•Lawyer EMMANUEL OGEBE reveals exclusive first freedom photo of pardoned Jackson, likens case to Nigerian situation

You haven’t heard the hymn “In Christ alone” sung with meaning until you hear it at a New Year’s cross over service in Nigeria. Nigeria and Afghanistan are the most religious countries on earth and Nigeria is the deadliest place in the world to be a Christian – for a dozen years straight.

When I was last in Nigeria during a Christmas in 2023, a bloody massacre for the 48hrs I was there – from the eve to Boxing Day – wiped out over 220 Christians. My family’s pastor adopted a toddler found alive amidst the corpses of 16 slaughtered relatives. He told me and a visiting delegation, “everyday I wake up with genocide in my house.”

This time I am in Nigeria again this Christmas season, like in 2023, facilitating another deathrow prisoner reprieve. The first from Indonesia - the largest Muslim country on earth - and the latest from Nigeria – with the largest black Muslim population on earth.

Crossover services were canceled in the neighboring northeast state after a deadly attack - like across the entire region – but in this Christian-majority state in a terror-plagued region, church was still on. Scores of armed soldiers and police were a grim reminder that worship is still a high risk activity.

The children’s recitals, the drama skit, raps and gyrations were things I never thought I’d see in conservative northeast Nigeria where Christianity is deeply pacifist. I contrasted this with the vituperative fulminations of raucous mullahs railing against infidels incessantly. Yet all these Christians want is to just dance, clap and praise…

After them, a man comes to the stage and says, “we are thankful because terrorists gathered with terrible plans for us but God saved us this year.”

I knew what he meant.

I am probably the only one who was in Nigeria from America the week before the U.S. air strikes on Islamist terrorists in the northwest and then was back there again from America days after.

In the week BB (Before Bombing), the question I got all over was, “when is Trump coming?” Now it seemed people were ecstatic AB (After Bombing) despite the doubtful efficacy/lethality thereof.

The charismatic, eloquent preacher, who I would later learn was the unassuming state governor, was hinting at news making the rounds that terrorists who’d amassed for a major Christmas onslaught had been taken out by the US. True or not, the palpable joy of answered prayers to a terror-wearied people was indisputable.

It’s been said that Nigeria is God’s experiment in the possible (although more likely the Brits’.) A people unwilling to fight, live with people dying to kill. That’s a recipe for the slow motion genocide going on here.

In Nigeria’s southwest, all six state governments banded together and set up a joint security force to supplement weak central policing against the Islamist Fulani nomadic militia that occupy their forests and attack them from there.

In the southeast, an eastern security network with similar intent but with a separatist, anti-establishment brent also exists. Nigeria has over 600 tribes but the nomadic Fulani Herdsmen militia (mostly foreigners) have managed to invade and inflict misery on most of them in their own homelands across the entire nation.

However in north central Nigeria, where thousands of Christians are being slaughtered year in year out, no such regional security counterweight has been established. Thoughts and prayers were it – until Trump.

As a former parliamentary said to me, “we’ve argued with colleagues about disliking Trump but on this one, he’s got us all on his side.” Trump is a highly divisive figure amongst Nigeria’s Christians almost like in the U.S. The bombings have largely unified Christians on Trump but irked many Muslims with pro-terrorist sympathies. They have gone from claiming they too were being killed - not just Christians - to claiming that Trump’s air strikes targeted their Muslim brothers.

Northern Nigeria’s persecuted Christians are tired of being killed and being denied the right to cry. Trump’s strikes signal the fact that their cries have been heard, their pain acknowledged and their truth unveiled.

The MP shared how Boko Haram terrorists were welcomed with applause and praise songs by the Muslim community when they invaded his state. Thousands of Christians were killed and thousands more fled the state. At Christmas 2011 over 100 Christians were killed in his state alone out of the three states that were simultaneously attacked - Plateau, Yobe and Niger.

He sold his family house just like many other Christians for cheap as their neighbors took advantage of their dread, death and desperation.

I asked if he’d recovered his home a dozen years later now that the raging insurgency has moved away somewhat. “I can’t live with them again. It’s not the terrorists. It’s my neighbors who celebrated.”

Killings and kidnappings have continued to occur this season despite the Nigerian government bolstering security. On Christmas Eve, after soft-target churches were secured, the terrorists bombed a mosque - the first ever Christmas Day attack on Muslims in a strategic tactical misdirect. Passengers traveling home for Christmas stopped and abducted on the highway once their Christian faith is confirmed. Muslim passengers freed to continue on just as has happened for over a dozen years…

Maybe when the fog of joy clears, reality will set in. However this does not appear to be as deadly as most Christmases. This week through new years, there were terror attacks in the northeast, northcentral and southwest (half of the country’s regions.) If the cumulative fatalities are under 100, it was a good holiday. Maybe Trump did return the Christmas jihadi grinches had stolen.

“No guilt in life, no fear in death;

this is the pow'r of Christ in me.

From life's first cry to final breath,

Jesus commands my destiny.

No pow'r of hell, no scheme of man

can ever pluck me from His hand;

'til He returns or calls me home,

here in the pow'r of Christ I'll stand!”

The words of the hymn resonated as much with northern Nigerian Christians as with my newest ex-deathrow client. Freed on Christmas Day after 10 years 10 months in prison, Jackson had paid a steep price for successfully defending himself when attacked by an armed Fulani herdsman on his farm - resulting in his attacker’s death.

The fact that Nigeria needs America’s assistance to fight terrorism is exactly why Sunny Jackson should never have been charged, least of all sentenced to die. Yet here by the grace of God, not the courts, he stands. And the fact that he still hasn’t seen his family after a week out due to the insecurity is exactly why US security assistance is imperative.

In a rare Christmas present double dovetail to Nigeria’s Christians, Jackson’s freedom on Christmas afternoon was nightcapped by the U.S. tomahawk missile strikes. These were twin odes to joy in their world where Trump was Santa and a US carrier were Santa’s helpers and the not-so-silent lights in the sky were an annunciation of sorts “peace on earth, goodwill to good men.”

A TWO-WEEK SECURITY WATCH SUMMARY:

PAST YULETIDE PERIOD [20 DECEMBER,2025 – 2 JANUARY, 2026]

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