The Cost of Silence: How Apathy Deepens the Middle Belt Crisis

By Ankeli Daniel

For years, the Middle Belt has been crying out for help, sometimes in quiet pleas, sometimes in desperate screams. Whole communities have been destroyed by waves of terror and displacement, yet the silence that follows often feels even heavier than the violence itself.
This silence from citizens, leaders, and the global community is not an absence of sound. It is a decision, and that decision carries consequences.

The Sound of Neglect

In a country that never stops moving, tragedies easily fade into background noise. One day it is villages burned in Benue, the next it is kidnappings in Kogi or fresh attacks in Southern Kaduna. The headlines shift quickly, but the survivors do not get to move on.

Behind every “breaking news” alert are people who may never return home, families trapped in makeshift camps, and children who learn the meaning of loss long before they learn the meaning of hope.

The scale of this crisis is undeniable. According to Amnesty International, over 10,217 people were killed in armed attacks across several Nigerian states in just two years, with Benue State alone accounting for 6,896 deaths. UNHCR estimates that Nigeria now has roughly 3.5 million displaced or stateless people, about 600,000 of them from Middle Belt communities.

Still, the silence continues in offices, churches, and conversations. We scroll past these tragedies, waiting for someone else to care first. But silence always takes a side. It stands with power, not the powerless, with comfort
instead of conscience.

When Silence Becomes Complicity

When we stop asking where security funds disappear to, when we look past displaced families struggling to live with dignity, and when we downplay acts of terror by calling them “skirmishes”, we are not just ignoring the problem, we are helping it grow.

Injustice doesn’t survive because evil is powerful; it survives because good people stay quiet.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reported 291,000 new conflict-related displacements in 2023, pushing Nigeria’s total to 3.4 million internally displaced people. Each displacement left unresolved, each attack left unpunished, becomes soil for impunity to grow. The suffering of the Middle Belt is not inevitable. It is the result of what we have tolerated for decades.

Apathy in High Places

It is not only ordinary citizens who stay silent. Many in positions of power, with the means to make real change, have chosen indifference over action.

Governments at both the federal and state levels often respond with words of sympathy but show little accountability. Security funds disappear without explanation, while communities remain unprotected. Relief materials arrive too late or not at all.

Every broken promise leaves another scar, and every ignored report erases another piece of truth.
Yet, the apathy of those in power is fueled by the apathy of the people. When we stop demanding better, they stop delivering.

Breaking the Silence

There is strength in our collective voice. Each time people speak out, ask the hard questions, or tell the story of someone who has survived, the walls of silence begin to break.

This, is why Middle Belt Concern (MBC) exists; to amplify those voices, to remind Nigeria and the world that silence has a cost too heavy to bear.

We stand for a region that refuses to be forgotten, for survivors who deserve justice, and for accountability that rebuilds trust in those who lead.

Speaking up means choosing courage instead of comfort, truth instead of silence, and life instead of loss.

What We Can Do

Breaking the silence is more than just speaking; it’s about taking action.
Share verified stories from the Middle Belt, because every repost helps fight misinformation.
Ask your leaders the hard questions. Demand transparency about how security funds are used.

Support local efforts that provide relief, education, and advocacy for displaced families and communities.
Organize or join dialogues and discussions that keep these conversations alive.
Every voice raised brings us closer to justice, and every action taken helps a survivor take one step closer to healing.

Hope in the Noise

Silence may have allowed this crisis to grow, but purposeful, persistent, and united voices can help bring it to an end.
The story of the Middle Belt is not one of defeat, but of strength and defiance. Its people have endured unimaginable pain and are still standing. What they need now are allies who will speak when it is easier to stay quiet.
In the end, history does not honor those who chose comfort; it remembers those who chose courage.
So, speak up.
Share the truth.
Stand with the Middle Belt until silence is no longer an option.

Daniel Ankeli is a photographer, media professional, and human rights advocate who documents insecurity, displacement, and community resilience across the Middle Belt. He is a member of Middle Belt Concern and writes from Jos, Plateau State.

The Silent Genocide: Gwoza’s Christians in the Grip of Jihadist Terror

By Suleman Ayuba

Gwoza, a once-vibrant Christian enclave in Nigeria’s Borno State, is thick with grief. For over a decade, jihadist insurgents primarily Boko Haram have waged a relentless campaign of terror against the region’s predominantly Christian population. Homes have been razed, churches reduced to rubble, and families torn apart. More than 60,000 Christians have fled across the border into Cameroon, only to face hunger, disease, and despair in overcrowded refugee camps. Many who attempt the treacherous journey back to Nigeria perish along the way, succumbing to starvation or exhaustion in the unforgiving bushes. This is not just a humanitarian crisis. It is a targeted, systematic assault on a religious community, one that many now describe as genocide.

Gwoza’s nightmare began in earnest in 2014 when Boko Haram seized the town and declared it the capital of their self-styled Islamic caliphate. In the years since, the group has returned again and again, launching coordinated attacks on Christian villages. Just last month, in October 2025, insurgents overran Kirawa, a settlement near Gwoza, forcing over 5,000 residents to flee into Cameroon. This was not an isolated incident. In January 2025, more than 4,000 Christians were displaced from nearby Chibok after similar raids.

The human toll is staggering. Since 2009, over 50,000 Christians have been killed nationwide by extremist violence, with Gwoza and surrounding areas bearing the brunt. Of the 176 churches that once stood in Gwoza Local Government Area, 148 have been destroyed. Pastors, farmers, and children have been executed in cold blood, often forced to renounce their faith at gunpoint.

For the more than 60,000 Gwoza Christians now living in Cameroon, exile offers little solace. Most are crammed into camps like Minawao in the country’s Far North Region, where aid is scarce and conditions are dire. Families live in flimsy tents, battling malnutrition, cholera outbreaks, and the constant threat of Boko Haram incursions across the porous border.

Borno State Governor Babagana Zulum visited these refugees in October 2025, acknowledging their plight but offering little in the way of immediate solutions. Many feel abandoned by the Nigerian government, by the international community, and by the world’s conscience.

The journey home is even deadlier. With internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Nigeria closing and repatriation programs faltering, desperate refugees attempt to trek back on foot. Hundreds have died en route, their bodies claimed by hunger, dehydration, and ambushes. One of the survivor recounted walking for days with nothing but wild leaves to eat, only to find his village in ruins upon return and bokko haram still targeted him until he run again to Nasarawa state.

The deliberate targeting of Christians for elimination based on their faith. A Gwoza Christians elder recently received death threats for daring to call it what it is a genocide and demanding international intervention.

Regardless of terminology, the facts are undeniable: entire Christian communities have been erased from the map. Land once farmed by generations of Marghi, Chibok, and Gwoza believers now lies fallow and is occupied by settlers aligned with the insurgents.

The world cannot afford to look away. The Home for the needy foundation in benin Open Doors for 3000 Gwoza orphans, providing critical support, but their resources are stretched thin. Safe, voluntary repatriation must be prioritized, alongside robust security for returnees. International pressure is needed to ensure Nigeria fulfills its duty to protect all citizens regardless of faith.

The people of Gwoza are not statistics. They are mothers who buried their children, pastors who preach in the ruins of their sanctuaries, and refugees who still dare to hope. Their story is one of resilience amid unimaginable loss.
It is time for the global community to act not with silence, but with solidarity. The Christians of Gwoza have suffered enough.

Some mixed metaphors on the rumours of war (II)

By Ahmed Yahaya Joe

“History is a vast early warning system.” – Norman Cousins (1915-1990)

President Bola Tinubu might be a consummate champion in local politics but obviously a very poor student (despite his numerous visits to France) of how Bonaparte elaborately describes a sandwich of distraction and flanking as “manoeuvre sur les derrieres.”
The moral here is even brilliant men are capable of blunders as famously exemplified at the epic Battle of Isandlwana fought between the armies of the Zulu nation commanded by their warrior-king 1816-1828, Shaka kaSenzangakhona and that of the British led by Lt. General Lord Chelmsford (1827-1905) along the plains of Nqutu and Angua valley of present-day South Africa nearly 150 years ago.
The timeless adaptable lesson involved should be very instructive to not only Asiwaju, his handlers and support base but also to a motley of his opponents including the rest of us from useful idiots to useful innocents.

On January 21, 1879 the Zulus headed into battle deploying what they had conceived as the “horns, chest, and loins,” of a metaphoric buffalo;
“The chest was the central part of the battle line, which would hold and pin the enemy force.
Meanwhile, the horns to either side would encircle it, moving in to the sides and rear. The tip of one horn stayed hidden behind tall grass and boulders; when it emerged to complete the encirclement, it gave the British a nasty psychological shock.
The loins were a reserve force kept back to be thrown in for the coup de grace. These men actually stood with their backs to the battle, so as not to grow overly excited and rush in before the right moment.”
– p.247 33 Strategies of War (2006) by Robert Greene

On the CPC designation of Nigeria by the US leader the “chest” that held and pinned down the Tinubu administration is inadvertently the increased practice of cartel politics by the ruling behemoth APC in the build-up of 2027 against the background of a spate of dysfunctional opposition parties in Nigeria’s political terrain;
“A cartel political party is a party which uses the resources of the state to maintain its position within the political system, colluding with other parties in a way similar to a cartel.
The premise is that the parties do not compete with one another being post-political, but rather collude to protect their collective interests and keep outsider parties from being viable.”
– Democracy and the Cartelization of Political Parties (2018) by Richard Katz and Peter Mair

Meanwhile, the bespoke “horns” are twofold.
First, was “hidden behind the tall grass” which shows that open-source intelligence analysis by various credible bodies have now established with accompanying forensic evidence that many social media networks and quite a number of self-styled influencers affiliated to the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) played a very prominent role in pushing the “Christian genocide” narrative in Nigeria from as far as back as 2016.
Take for instance the findings by TheCable;
“Data from X (formerly Twitter) between January 1 and October 1, 2025 showed over 165,000 mentions of the topic reaching an estimated 2.83 billion people worldwide a figure more than 12 times the Nigerian population.”

The second horn is the March 12, 2025 Capitol Hill testimony of the Guma-born Bishop Wilfred Anagbe, Catholic diocesan of Makurdi beside Tony Perkins, a former chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom – the very State Department body responsible for the global due diligence before any nation is designated CPC or not. Anagbe was at the House Foreign Affairs Committee over prior attacks 3 months before that of June 13-14. Notably, his appearance on February 14, 2024 was when he quite elaborately described the situation in Benue and others parts of Nigeria’s Middle Belt as “genocidal persecution of Christians” in his detailed testimony. Why wasn’t the Nigerian mission in DC present at both hearings to offer the counter-narratives as being presently touted by the federal government?

Then came an Isandlwana-like “coup de grace” delivered via the Angelus from the Vatican, a 12-noon prayer led by any given Pope every Sunday from a window at the Apostolic Palace St. Peter’s Square since 1954 under Pope Pius XII. That of Pope Leo XIV on June 15, 2025 was no different televised across the globe to millions of the Catholic faithful probably even including US Secretary of State Marc Rubio, Ted Cruz among others;
“During the night between 13 and 14 June, a terrible massacre took place in the city of Yelwata, located in the local administrative area of Guoman (Guma) in the state of Benue, Nigeria. Around two hundred were killed with killed with extreme cruelty.”
The onetime Francis Cardinal Prevost who was billed to visit Nigeria in July before he was elected as Pontiff on May 8, 2025 after a brief exhortation concluded;
“I pray that security, justice and peace prevail in Nigeria, a beloved that has suffered various forms of violence. I pray in particular for the rural communities in the state of Benue, who have increasingly been victims of violence.”

Perhaps if Nigeria had had an ambassador to Italy with a letter of credence to the Vatican, His or Her Excellency would have promptly notified President Tinubu of the obvious diplomatic red flag of His Holiness mentioning Nigeria ahead of the atrocious situation in Sudan in his Angelus. Such a monumental lacuna is unforgivable in international relations. Is the Villa even aware that between November 2001 and September 2016 the Pope had visited 9 times each time travelling extensively across Nigeria?

Recall the future Pope first visited barely a month after the Sharia riots in Kano also a year or so after previous Sharia riots in Kaduna. He was present at the episcopal ordination of the Catholic Bishop of Kano then under the Sharia dispensation of Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau. His next visit back then was after the 2011 post-election fallout and Christmas Day bombing of St. Theresa’s at Madalla.
Even without an ambassador to Italy accredited to Vatican City the federal government would have sent a special envoy to directly engage the Roman Curia to salvage the diplomatic collateral damage before the situation culminated into a CPC designation across the Atlantic. Shuttle diplomacy is obviously not part of Tinubu’s governance modus operandi.

“We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual friends. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
– Lord Palmerston, British Prime Minister 1855-1858, 1859-1865

Palmerston was not a man of religious faith. Rather he worshipped at the altar of gunboat diplomacy who as a foot soldier of imperialism, he was able to deftly kill three birds with one stone in pre-colonial Lagos.
This was by skilfully aligning British commercial interests of abolishing the extremely lucrative trade in slaves that was the oxygen of the local economy with that of the power tussle between Obas Kosoko and Akitoye all the while factoring the evangelical aspirations of the Church Mission Society (CMS) and visceral fears of the “Saros” – a very marginalized and deeply prosecuted minority in Lagos. Palmerston then as Foreign Secretary had no compunction in ordering the British consul to the Bight of Benin and Biafra (now Gulf of Guinea), John Beecroft (1790-1854) to unleash a very horrific cannonade on Lagos still described in local parlance as “Ogun Agidingbi” between 26th-28th December, 1851.

Oba Akitoye (d.1853) who was monarch in 1841 until after his dethronement in 1845 by his nephew Oba Kosoko (d.1872) had prior written the British from exile at Badagry pleading;
“My humble prayer is that you would take Lagos under you and plant the English flag there, and that you would re-establish me on my rightful throne at Lagos.”
While Kosoko was in turn dethroned in 1851 by British fiat elsewhere;
“Eight years after being admitted into the ministry as a priest by the Bishop of London, Crowther was received by Queen Victoria and (her husband) Prince Albert in November 1851 at Windsor Castle. Both the Queen and the Prince studied a map showing Lagos and Abeokuta and displayed great interest in the area’s trade. When Queen Victoria asked what the solution could be for slave trade in the West African coast, Ajayi replied, ‘Seize Lagos by fire and by force.’”

In conclusion, the moral of history here is as sentinel warning. President Trump’s sabre-rattling within the context America’s grand strategy should be a wake-up call for much needed introspection in our nation. This in retrospect it points directly to the missing ingredient during the power tussle between Obas Akitoye and Kosoko. Their mutual lack of consensus made the resort to “by fire and by force” inevitable. Perhaps why we still retain the name NNS Beecroft as “cradle of service” of the Nigerian Navy in Lagos as a metaphor lest we forget Kristin Mann writes in her 2007 book entitled Slavery and the Birth of an African City “The British bombardment opened Lagos to Christian missionaries.” -p.93

This writer therefore reckons just like Palmerston needed an intractable pretext to deploy British firepower 174 years ago to Lagos, for Trump to protect his nation’s strategic interests in present-day Nigeria, he similarly needs “useful innocents” that irreconcilable circumstances have pushed to the wall by local dynamics.

Concluded.

Mixed metaphors on rumours of war (I)

By Ahmed Yahaya Joe

“The spider has no need to hunt; it simply waits for the next fool to fall into the web’s barely visible strands.”

– The Controlled-Chaos Strategy, p.77 33 Strategies of War (2006) by Robert Greene

According to William D. James, “A close examination of the history of statecraft reveals that grand strategy works best when competing ideas collide, and rigorous processes challenge prevailing orthodoxies.” – The Key to Grand Strategy (2025)

If so, why is there more gaslighting than enlightened debate resonating from the high-decibel “Christian genocide” babel of discordant voices?

Anyway, ESL is the United Kingdom acronym for English as a Second Language that formed the kernel of “Mind Your Language” an immensely popular bygone era British comedy series that ran from the late 1970s to early 80s on Nigerian national television. For those old enough to remember the program brilliantly captured the struggles of an assorted group learning the twists and turns including nuances and idiosyncrasies of the English language.

“Mind Your Language” featured memorable characters like the amiable Jeremy Brown played by Barry Evans who passed in 1997, the habitual parodist Ranjeet Singh (Albert Moses passed in 2017) and the utterly exasperating Ali Nadim (Dino Shafeek passed in 1984) not forgetting the racy French Danielle Favre (Francoise Pascal surprisingly from the African island nation of Mauritius) and the dry humoured stern Miss Courtney, a taciturn feminist and proud spinster played by Zara Nutley (1924-2016) among others.

But underneath all that entertaining laughter in that TV show the producers neatly camouflaged many prejudices including false dichotomies and selective framing.

Little wonder one gets a sense of déjà vu of that sitcom from our halcyon days against the background of the quantum of dissimulation recently in our public space concerning the raging “Christian genocide” narrative and counter-narratives.

By the way how imprudently different is the conditional military ultimatum of Mr. Trump to Nigeria with the kind of war mongering in President Bola Tinubu’s letter to the National Assembly read at plenary in the Senate chamber on August 4, 2025?

“Following the unfortunate political situation in Niger Republic culminating in the overthrow of its President, ECOWAS under my leadership condemned the coup in its entirety and resolved to seek the return to a democratically elected government in a bid to restore peace.”

Didn’t the Nigerian leader go even ahead to demand from the legislature the necessary approval for a Nigerian, “military build-up and deployment of personnel for military intervention to enforce compliance of the military junta in Niger should they remain recalcitrant”?

Curiously, Mr. Trump’s claims of “White genocide” in South Africa did not come with military threats. Or any grandiloquence. This is obviously because Pretoria’s Union Buildings atop Meintjeskop resorted to diplomatic proactiveness. The Sarcastic Sunday offering of November 9, 2025 speaks presumptive volumes on the Villa’s template;

“With no ambassadors across 109 countries. Welcome to Nigeria’s foreign service where diplomacy is outsourced to Twitter spaces and YouTube channels. Other nations send ambassadors. We send prayers, acting officers, and PowerPoint slides. And yet, the Presidency insists there’s no diplomatic vacuum. Of course not. Abroad, we used to have envoys who wrote policy memos. Now, we have TikTok warriors who write threads.” – Mohammed Bello Doka

Discerning Nigerians wonder with consternation on the abysmal lack of continuum for a decade from 2015 to 2025 particularly against the background of Tinubu’s 2023 presidential campaign promise “We will continue with the developmental program of APC. It will not stop.”

How so?

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is the second largest circulating newspaper in the United States with an average of 4.1 million and 473,700 digital and print subscribers daily. Published 6 days weekly in New York, WSJ extensively covers international news, business and finance to a global readership for the last 134 years.

In its 20th December, 2019 edition the French public intellectual, Bernard-Henri Levy stated in his column;

“Nigeria’s Christians are under siege. And the world pays no attention. Few in the United States or Europe have reported on it. Shall we wait, as usual, for the disaster to be done before waking up? These are the stakes behind my voyage to the heart of Nigerian darkness. This is the meaning of the campaign to save Nigeria’s Christians that I hope I am launching today.”

These same words were reproduced worldwide in various prominent publications including Levy’s own 2021 book entitled The Will to See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope pp. 93-104

Fast forward to the Truthsocial.com comments of President Trump of Friday, October 31, 2025 reportedly posted after watching a Fox News TV broadcast on the plight of Nigerian Christians. Even if it is more than a coincidence that WJS and Fox News are both owned by the same News Corp conglomerate owned by the 94-year-old Rupert Murdoch, what if “when pigs fly” (apologies to one of my takeaways from Mind Your Language) and American troops eventually deploy to Nigeria?

While the question is more hypothetical than even the kind of diplomatic posturing embedded in our title by Churchill it remains more of political hyperbole than involving any strategic substance or even military relevance. That notwithstanding the answer is obviously that Americans of Nigerian extraction would be deployed in various combat and non-combat capacities.

That is what should frighteningly worry each and every one of us irrespective of our polarized positions in the “Christian genocide” debate.

Back in 1993 when the US then under President Bill Clinton intervened in Somalia under the auspices of UNOSOM (United Nations Operations in Somalia) a certain artillery subaltern, Hussein Farah Aidid of the 2nd Battalion, 9th US Marine Regiment was among the first boots on ground “guns-a-blazing,” paradoxically the Somali-Born son of the main antagonist, General Mohammed Farrah Aidid.

How did the Americans get to pit a son against his father one of the major factional leaders?

A Somali adage speaks volumes;

“I and Somalia against the world. I and my clan against Somalia. I and my family against the clan. I and my brother against the family. I against my brother.”

Will the application of the immediate foregoing Horn of Africa dictum be any different when the boots of Nigerian-American service men and women hypothetically land in Nigeria?

The question is pertinent against the background of the open confession of US Marines Major-General Smedley Butler in his 1935 treatise entitled War is a Racket;

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Who are the Nigerians reminiscent of Hussein Aidid likely to be deployed to Nigeria for by Pentagon for “fast, vicious, and sweet,” operations?

Between the Odocha siblings in the US Army as subalterns Chioma, Tochi, and Kelechi are US Marines Halima Hussein and Shamsiyya Jibo respectively from Imo and Kano States. Elsewhere beyond the attached picture are also the very high ranking likes of Kelechi Ndukwe, Commanding Officer of a US Navy guided-missile warship now a Commodore and Amanda Azubuike a Brigadier-General in the US Army.

Reminiscent of the younger Aidid and Smedley are they not all also uniformed muscle men and women defending American big business interests in the overall context?

The designation of Nigeria first by the 45th President of the United States as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) in 2020 subsequently in 2025 as America’s 47th did not both just fall out of the sky. It took “thinking strategically and acting tactically” completely missed by President Tinubu and his insiders perhaps why Senator Mohammed Ndume in not too complimentary terms describe Villa apparatchik as “kakistocrats and kleptocrats.”

Apparently, the current chief tenant of the Villa has increasingly become too distracted with the political build-up of 2027 to closely monitor the international dynamics around him.

The glaring contradiction between Levy’s 2019 “voyage to the heart of Nigeria’s darkness” and the “The slaughtering of Christian worshippers’’ post on President Tinubu’s verified handle dated 29th January 2014 in retrospect currently locates him between a rock and hard place not only in the international arena but also domestically .

The Nigerian Foreign Affairs minister’s recent embarrassing attempt to internationally roll back the “Christian genocide” narrative on Piers Morgan Uncensored has already produced an embarrassing blowback currently trending.

Though not a career diplomat albeit Nigeria’s ambassador to Germany 2017-2023, Yusuf Tuggar did not need to box himself into such a controlled-chaos corner on his X handle post-interview by co-guest Goldie Ghamari.

While the insults she heaped on the honourable minister need not be reproduced here there is need to nonetheless properly understand that all over the world;

“Grand strategy sits at the highest level of national security decision-making, where judgements over a state’s overarching objectives and interests, as well as its security environment and resource base, are made.”

If so, does Nigeria have any such template under Tinubu?

The Americans obviously do under Trump.

Continued in Part II