By EMMANUEL NNADOZIE ONWUBIKO

Few weeks back, we all woke up to the cheering news that the President of the United States of America, Mr. Donald John Trump, had issued a warning to the Nigerian government to stave off the incessant’bloody attacks much more specifically targeted at Christians and their places of worship as are persistently carried out by armed Islamic terrorists.

The President of America and some Congressional members drawn from mostly the dominant party in the Congress of USA: the Republicans, also made official declaration that Nigeria is a country of particular concern.

However, what surprises most Nigerians is that rather than accept the factual realities of persistent attacks which target at Christians majorly alongside other citizens of divergent ethno-religious affiliations, the government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu denied that there is any genocide of Christians. Tinubu and his acolytes in his administration, have maintained this line of argument as stated by Tinubu himself. Thankfully, the US administration has maintained that it has verifiable facts to support their claim of a genocide targeting Christians in Nigeria.

Specifically, the US President, Donald Trump, threatened to carry out attacks in Nigeria in response to anti-Christian violence, saying he instructed the recently renamed Department of War to “prepare for possible action”.

In a social media post a month ago, President Donald Trump said the United States would immediately cut off all assistance to the African country “if the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians”.

The US “may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities”, Trump added, without specifying which groups or alleged “atrocities” he was referring to, according to Aljazeera, a news network owned by Muslims in the United Arab Emirates.

“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!” he wrote.

Aljazeera reports that the social media post comes a day after the US president announced that Nigeria – a country almost evenly divided between a Muslim-majority north and a largely Christian south – would be added to the Department of State’s list of “Countries of Particular Concern”, which is set up to monitor religious persecution around the world.

In recent months, right-wing lawmakers and other prominent figures in the US have claimed that violent disputes in Nigeria are part of a campaign of “Christian genocide”, Aljazeera reports.

The US government followed up the threats by sending a high powered delegation to ascertain the facts around the claim of genocide of Christians in Nigeria.

As aforementioned, exactly a month after President Trump made the threats to bomb terrorists in Nigeria responsible for the persistent and systematic killings of Christians in Nigeria, the Congressional members from the USA Congress landed in Nigeria and went on straight to visit some of the theatres of these genocidal killings.

The United States congressional delegation, led by Congressman Riley Moore has already concluded its fact-finding mission to Nigeria over alleged genocide and is expected to brief President Donald Trump before the end of the month.

The delegation, made up of five members of Congress, arrived in the country on Sunday last week and visited Internally Displaced Persons, survivors of terrorist attacks, Christian communities, Christian leaders and traditional rulers, particularly in Benue State.

They also held a meeting with the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, and the Attorney General of the Federation, Lateef Fagbemi (SAN).

Featuring on a Fox News programme anchored by Harris Faulkner on Thursday, Moore said the team heard harrowing accounts of killings allegedly carried out by Fulani and Islamic extremists, describing the experience as the most disturbing of his career.

“It was really shocking — the stories we heard, the imagery. I have never witnessed anything like that in my life,” he said. “I met one woman who lost her entire family. Five of her children were murdered right in front of her while she was pregnant. She escaped and delivered her baby in an IDP camp. You can see that her soul has literally left her body. There are countless stories like these.”

He also narrated another case of a woman who lost her husband, two daughters, and her unborn child during an attack, saying the pattern of violence suggested that Christian communities were deliberately targeted.

Moore said the delegation travelled across Benue State in armoured vehicles due to security risks, adding that they met Catholic and Protestant leaders, bishops and community heads to obtain what he called “ground truth”.

“This is a fact finding mission. Benue is one of the most dangerous states in Nigeria. This is where the majority of Christians are being murdered for their faith in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. But I felt we had to go,” he said.

According to him, IDP camps were not spared by attackers, raising questions about claims that the violence was driven by climate pressures or land disputes.

“For those who say this is about climate change or economics, why would you burn down a church? Why would you attack an IDP camp screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’? It is very clear what the answer is,” he said. “They are trying to erase Christians in Benue State and across Nigeria from their ancestral homeland.”

Moore confirmed that President Trump tasked him and House Appropriations Chairman, Tom Cole, to compile a full report on the situation.

“We will report back to the President and make recommendations. He has asked myself and Chairman Tom Cole to give him a report, and we are going to do that by the end of this month,” he added.

Trump had late October designated Nigeria a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ over alleged Christian genocide, a position the Federal Government has countered, insisting that Nigeria’s security crisis has no religious colouration.

What is still a painful shock to me as a Catholic and millions of other citizens of Nigeria is not that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu whose Vice president is also a Muslim like the President, denied that there is genocide of Christians in Nigeria. But the persistence and consistency in creating doubts of these realities of killings of Christians by terrorists by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has made some of us who are living witnesses of these systematic killings of Christians alongside others by Islamic terrorists, to raise posers as to the ways that the President is going about his denials as if he has something to benefit from doing so. Why is the president of all of Nigeria fighting tooth and nail to do public relations work for Islamic terrorists who are the ones that the USA government plants to bomb and decimate? Tinubu, are you working for us Nigerians or against us? What’s going on, sir?

Why is President Tinubu disputing this factual occurrence of killings of Christians which have continued even as I write?

What does it profit President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his cronies in his government including even some hitherto respected Christian clerics including the Archbishop of Abuja Ignatius Kaigama and the Bishop of Sokoto Mathew Hassan-Kukah to continue to dispute the well-known truth of the continuous massacres of Christians in their homes, their Churches and the violent kidnappings of their pastors and families and their brutal killings recorded and shared on the social media by these Islamic terrorists?

After the backlash that attended his initial disputes that there is no genocide of Christians, Bishop Kukah only recently wrote another epistle in the media admitting what he loosely calls persecution of Christians in Nigeria, whatever that means.

The reality is that there Is genocidal killings of Christians in Nigeria.

Only on Friday, yesterday, the president again displayed his annoying insensitivity by denying the obvious facts of the killings of Christians in larger percentages by Islamic terrorists.

President Bola Tinubu insisted that there is neither Christian genocide nor Muslim genocide in Nigeria.

Tinubu said this while declaring open the Nasrul-Lahi-l-Fatih Society (NASFAT) 8th Biennial Conference and Annual General Meeting in Abuja yesterday.

The theme of the conference was “Building Resilience in a Changing World: The Role of Faith and Community”.

Represented by the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr Lateef Fagbemi, the President said that what the country had was terrorism, driven by criminality and extremism.

He said that the Federal Government was working tirelessly to overcome the security challenges.

Tinubu said, “in recent times, the Federal Government and other persons of goodwill, had to address unfounded allegations.

“The allegations are not only false, but harmful, and capable of inflaming passions and disrupting the sustenance of the peaceful coexistence which we continue to build as a nation.

“Nigeria’s response was clear, firm, and measured. We reaffirmed that our nation does not foster or tolerate policies or actions aimed at persecuting any religious group,” he said.

According to him, security challenges are rooted in historical, economic and criminal issues, not religious issues.

Mr. President, you lied. The genocide of Christians is a fact that only those who sympathise with Islamic terrorists will dispute. You lied, big time, Mr. President!

Security challenges in the far north are rooted partly in the satanic determination of some Islamists who believe that they are waging Jihad war against Christians and so, the major targets of attacks of Boko Haram, ISWAP terrorists, are Christians and their places of worship and there are multiple evidence-based proofs to disprove the intentional, deliberate but provocative doubts raised persistently by Bola Ahmed Tinubu concerning the genocide of Christians. This same president who directly controls the DSS, knows that some Islamists that bombed and killed nearly 100 Christians inside a Catholic Church in Owo Ondo state are being prosecuted by the DSS.

If I say President Tinubu lied and continues to lie about the genocide of Christians in Nigeria, I’m saying so with statistics. I will demonstrate this shortly.

Catholic News Agency few hours back published that the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN), said that at least 145 priests have been kidnapped, 11 have been murdered, and four remain missing since 2015.

However, Intersociety claims the reality is much worse. According to its counts, at least 250 Catholic clergy have been attacked in addition to another 350 clergy from other denominations.

The phenomenon, according to the report, is due to a combination of attacks by jihadist groups and organized criminal gangs operating for profit. Priests have been victims of both violent ambushes and financial extortion.

“Many were kidnapped for ransoms reaching tens of millions of nairas [Nigrian currency] or thousands of dollars. In other cases, the attackers sought to seize luxury vehicles belonging to the clerics to sell them to criminal networks,” Intersociety details in the report.

One of the most recent cases is that of Father Wilfred Ezemba, parish priest at St. Paul’s in Agaliga-Efabo (Kogi state) who was kidnapped on Sept. 12 along with other travelers by suspected jihadists and released on Sept. 16.

Furthermore, the report estimates that from the Boko Haram uprising in July 2009 to September of this year, 19,100 Christian churches in Nigeria have been destroyed, looted, or violently closed, representing an average of 1,200 churches per year, 100 per month, or more than three per day.

The violence has affected both Catholic churches and the so-called “white-garment churches” belonging to the Organization of African Instituted Churches as well as other Christian denominations.

The persecution of Christians in Nigeria has also led to a mass exodus: At least 15 million people have been displaced, forced to abandon their villages, ancestral homes, and churches to flee the massacres.

Intersociety also highlights in the report that personnel from special units of the Nigerian army and police, along with their commanders, are allegedly involved in kidnappings, murders, and forced disappearances of pastors of various Christian denominations.

According to the nongovernmental organization, they claim they are conducting counterinsurgency operations in the southeast part of the country against individuals or groups promoting the secession of the Nigerian region of Biafra, which attempted to become independent from Nigeria in 1967 and was defeated after a bloody war that lasted till 1970.

These operations began in October 2020 in Obigbo (Rivers state) and in January 2021 in Orlu (Imo state). The worst affected regions include Taraba, Adamawa, Borno, Kaduna, Benue, Plateau, Enugu, Imo, Niger, Kogi, Nasarawa, Bauchi, Yobe, and Southern Kaduna, where jihadist groups — such as Boko Haram, ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province), and Fulani herdsmen and bandits — have combined religious terrorism with criminal motives.

Jhadist camp holds at least 850 Christians

One of the most serious aspects documented in the report is the existence of jihadist camps, such as those in Rijana in Kaduna state, where at least 850 Christians are being held in extreme conditions, many of them tortured or killed if their families don’t pay a ransom. Recent cases include nuns kidnapped and released after ransom payments, as well as the murder and kidnapping of priests in Enugu and Kogi states in September.

Likewise, there have been systematic kidnappings of Christian children in eastern Nigeria who are sent to Islamic orphanages in the north for forced conversion to Islam, affecting Catholic schools and communities.

In the light of all these and many other undocumented facts, I asked again: Mr. President, what does it profit you, to keep denying the truth of genocide of Christians in Nigeria?

•Emmanuel Nnadozie Onwubiko, the founder of Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), is a former National Commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) of Nigeria.