Founder, International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (InterSociety) Nigeria, Emeka Umeagbalasi, is a criminologist and security studies expert, who has over the years carried out extensive research and on human rights issues and democratic governance in Nigeria. In this interview, he addresses with statistical evidence, the enormity of the genocide against Christians in Nigeria. He also wants that Nigeria may be heading the way of Sudan if something is not done urgently to address the issues.

InterSociety’s research was referenced during a recent debate in the United States on persecution of Christians in Nigeria, where your organization claimed that 125,009 Christians have been killed in targeted attacks by jihadists and terror groups since 2009 and 19,000 churches destroyed. Can you give us further clarifications on your data?

First of all, we have gathered both locally and internationally through shared intelligence, the sustained, ongoing efforts by the Nigerian Government to politically influence some church organizations in Nigeria including Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, Catholic Mission, Christian Association of Nigeria and influential preachers and leaders to shift their grounds to the effect that “there is no Christian genocide in Nigeria.” According to the shared intelligence, such politically motivated desperate efforts were rapidly extended in the past weeks through “lobbying” and pressures on some influential voices in the Vatican City, United States, European Union and some reputable international media outlets etc. From the shared intelligence, among those that successfully resisted or withstood such political pressure or influence are US independent researcher and former Mayor of Blanco in Texas, Mr. Mike Arnold and two members of his respected team who had during their public outing on Oct 14, 2025 in Abuja, Nigeria, shocked the Nigerian Government and international watchers by sticking to their conscience and truth. But they say that facts are sacred. The Nigerian Government’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) had on Dec 17, 2024, released an “America Wonder Statistics”, saying “between May 2023 and April 2024, a period of one year: “614,373 citizens died in Nigeria from insecurity.” We are not a media organization, but a research-based human rights, rule of law, democracy, security and safety advocacy organization since July 2008, when IntersSociety was founded. Our team leaders are independent and self-made and sustained professionals and expert-volunteers grounded in the fields of Criminology and Security Studies, Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution, Law, Journalism, teaching profession; and among them are business persons, etc. As expert-volunteers, we pulled our respective expertise together and freely and selflessly deployed them for the betterment of the society or humanity. Our in-kind resources are at all times beyond what money or political or sectional or separatist interests can buy or influence. This explains why we have remained focused and uncompromised since 2008, bearing in mind that Nigerian public office is deeply rooted in corruption and corrupt practices, to the extent that there are no fewer than 800 to 1000 fake and government-affiliated NGOs causing havoc to fight for the respect and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms, especially religious freedom or freedom of worship or belief. The Nigerian Government, especially the immediate past and the incumbent are also responsible for destruction of not less than 70 percent of credible and independent NGOs. The few that refused to be infiltrated and destroyed are governmentally threatened and labelled or called all sorts of unprintable names such as Boko Haram affiliate (Amnesty International) if operating in the North-East and North-West, militia-affiliate if operating in the Middle-Belt or North-Central and IPOB-affiliate (i.e. Intersociety) if operating in South-East and South-South.

How do you build your data and what’s the scope of your work across Nigeria?

InterSociety is grounded in data mining or collection, analysis and management using natural and simple scientific methods. One of our strongest data collection, analysis and management strategies, also one of the oldest natural methods in the world is: time, location and space of an incident or crime scene. In a premeditated fatal incident, for instance, we rely on: who were those killed? Who killed them? Where were they killed? When were they killed? Why were they killed? How many of them were killed or injured or abducted and taken to where and by who? And was there justice accountability for the victims and the perpetrators using criminology, victimology and penology? These questions are also used when determining defenceless properties attacked by armed state actors and armed non-state actors. In social media generated pictures and videos analysis and management, these elements must textually or visually be included inside them or explained at source to be acceptable in our data analysis. Our scope covers state actors and non-state actors’ involvement across Nigeria. Unlike several other organizations that have concentrated their advocacy findings on “Christian Genocide in Northern Nigeria” especially in Benue, Southern Kaduna, Plateau, Borno, Taraba and Adamawa and have their reports restricted to “armed non-state actor involvement”, the scope of Intersociety’s reports through tracking and monitoring since 2010 is much larger, covering attacks on defenceless Christians and their sacred places of worship and learning across Nigeria’s North-West, North-Central, North-East, South-West, South-East and South-South regions or zones. Through close monitoring of patterns and trends of the jihadist activities of the jihadist Fulani militants and allied others, in collusion with immediate past and incumbent governments of Nigeria, we have been able to track and monitor the southward movements and activities of the Fulani jihadists, especially since 2016, during which not less than 48 rural Igbo Christians of Enugu State were gruesomely murdered in their sleep by jihadist Fulani militants, masquerading as “Fulani herdsmen.” The massacre took place in April 2016 in Nimbo part of Uzo-Uwani in Enugu State; likewise, a handful of others between July and December 2015.

It must also be noted that until secret deployment of jihadist Fulani militants, widely believed to have been aided by Nigerian security forces using late night movements; occupation of Igbo land and South-South bushes and forests by jihadist Fulani militants was a near-zero. By Jan 2015, there was no “jihadist Fulani forest occupation in the region” except “Hausa Quarters” sparsely located in places like “Kara in Ogbaru”, “Ama Hausa” in Owerri, “Sokoto Road” in Onitsha, etc. By 2018, “jihadist Fulani occupation in Igbo land forests and bushes began to spring up, hitting about 139 in August 2019 and 400 by 2020, to more than 700 by end of 2024. As of Sept 2025, there were estimated 1000 forest and bush locations occupied by jihadist Fulani militants and their allies in the South-South and the South-East; engaging in “secret and open killings” targeted at Eastern Christian travellers and farmers, leading to estimated 60 percent casualties, according to independent sources, arising from roadway, bush-way and forest-way ambushes and abductions (rarely reported in the media except via individual survivors social clusters’ accounts) including locations within and outside the East and their boundary states or communities (i.e. Kogi, Benue and Ondo). Open killings (majorly reported in the media), on the other hand, constitute the remaining 40% of all the casualty figures. Similar Jihadist activities including invasion and occupation of forests and bushes are also enveloping the Christian parts of the South-West and Yoruba parts of Kogi and Kwara where several Muslim areas are also not spared.

From the statistics you revealed before now, can it be right to say that you have asserted firmly that Christian genocide is a reality in Nigeria. What do you think propels such incidents in Nigeria?

Christian Persecution (“Christian Genocide”) in Nigeria, especially in the hands of the country’s armed state actors and their political enablers is found to be driven by the trio of structural violence, cultural violence and physical violence. Structural Violence involves exclusion, discrimination and ethno-religious profiling of the citizens on the grounds of their religion and ethnicity, followed by Cultural Violence such as false labelling, mass criminalization, mass and religious stigmatization, hearsay conclusions and prosecutorial vindictiveness; leading to physical violence including systematic and coordinated targeting of members of a particular religious and ethnic grouping for egregious attacks including false-labelling, secretly and openly killing, abducting, torturing, maiming, incarcerating and disappearing them without traces or criminally interring their dead body persons in a way unknown to written law in secret places and outside official records or knowledge of their families. Victims of the above, in the eyes of the international laws and norms including the International Freedom of Religion or Worship or Belief are safely and correctly pronounced as Victims of the State Actor Religious Persecution (Christian Persecution), having been falsely labelled or secretly or openly killed and lethally maimed or abducted and tortured or incarcerated under prosecutorial vindictiveness or abducted and disappeared without traces, all on the grounds of their religious or ethnic identities. The combined effects of the above also have the full backing of Section 10 of Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution (forbids adoption by Nigerian Government of any religion as “a State Religion”).

They are further guaranteed by Section 38 of the same Constitution which guarantees Nigeria’s citizens’ Rights to Freedom of Thought, Conscience and Religion as well as their coordinate Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (acceded to by Nigeria in 1961), Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1976 (signed and ratified by Nigeria in 1993) and Article 8 of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights of 1981 (signed, ratified and domesticated by Nigeria in 1983). Nigeria is also a State Party to the trio of the Geneva Conventions (Humanitarian Law Treaty) of 1949 and their Protocols of 1977, the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute) of 1998 and the Genocide Convention of 1948.

With all these killings, what do they portend for Nigeria?

The Sudanese Government under the ousted dictator, Gen Omar Hassan el-Bashir (1989-2019) was clandestinely responsible for arming and colluding with the Janjaweed (camel herders) terror militias, starting from late 80s, during which there was free and unchecked collusion between the Islamist Government and leaders of the Janjaweed, to the extent of using the terror militias to massacre tens of thousands of black Darfurians and almost obliterate Christian communities of Sudanese origin. The then Sudanese Government and the Janjaweed militias’ collusion became so pronounced that key leaders of the Islamic terror militias were given key ministerial positions in the Sudanese Government including the appointment of Ahmad Muhammed Harun as Minster of State for Interior and Ali Kushayb for another, among others. There was also free flow and influx of licit and illicit small arms and light weapons between the Sudanese Government and the Janjaweed terror militias. It is not only that all these led to the ICC’s indictment of then President el-Bashir in 2005, but also the dreaded Ali Kushayb who was arrested by the ICC for crimes against humanity and war crimes particularly between 2003 and 2004 in Darfur was convicted on Oct 5, 2025 and jailed for more than 20 years. The Sudanese Janjaweed had also metamorphosed into “the Rapid Support Forces” headed by Gen Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, responsible for deaths of tens of thousands of defenceless civilians in Sudan since 2021. All the above is to say that the romance between Governments of Nigeria since June 2015 till date and Fulani herdsmen (cattle herders) and their jihadist Fulani militants is a replica of what happened in Sudan.

Can you give a partial breakdown of how you arrived at the figures of the killings?

InterSociety started tracking and monitoring egregious, systematic, coordinated and state-enabled attacks against Christians and non-violent Muslims across Nigeria since 2010, a period of more than 15 years. Our tracking and monitoring are done through primary (direct observation where necessary and eyewitnesses and survivors’ accounts) and secondary (researchers and other third party accounts) sources, which have been relied upon to establish the 125,000 Christian deaths and 60,000 defenseless Muslim death figures and burning of the estimated 19,100 churches across Nigeria over a period of more than 15 years or since 2010. Natural sources of collection data are very difficult to be disputed no matter how hard critics try to dispute or discredit them. The estimated 125,000 Christians killed by Islamic jihadists and ethno-religiously radicalized security forces in 16 years were arrived at by establishing that estimated 52,250 Christian deaths occurred between July 2009 and April 2023 and 30,000 moderate Muslim deaths, in addition to estimated deaths of 24,000 covering: 8,222 Christian deaths recorded across Nigeria from Jan to Dec 2023, 6,500 recorded in 2024 and 7000 recorded in months of 2025 or Jan to Oct 2025. There are also ‘dark figures of about 2,100-2,300 deaths’ representing civilian deaths arising from armed non-state actor and armed state actor captivity killings, from those abducted and taken into custody or captivity, on the ratio of out of every 100 Christians abducted, 10 or 10 percent are not likely to come back alive. For instance, out of more than 1000 Christians held hostage by Jihadists Kaduna’s Rijana forest camps since Dec 2024, more than 120 have been killed in captivity. The figures above are also in addition to freshly discovered 30,000 Christian deaths from state actor and non-state actor massacre in the past nine years and four months in Eastern Nigeria. Among them were estimated thousands (likely to be in the neighborhood of no fewer than 5000) abducted from the East by military, police crack squads and secret police, face-bagged and moved in the dead of the night to secret places like the Kainji and the WAWA military cantonments in Niger State (Nigeria’s largest land State), the Nigerian Army Alpha Commando Base, along Suleja-Bida Road in Niger State, the Old and the New Keffi Prisons in Nasarawa State, the Abacha Barracks in Abuja, the Gusau Maximum Security Prisons in Zamfara State, the Kuje Maximum Security Prisons in Abuja and so on, where they are dumped uninvestigated and untried and likely to have been killed in custody between August 2015 and Nov 2020. There are also other defenseless Trado-Judeo-Christian Easterners abducted by jihadist Fulani militants and allied others from the East and disappeared who are also likely to have been killed in captivity especially since April 2021. Added to the list were circumstantially concluded death of estimated 18,000 Christians abducted and permanently disappeared during Boko Haram Islamic Insurgency of July 2009 to Dec 2014 including estimated 3000 Igbo-Christians resident in different parts of Northern Nigeria as at the time of their abduction and disappearance in places like Jos, Suleja, Katsina, Gusau, Birnin Kebbi, Minna, Dutse, Jalingo, Mubi, Kano, Kaduna, Damaturu, Maiduguri, Bauchi, Gombe, etc. 18,000 were abducted and disappeared during Boko Haram actions.

Tens of thousands of Nigerians, many of whom defenseless Christians were targeted, abducted and never returned in the hands of Boko Harm Insurgents which started their jihadist campaigns with a spike in July 2009 and majorly targeted Christians, their churches and schools, during which Igbo-Christians residing in different parts of Northern Nigeria were one of their earliest targets. While the exact number of those openly killed and others abducted and disappeared was tasking and challenging to establish, however, the International Red Cross had in Dec 2019, released a Report, saying that less than 22,000 Nigerians were missing since Boko Haram crisis began in 2009. Going by independent estimates, no fewer than 30,000 citizens including estimated 3000 Igbo-Christians in the North were believed to have been abducted and disappeared without traces between July 2009 and Dec 2014 or thereafter, out of which estimated 18,000 belonged to members of the Christian faith and affiliated others.

The Nigeria army has claimed that your organisation is affiliated with IPOB. Does InterSociety have links with the Indigenous People of Biafra or is it affiliated with or share its research with any Biafra organisations based in the United States?

Let it be placed on record that every human rights or humanitarian watchdog is universally empowered under UN System to monitor, track and research in any troubled or conflict area, especially where members of the civilian population are identified as having been endangered by the fighting parties and nothing under the international law stops such groups including InterSociety from launching an investigation or producing a report, during which they can gather credible data from anywhere, including collecting such from the affected civilian population as well as mirroring down their advocacy works on state actor and non-state actor fighting parties.

Let it also be boldly stated here that Intersociety is not affiliated to or an affiliate of IPOB and can never be. We are only interested at ensuring the protection of vulnerable members of the Eastern civilian population by exposing blanket labelling of such uninvolved defenceless citizens as “IPOB members” by the IPOB itself or state actor fighting parties especially the military. We have also clashed severally with IPOB leadership in their attempts to label uninvolved citizens of the East as “their own IPOB members”. It has remained our position that “not every citizen of the South-East and the South-South civilian population is a member of IPOB”. As a matter of fact, at least six out of every eight South-East and South-South civilian citizens are not IPOB members and have nothing to do with the group. By law, it amounts to atrocity-crime or crime against humanity or war crime to shoot and kill unarmed IPOB members, more so when not every IPOB member is an armed ESN operative. It is also a war crime under Geneva Conventions of 1949 to kill a wounded or surrendered combatant who was taken alive into custody and killed in the same custody by armed state actors. We have severally clashed in the media with IPOB leaders and leadership especially in 2017 and 2021 over the group’s “no more election in Anambra or South-East stance”. Myself and members of my nuclear family were nearly abducted and killed on Nov 27 and Dec 5, 2024 by strongly suspected “Counterfeit Biafra Agitators”, during which my car was snatched twice and my wife, son, house helper and driver narrowly escaped being abducted and killed in his in-law’s town of Arondizuogu in Imo State and Ezinifite in Aguata, Anambra State-during and after his father-in-law’s funeral.

It is therefore our informed position that the Nigerian Army is falsely labelling InterSociety as “IPOB-affiliated” in order to ward off being regularly checkmated over its grisly and egregious human rights abuses and violations including corruption and brutalities in the line of their operations in Eastern Nigeria. This is to the extent that the above has remained the stock-in-trade of the Nigerian Army and its Armed Forces proprietor-body since after Oct 2020 when it invaded Obigbo in Rivers State with war-grade weapons, during “EndSARS”; and in less than 30 days (Oct 21, 2020-Nov 10, 2020) massacred 130 unarmed and defenseless Obigbo residents, injured 150 others, abducted a total of 620 persons including 540 men and 80 women; out of which 468 were rescued by rights groups and their pro bono lawyers and 152 still unaccounted for till date (Oct 2025). The Nigerian Army has falsely labelled InterSociety as “IPOB-affiliate” more than six times including in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, especially whenever it is called upon to render its operational and law enforcement public accountability.

The Nigeria Army has also earned notoriety in false labelling especially each time it is called upon to render public accountability of its law enforcement and operations. For instance, NA had severally falsely labelled Amnesty International as “Boko Haram-affiliate” during the Amnesty International presentation, years back, of its several reports in the North-East, during which the Army was also fingered in several sponsored campaigns of calumny against several rights groups in Nigeria since July 2015 using mushroom media and CSO groups. Nigerian governments, especially under Buhari and Tinubu, have gravely applied “Weapon of Cultural Violence” against the people of Eastern Nigeria, especially the South-East and the respected region’s social entities and respected voices, to the extent of labelling them “Biafra/IPOB members or sympathisers” anytime they publicly speak independently or air their independent views on issues of critical regional and national importance. As a respected member of the Alliance Against Genocide in USA since 2020, we have also liaised or worked with numerous international rights and justice bodies including Human Rights Watch, South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies (ISS), among others. (The Sun)