The Numbers CAN Won’t Face: How Nigeria’s Leading Christian Body Became an Apologist for Targeted Violence

By Zariyi Yusuf

When Abimbola Ayuba, Director of National Issues and Social Welfare for the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), dismissed foreign concerns about Christian persecution with the assurance that “bullets don’t look for a Christian or spare a Muslim,” he may have expected his words to calm international alarm. Instead, he revealed something far more troubling: Nigeria’s premier Christian organization has become an unwitting or perhaps willing accomplice in obscuring one of the most systematic campaigns of religious violence in modern African history.

The numbers tell a different story. A devastating story. A story that CAN, for reasons that demand urgent scrutiny, refuses to tell.

That story comes from an exhaustive four-year study by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA), an independent research organization dedicated to documenting religious persecution across the continent. Their meticulous data collection, available at www.orfa.africa, tracked every recorded incident of violence in Nigeria’s conflict zones from October 2019 to September 2023. What they found doesn’t just challenge CAN’s narrative, it exposes it as fundamentally dishonest.

And the crisis is ongoing. ORFA is currently preparing to release a comprehensive six-year report covering October 2019 to September 2025.

The Mathematics of Denial

The ORFA report’s findings don’t just contradict CAN’s position, they obliterate it.

Of 30,880 civilians killed during this period, 22,361 were Christians and 8,314 were Muslims. At first glance, this 2.7 to 1 ratio might seem to support CAN’s narrative of generalized violence. But this surface-level analysis commits a fatal error: it ignores population distribution.

When ORFA researchers adjusted for the relative sizes of Christian and Muslim populations in affected states, the only mathematically honest way to assess targeting, the ratio exploded to 6.5 to 1. Christians are not just more likely to die; they are six and a half times more likely to be killed than their Muslim neighbors, according to ORFA’s population-adjusted analysis in the reporting period.

For abductions, the story is equally grim. Of 21,532 civilians kidnapped, 11,185 were Christians and 7,899 were Muslims. The proportional ratio? 5.1 to 1. Christians are five times more likely to be dragged from their homes, held for ransom, or to disappear entirely.

When Ayuba insists that bullets “don’t look for a Christian,” the mathematics respond with a simple, brutal truth: Yes, they do. And they find Christians with deadly, disproportionate accuracy.

The Perpetrators CAN Won’t Name

Perhaps the most damning revelation in the ORFA data concerns not the victims, but the killers, and CAN’s careful avoidance of naming them.

When most Nigerians and international observers think of terrorism in Nigeria, they think of Boko Haram and ISWAP. The government encourages this focus. Even foreign critics like Bill Maher center their accusations on “Islamists” and “Boko Haram.”

But the data reveals a conspiracy of misdirection. Boko Haram and its ISWAP offshoot combined to kill 3,079 civilians over four years, according to ORFA’s documented incidents. Horrific, certainly. But it pales beside the real engines of violence: Armed Fulani Herdsmen killed 11,948 civilians, while “Other Terrorist Groups”, largely Fulani bandits, killed 12,039.

That’s 23,987 victims mainly from Muslim Fulani-affiliated groups versus 3,079 from Boko Haram and ISWAP. These Fulani Ethnic Militia (FEM) are killing civilians at nearly eight times the rate of the terrorists everyone is talking about.

FEM is a Muslim militant group credited for most violent attacks in Nigeria’s Middle Belt and Northwest regions. Their violent activities also extend to the southern part of the country.

Why does this matter? Because the targeting is explicit and undeniable.

Of the Christians killed, nearly 80% were murdered by FEM. This is not the signature of random violence. This is selection. This is targeting. This is, by any honest definition, persecution.

And CAN, while acknowledging that “insurgency has claimed several Muslims in their early morning prayers,” conveniently neglects to mention that the primary killing force operates with clear religious preferences.

The Farming Season: When Persecution Becomes Ethno-Religious Cleansing

The temporal pattern of violence documented by ORFA reveals something even more sinister than religious targeting, it suggests systematic economic destruction designed to drive Christian communities from their ancestral lands.

Violence peaked between April and June, the heart of Nigeria’s farming season. This is when Christian farmers must plant their crops or face starvation. This is when they are most vulnerable, scattered across their fields, focused on survival rather than security.

And this is precisely when they were slaughtered.

The majority of civilians killed during these peak months were Christian farmers in the North Central, and parts of the North West, according to ORFA’s geographic analysis. Meanwhile, confrontations between Security Forces and Terror Groups, measured by casualties among combatants, dropped significantly during these same months.

Read that again: When Christian farmers are being massacred in their fields, the Nigerian Security Forces reduce their engagement with terrorist groups.

The ORFA report’s conclusion is damning: “In the period of the year when civilians were most severely attacked by Terror Groups, the Security Forces remained relatively absent.”

This is not neglect. This is abandonment. And the consequences go far beyond death tolls. Survivors report their fields destroyed or seized, ORFA’s data documents widespread “land grabbing.” Unable to plant, unable to harvest, forced to pay ransoms for kidnapped family members, Christian farming communities are driven into debt traps that complete what violence begins: the destruction of their ability to remain on their land.

When Ayuba suggests that concerns about Christian persecution are being “taken advantage of by groups who know what they benefit from foreign interests,” he ignores a more disturbing possibility: that his organization’s dismissiveness serves interests much closer to home.

The Geography of Abandonment

The regional breakdown of violence exposes a pattern of security deployment that appears designed to fail Christian communities.

The North West saw 11,626 civilian killings; the North Central, 8,789; the North East, 5,521. But the religious breakdown reveals the strategic nature of this violence.

In the North Central, the region with the second-highest death toll of civilians, 7,417 Christians were killed compared to just 1,348 Muslims, according to ORFA’s state-by-state breakdown. That’s a 5.5-to-1 ratio. Yet this is precisely where the data shows Security Forces were “relatively absent,” leaving the population “in the lurch” and giving “Muslim Fulani militants ample opportunity for their violent attacks, with Christians as their main victims.” (ORFA, August 2024).

Meanwhile, Security Forces killed 13,480 members of Terror Groups over four years, most of them in the North West and North East. Effective military action is clearly possible. It simply isn’t happening where Christians need it most

The Question CAN Cannot Answer

CAN’s position rests on a simple assertion: the violence in Nigeria is generalized insurgency that affects all Nigerians regardless of faith. The ORFA data poses an equally simple question in response:

If violence is truly indiscriminate, why are Christians 6.5 times more likely to be killed and 5.1 times more likely to be abducted than Muslims, when population size is accounted for? Why does one militia group kill Christians at double the rate it kills Muslims? Why are Security Forces absent from the regions where Christians face the greatest danger?

Ayuba suggests that “groups who know what they benefit from foreign interests” are exploiting Nigeria’s security crisis. But there’s a more uncomfortable possibility: that CAN itself, whether through political pressure, ethnic solidarity, or simple denial, has chosen institutional survival over prophetic witness.

When foreign governments threaten sanctions, CAN warns that “all of us will suffer.” Perhaps. But 22,361 Christians have already suffered the ultimate consequence. Their deaths deserve more than deflection. They deserve recognition. They deserve justice.

And they deserve better than a Christian organization that insists their persecution doesn’t exist.

Whereas CAN, under the presidency of General Muhammadu Buhari – a Fulani Muslim under whom Nigeria saw the proliferation of Islamist groups and more sympathy towards them than any resolve to eliminate them – cried to the international community about what practical indications revealed as a silent genocide against Christians, what could be any new data the present leadership of CAN have that made them deny an obvious genocide – especially at a strategic time when the US and other international observers are focusing on a call that has been on for over a decade?

The numbers are clear. The pattern is undeniable. The Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa has done the painstaking work of documenting what CAN refuses to acknowledge. And with ORFA’s forthcoming six-year report (October 2019 to September 2025) the question becomes more urgent: Why is the Christian Association of Nigeria working so hard not to see it?

Full ORFA report (Oct.2019-Sept.2023) with methodology available at www.orfa.africa. Six-year report (Oct.2019-Sept.2025) forthcoming.

The Night They Come: Living with Fear in Northern Nigeria

By Mike Odeh James

They strike as early as 10 p.m.—ghosts in the night, their arrival announced by sporadic gunfire and the haunting rhythm of their war cries that echo through the sleeping village. The sound alone freezes the heart. Families—fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters—huddle together in the dark, whispering prayers and trembling in silence. Some wet themselves; others shake uncontrollably. Mothers press trembling palms over the mouths of their infants, terrified that a single cry could summon death.

In that chaos, families scatter for survival. Some crawl into gutters filled with dirty water; others flee into uncompleted buildings, clinging to walls and praying the killers pass them by. Many rush into the bush, barefoot, with nothing but their nightclothes—unaware that snakes and scorpions lie in wait. A few hide inside the ceilings of their homes, hearts pounding as they hear footsteps below. The Fulani terrorists comb every house, every corner of the bush, searching for movement, for breath. At times, they set entire buildings ablaze, cooking whole families alive. And if they find you hiding, they shoot without hesitation.

The father, desperate and shaking, reaches for the hotline number the military had promised would bring help. He dials it again and again. It rings endlessly, unanswered—until despair becomes familiar.

For four long hours, gunfire rains. The Fulani terrorists—though not all Fulani are killers—move with ruthless precision, torching homes, dragging victims away, firing into the night. Then, as suddenly as they came, they vanish into the blackness—quietly, almost peacefully—leaving behind a village soaked in tears and fear.

When the sun rises, the true horror unfolds.

A neighbour’s wife has been taken.

A young boy lies still, his eyes wide open.

Another man limps, clutching a bleeding leg.

You hear someone whisper, “God, when will this end?”

But deep down, everyone knows—it won’t. Not yet.

They come twice a week now. They will move to the neighbouring villages and later cycle back

Each raid feels like a rehearsal for death. The nights grow longer, the days emptier. And in the daylight, the government’s words sound cruelly hollow.

Former President Muhammadu Buhari once warned Nigerians not to “stereotype the Fulani” for the sins of a few. The Sultan of Sokoto also cautioned against revenge killings. And the presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina, mocked the bereaved, asking, “Why don’t you give up your ancestral lands instead of dying for them?”

Soldiers clamped down youths who may have dane guns for self defence

But how do you give up the land that holds your father’s bones?

How do you abandon the soil that carries your children’s footprints?

It continued. Then, suddenly, I realised I had grown used to being woken at 10 p.m. every night. Even when there was no attack, my mind refused to rest. Sleep became a memory. I could not close my eyes until 5 a.m. My face thinned, my body weakened. I was becoming a ghost of myself.

When I finally went to the hospital, the doctor sighed deeply.

“You have acute high blood pressure and insomnia,” he said softly. “If you don’t rest, it could kill you.”

He paused, then added, “You’re not the only one. I’ve treated over 50 people with the same symptoms this week.”

Another doctor, a friend, told me he had seen 34 others—each suffering from the same silent torment.

We are the living dead—the unseen casualties of endless fear. We may not have been shot or kidnapped, but we are dying slowly, from the inside.

We are the other victims of Fulani terrorism, abandoned by a government that failed to protect us, betrayed by leaders who preach peace while we bury our neighbours.

And still, every night, at exactly 10 p.m., I wait for the sound of gunfire—because silence, too, now sounds like war.

An excerpt from Mike Odey’s yet to be published book…..