US pressure is forcing action on anti-Christian violence, Nigerian Christian leader tells 'Post'

The discussion came only days after the murder of at least 50 people and the abduction of several women and children in Nigeria’s northwestern Zamfara state, and the brutal killing of at least 34 people by Lakurawa Islamist terrorists in the northwestern Kebbi state.

The committee found that jihadist networks were exploiting weak enforcement and limited accountability to carry out sustained and coordinated violence against Christians and other religious minorities.

House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa chairman Chris Smith (R-New Jersey) said, “President Trump’s bold and well-founded redesignation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern was not just a declaration - it was a directive.

“For nearly 20 years, the Nigerian government has been complicit in, and complacent about, the violent religious persecution occurring within its borders. By failing to punish and prosecute the Islamist extremists who wantonly rape, torture, and murder Christians and non-radical Muslims in their country, the Nigerian government has only emboldened these terrorist thugs to inflict even more suffering.

“This joint report - requested by President Trump and compiled by the House Appropriations and Foreign Affairs committees - is a critical tool for helping the Nigerian government to help its own people. This report provides comprehensive recommendations for the United States to follow throughout its efforts to curb the religious violence in Nigeria, ranging from bilateral agreements to economic sanctions.

“It is well past time that we dismantle the culture of denial surrounding the religious persecution in Nigeria - and this report provides the proper tools to do so.”

James explained that while the issue of persecution against Christians has “escalated in the past few years,” it was the actions of the past Nigerian administration that allowed extremist Islamist groups to fester unchecked.

“There is an ongoing persecution of Christians, and often it takes an ethnic coloration, because largely, most communities were evangelized along ethnic lines. When people get saved, communities get saved,” he explained, noting the complex ethnic relations tied to the faith. “So you have a predominantly Christian community. So when you persecute the church, you’re basically saying it’s likely going to affect a particular ethnic group.”

While the brutalization is what often makes it into the headlines, James explained that there is a structural component on an institutional level targeting Christians.

By labeling education facilities in northern Nigerian states, where the students are predominantly Muslim, as “educationally disadvantaged,” Muslim students can gain entry to academic institutions with lower requirements than those of their Christian counterparts, he explained.

In some cases, Christian students are denied entry to the state schools and federal colleges in these disadvantaged areas, he claimed, creating further barriers to Christians receiving higher education.

Historically, he continued, devout Christians were also not appointed to political leadership during the period of frequent military coups in the country, from 1966 to 1993.

The coups “give unregulated power for the plotters who assume leadership to appoint whoever they consider loyal, although Christians were often appointed, but most of those appointments had always tilted more towards the other faith or, at best, those who they consider nominal enough not to pose any threat to the Islamization agenda,” the reverend shared.

“So people [Christians and religious minorities] are intentionally denied [positions] in civil service in government circles, which became an opportunity for some kind of appointment, by promotion, through nepotism, [with] religious and ethnic consideration.”

Under the last administration, James said, the heads of the security apparatus, including the army, the air force, the navy, the police, and the civil defense, were all from the Fulani ethnic group, a mostly Muslim community that makes up only 7.6% of the population, according to the Minority Rights Group.

Elite Fulani members have been frequently accused of pushing an Islamist agenda, following the legacy of the Sokoto Caliphate, which saw a major Sunni Muslim state run in West Africa until it was conquered by Britain in 1903.

The caliphate, which had a slave-based economy, was structured around 19th-century interpretations of Sharia (Islamic law), according to “The Application of Islamic Law and the Legacies of Good Governance in the Sokoto Caliphate, Nigeria (1804-1903): Lessons for the Contemporary Period,” published by the University of Zurich.

The US House Committee on Foreign Affairs suggested that one way to target anti-Christian persecution is to “review and use points of leverage to compel Fulani herdsmen to disarm, including by blocking export of beef and other cattle-related products,” indicating the US has also assessed a connection between the Fulani group and the massacres.

Buhari had pledged to fight Boko Haram, but failed to defeat the Islamist group, leaving tens of the 276 schoolgirls abducted from the group in Borno state in captivity to this day, more than 10 years after they were first taken.

“How does a group of terrorist, how do they manage to invade a government school and move with 300 and something teenagers? What route did they take? How did that happen?” James asked, visibly frustrated by the lack of action by authorities and the lack of protection provided to the girls. “Christian students were targeted, kidnapped, raped; many of them had not been found till we talked about 10 years later,” James continued.

Women, girls, and Christian leaders are often targeted in kidnapping plots in Nigeria, held for ransom or forced to marry their abductors. James was particularly critical of the fact that, despite the “high level of intelligence” the government has at its disposal, money was still being paid out to terrorists.

“Until the recent threat from the United States, the question we asked was, who are the people killing communities? Who weaponized them with high-caliber weapons that are used even in conventional wars? How did they break through our system? Then we had that administration [Buhari’s] talking about repentant terrorists, repentant Boko Haram, being offered scholarships, being reintegrated into the police, apparently compromising the security system,” he continued.

According to the UN Human Rights Office, many of the schoolgirls who were successfully rescued were pressured into remaining married to their captors, forced to live in camps with the “repentant” terrorists and the children they were forced to bear.

“Some of them escaped or have been later exchanged for prisoners. But at least 91 of the Chibok girls are still in captivity, or their fate is unknown,” said Dalia Leinarte, a CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) member who participated in the mission to Nigeria last month.

Continuing to discuss the more physical examples of persecution, James warned that Nigeria’s strict Blasphemy Law has led to students being “lynched on campuses” across the country. In many states, Sharia law operates alongside secular law, and Amnesty International Nigeria warned that accusations of blasphemy had been frequently used as a means to “settle personal scores.”

As part of the US committee’s recommendations, the experts said it wants to see blasphemy laws repealed and sanctions and visa restrictions placed on those involved in the violence.

People have been killed after having a “disagreement with a Muslim student at a university,” he claimed. “It’s not just that such people are killed publicly; you never get to see any form of justice.”

In a report published in October 2024, Amnesty International documented at least 555 deaths from mob violence in 363 documented incidents between January 2012 and August 2023. The victims were tortured to death or murdered after being accused of theft, witchcraft, and blasphemy, among other things, with few of the incidents investigated and prosecuted.

Last year, a woman was burned to death by a mob in northern Nigeria’s Niger state after she was accused of blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad, BBC News reported. Local media reported at the time that a man had proposed to her, and she rejected him in a manner considered blasphemous by locals. In 2022, a Christian female student was killed by Muslim students who accused her of blasphemy in Sokoto.

“The terrorists have become quite bold. They’ve taken territories; they’ve even implemented a tax regime along Sharia law in some places,” he said, explaining how the Arabic words written on the sites of attacks made the fundamentalist issue at the heart of the attacks impossible to ignore.

“In summary, you have a systemic persecution that has been perpetrated over the years. You have educational persecution. You have propaganda. Of course, you can talk about the physical violence, killing, raping, maiming, displacement of communities, [the] taking over of ancestral land.... And when they [the Nigerian authorities] say, this is not Islamic, we say, why do they enforce the Sharia legal system? Who are the people who write Arabic inscriptions after killing people in churches or invading communities in the night while people were sleeping? And so, at this stage, it’s difficult to say this was no longer religious. The documentation will be difficult.”

While some Christian leaders describe the violence as genocide, international bodies, including the United Nations, have not formally classified it as such.

Shiri Fein-Grossman, the CEO of the Israel-Africa Institute and a leading expert on foreign policy, said that “there is a serious and ongoing debate among scholars about how to define the violence in Nigeria.

“Many leading experts describe it as a complex intersection of religious ideology, ethnic identity, competition over land and resources, and deep state fragility. They caution against reducing the crisis to a purely religious conflict, and that analytical discipline is important.

“At the same time, when you speak directly with Christian communities on the ground, many describe a lived reality of being targeted because of their faith. Churches are attacked, clergy are kidnapped, and villages identified as Christian are repeatedly assaulted. Both dimensions must be acknowledged."

“Recent developments reflect growing international concern. The deployment of roughly 200 US military advisers, Nigeria’s redesignation as a Country of Particular Concern, and conditional security assistance tied to protecting vulnerable communities all signal that religious freedom and security are now closely linked in policy,” she continued.

“We can reject simplistic narratives while still taking persecution seriously. In fact, serious analysis strengthens, not weakens, our response.”

Fein-Grossman added that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear in Washington recently that Israel is ready and willing to “contribute its intelligence and counterterrorism experience” to help Nigeria in its battle against extremist violence.

Asked if he felt safe, James paused before admitting that he didn’t.

“There are places many Christians and Christian leaders can’t go to, and, as we speak, we were aware we could be a target any moment - especially once your face is known,” he shared. “I can’t say I feel safe. For instance, you work constantly, being aware that it could be you, it could be your family, it could be your associates, and it could be anytime.”

While James painted a grim picture of the reality of Christians in Nigeria, he added that the comments and actions taken by the US in recent months have encouraged the government to be accountable.

“I must say that recently, in the past few months, the current government, after those pressures from the US, especially after those publications, have made some level of attempts to show [they are being] proactive,” he said. “I want to be as honest and as objective as I can, from all that we have put together, regardless of the motives and the imperfections that may have characterized the Trump administration. Without his administration’s intervention, it would have been a worse situation. Nigeria would have been a very, very terrible situation.”

In November, Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu pushed back against claims of religious intolerance and defended his country’s efforts to protect religious freedom.