Nigeria must have collectively felt its hair rise when what must have seemed like bewildering statements to many of us by US president Donald Trump on October 31st, morphed into threats of war the following day, if we don’t root out the Islamic extremism that has been responsible for what has been described in US circles as “Christian Genocide”.
The idea of Christian Genocide must be bewildering to us Nigerians, because anybody who follows the news is well aware that the killings by groups Boko Haram and the Islamic State West-African Province (ISWAP) have been largely indiscriminate, affecting Muslims and Christians alike. Also we are aware that circumstances leading to the killings and other associated acts of violence are multifaceted. They are not only, and not even primarily, motivated by religious concerns but are also economic, expressing themselves in multiple forms like banditry, kidnapping for money, and land disputes between Fulani herdsmen and non-Fulani farmers. Granted, the herdsmen-farmer conflict has a religious coloring, as the Fulani are Muslim, while the farmers tend to be Christians, but the issue bringing both parties into conflict isn’t religious, it is economic in nature.
It is just human nature to try find a rational explanation to a bewildering situation, and so it has been making the rounds in the Nigerian polity that the threat of military action to stop the supposed Christian Genocide in Nigeria, is just a pretext for the US government to get at Nigeria’s deposits of rare-earth metals, as it is desperate to wean itself off China’s supply-chains for the same metals. This is all very plausible, but I think the rational explanation we are looking for lies on American soil as opposed to being under Nigerian soil. Basically, I think Nigeria is just being used as a pawn in America’s domestic politics.
In America, the Republican party (the party of the current president), is the party that champions the concerns of the religious conservatives. Now this group, particularly its Evangelical wing, is very much concerned America’s foreign policy and actively tries to shape it to conform to its political agenda, and one of the top items on that agenda is to stop the global persecution of Christians. This wing, and the religious advocacy groups associated with it, have long portrayed Nigeria as a hotspot for Christian persecution, often citing attacks by Boko Haram and bandits operating in the north of the country.
These religious groups often push for US Military intervention and/or foreign aid restrictions against countries they perceive to be guilty of Christian persecution and Nigeria in their eyes, seems to fit the bill. These issues often become talking points in U.S. domestic politics.
Now there is a network of Christian international NGOs operating in Nigeria that funnel information about the crises in Nigeria to the evangelical groups back home in America. While these groups are often genuinely concerned about the various crises in Nigeria, they often oversimplify their reporting by stripping the issues of all nuance and complexities and ultimately present the issues as religious conflicts with Muslims killing Christians. They do this, often unintentionally because this is the kind of message that resonates with the religious groups back home. It also, one might add, helps to keep donors engaged. It also doesn’t help these NGOs often don’t have the background or context to understand deeply the multidimensional issues they are reporting on.
In the light of the discussion above, I think it is imperative that the Nigerian government send a delegation to America to meet with these evangelical groups in a bid to counter the false narrative being spread about Nigeria. In these trying economic times, Nigeria can hardly afford to be battling foreign sanctions and the threat of military force, while it is itself struggling with the crippling weight of its internal crises.
