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.