By Umar Sani Adamu,
For a long time, Western media outlets, foreign politicians, and advocacy groups have repeatedly described Nigeria as the scene of an ongoing “Christian genocide” at the hands of Muslims, particularly Fulani herdsmen. The charge is serious, emotional, and widely circulated. However, a closer examination of the facts on the ground reveals a much more complex and painful truth: the primary victims of the country’s deadliest insecurity crisis, armed banditry, are overwhelmingly northern Muslims.
Multiple independent investigations have found no evidence of a systematic, religiously motivated campaign to exterminate Christians. A 2024 BBC Global Disinformation Unit report, fact-checks by AFP and Al Jazeera, and even cautious statements from Open Doors, the Christian persecution monitor frequently quoted by genocide advocates, have all warned that the term “genocide” is being misused and exaggerated in the Nigerian context.
The violence plaguing the country is real, but it is predominantly criminal, not confessional. Since 2015, armed banditry, kidnapping for ransom, cattle rustling, village raids and mass killings have turned Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto and parts of Niger State into killing fields. These states are 90–98 per cent Muslim. Most bandits are ethnic Fulani Muslims who prey primarily on Hausa Muslim farming communities.
Complex numbers tell the story that western headlines rarely do:
– Zamfara State alone recorded over 1,200 banditry-related deaths in 2023, almost all Muslim.
– In the first nine months of 2025, more than 2,800 people were killed by bandits across the North West, according to the Nigerian Atrocities Documentation Project. The vast majority were Muslim.
– The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom stated in its 2025 report that banditry “disproportionately affects Muslim-majority areas”.
While Christians have suffered real losses in Middle Belt farmer-herder clashes and church attacks, the scale and frequency pale in comparison to the daily carnage in the Muslim North West.
When the clergy cross the line
This month, Plateau State Police Command arrested a Catholic priest for allegedly supplying AK-47 rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition to bandit gangs operating across Plateau, Kaduna and Bauchi. Weapons recovered from the cleric have reportedly been linked to recent deadly raids. He was paraded on November 12.
It is not an isolated case. In February 2025, another Reverend Father, a deaconess and several church members were arrested in Taraba for allegedly running arms to both Boko Haram and bandit groups. Similar arrests of Christian clergy and lay workers have occurred in Benue and Nasarawa.
Social media reaction was swift and furious: “They label every Fulani man a terrorist, yet a Reverend Father is caught red-handed arming the same killers,” wrote one widely shared post.
Why the false narrative endures
Images of burnt churches and grieving Christian widows travel fast on global networks. Footage of torched Muslim villages in remote Zurmi or Tsafe rarely does. Poor, Hausa-speaking northerners lack the lobbying machinery that amplifies Middle Belt voices in Washington and London.
As one northern governor privately admitted: “When they shout ‘Christian genocide’ abroad, the grants go to NGOs in Jos and Enugu — never to the millions of displaced Muslims rotting in camps in Gusau and Birnin Gwari.”
The way forward
Nigeria’s crisis is one of state failure, poverty, climate stress and organised crime not a holy war. Treating banditry as jihad only deepens division and delays solutions. Community policing, economic revival in the rural North, and ruthless prosecution of arms suppliers regardless of collar or turban offer the only realistic path to peace.
Until the world stops peddling a convenient myth, the people bearing the heaviest burden — ordinary Muslim farmers, women and children of the North West — will continue to bleed in silence.
There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria. There is, however, a predominantly Muslim tragedy that the world has chosen not to see.
Umar Sani Adamu can be reached via umarhashidu1994@gmail.com.
