Captivity by Creed: The Religious Sorting System Nobody Talks About

…Inside the two-tier captivity system of Fulani ethnic militias — where faith determines who suffers, how much a life is worth, and whether a hostage comes home at all.

By Steven Kefas

May 2026

The terrorists conveniently called bandits by the media had a rule. They stated it plainly, in the open, in front of their captives: Fulani people would not be taken. They were brothers. Christians and certain Muslims majorly non-Fulani were fair game. What happened next depended entirely on which category you fell into.

Sunday Cletus was abducted on 28 February 2026, while travelling through Kachia Local Government Area in Kaduna State. What he witnessed and endured over the days that followed was not random cruelty. It was, according to his account and the findings of extensive field research spanning multiple states and multiple years, a system, deliberate, consistent, and organised around two variables: religion and ethnicity.

The differential treatment of Muslim and Christian abductees by Fulani Ethnic Militias (FEM) in Northern Nigeria is among the most under-documented dimensions of a security crisis that has displaced hundreds of thousands and left communities across Kaduna, Plateau, Kogi, and the wider Middle Belt and northwest regions in a state of sustained terror. While public attention has focused on the frequency and geography of attacks, which villages were raided, how many were killed, the testimony of survivors reveals that what happens after capture is equally telling, and equally horrifying.

‘They Are Our Brothers’

The classification begins at the point of abduction. Cletus reported that his captors were explicit: Fulani individuals were not to be targeted because of ethnic solidarity. The instruction was not whispered or implied. It was declared. In that moment of capture, a sorting mechanism was set in motion that would govern every subsequent hour of captivity.

This is not a single camp, a single commander, or a single incident. Field interviews conducted across multiple states over several years return the same account with remarkable consistency: from the moment of capture, Muslim abductees and Christian abductees enter different realities.

“For a Christian in Southern Kaduna, the danger of being kidnapped is compounded by the near certainty of harsher treatment, higher ransom demands, and a meaningfully greater risk of death, not because of anything they have done, but because of their faith.” Says a retired security personnel who spent 4 months in captivity in Southern Kaduna.

Inside the Two-Tier System

Survivor testimonies describe a captivity environment divided into two parallel experiences. Muslim abductees are, in the words of multiple survivors, treated with a degree of restraint. They are generally not subjected to the physical and sexual violence that Christian captives endure as a matter of routine. They receive adequate food. They are permitted relative freedom of movement within the camp. In documented cases, they have been allowed to observe religious obligations. The logic, as captors have articulated it in the presence of Muslim detainees, is one of communal solidarity, a fellow Muslim, however different in ethnicity or background, is assigned a different moral status.

For Christian captives, the experience is of another order entirely. Men are beaten systematically not as punishment for specific behaviour, but as a baseline condition of captivity. Women face the additional horror of sexual violence. Cletus described an environment in which abuse was pervasive, in which captives were entirely at their captors’ mercy, and in which psychological torment was deployed as deliberately as physical violence. Christian abductees are subjected to prolonged uncertainty, repeated threats of execution, and in documented cases, forced to witness violence against fellow captives as a mechanism of coercion and terror.

There are exceptions. Field research has documented cases in which non-Fulani Muslim abductees were also treated harshly, suggesting that ethnicity intersects with religion in complex ways. But the pattern holds across the breadth of the data: faith is the dominant variable.

The Price of Faith: Ransom Asymmetry

The differential does not end with conditions in captivity. It extends into the financial machinery of release. Across field interviews with survivors and families in the north central region and parts of the northwest, a consistent pattern emerges: Muslim abductees are released on comparatively lower ransoms, negotiations are shorter, and in several documented cases, Fulani community intermediaries with informal access to the armed groups have facilitated release with minimal negotiation.

For Christian families, the process is an ordeal of a different kind. Demands are higher. Timelines stretch for weeks. The threat of lethal consequences for delay or non-compliance is more frequently and more credibly invoked. Field interviews document cases in which families gathered and paid the full ransom demand, only to receive no release, followed by escalating demands. In some cases, Christian abductees were killed even after their families complied.

The death that Sunday Cletus described witnessing, a teenage boy executed because his family did not initiate negotiations quickly enough is not an aberration. It is an example of a broader operational logic in which a Christian life is assigned a lesser and more conditional value, one that can be cancelled at will.

A Religious Hierarchy of Human Worth

What emerges from years of field testimony is not a picture of chaotic, opportunistic violence. It is a picture of a system, one with internal rules, consistent practices, and an embedded hierarchy. Religion functions as a determinant of fate at every stage of the abduction experience: who gets taken, how they are treated in captivity, on what terms they may be released, and whether they survive.

This pattern is consistent across multiple states, multiple armed groups, and multiple years of survivor testimony. It is not incidental variation between individual captors. It is, as the evidence compels us to describe it, a religious hierarchy of human worth embedded in the operational logic of Fulani Ethnic Militias.

The implications reach beyond security analysis. The same sorting mechanism documented in community attacks where Muslim members of mixed villages are spared while their Christian neighbours are killed is replicated and deepened inside the captivity system itself. Faith does not merely determine who is attacked. It determines what they endure, how much their life is worth in negotiation, and whether they return.

The Reckoning

Sunday Cletus came home. Many do not. His testimony, set against the accumulated weight of survivor accounts gathered across the region over years, forces a confrontation with a dimension of Northern Nigeria’s security crisis that policy discussions have consistently failed to address with adequate seriousness.

The violence is not indiscriminate. The suffering is not evenly distributed. And the religious character of the crisis does not begin and end with the moment of attack. It permeates the entire machinery, the raid, the abduction, the camp, the negotiation, the release, or the execution. Until that reality is named plainly and confronted directly, the communities living under it will continue to bear its weight largely alone.

…Steven Kefas is an investigative journalist, Senior Research Analyst at the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, and Publisher of Middle Belt Times. He has documented religious persecution, terrorism and forced displacement in Nigeria’s Middle Belt for over decade

Middle Belt Concern Issues Global SOS: Remove Nigeria’s NSA, Stop the Killings, or Face a Regional Catastrophe

By Steven Kefas

(Abuja, Nigeria), They came during Palm Sunday. They came during Easter. As Christian families gathered in prayer across Nigeria’s Middle Belt, armed men descended on their villages, burning homes, raping women, killing children, and driving entire communities into the bush. These were not random acts of chaos. They were calculated, coordinated, and chillingly timed.

Now, a coalition of more than eighty civil society organisations has decided that silence is no longer an option. On April 24, 2026, Middle Belt Concern launched an urgent international petition, calling on the United Nations, the African Union, ECOWAS, the European Parliament, and the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and other democratic nations to intervene in what it formally describes as an ongoing genocide against predominantly Christian farming communities in Nigeria’s heartland.

The ten-page petition titled Stop the Genocide in Nigeria’s Middle Belt & Avert a Looming Refugee Crisis in West Africa  is both a cry for help and a damning indictment of a government that, the coalition alleges, has watched, wavered, and in some cases, enabled the carnage.

The Middle Belt is no peripheral region. Stretching across states including Benue, Kaduna, and Nasarawa, it is home to over 50 million people, representing more than 400 indigenous ethnic nationalities. It is also Nigeria’s primary food-producing zone, the breadbasket of Africa’s most populous nation. For years, its farming communities have suffered relentless attacks by Islamist terrorist groups and armed Fulani militia. Villages reduced to ash. Harvests abandoned. Generations of indigenous life erased.

The numbers are staggering. Millions have been forcibly displaced. Entire communities that have farmed the same land for centuries now live as refugees within their own country, sheltering in camps or cramped urban fringes while strangers occupy their ancestral homelands.

And yet, according to Middle Belt Concern, the Nigerian government’s response has not been protection, it has been paralysis, at best, and complicity, at worst.

At the heart of the coalition’s fury is Nigeria’s Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), the body that coordinates the country’s intelligence and security architecture. The coalition alleges that ONSA has presided over decades of catastrophic intelligence failures, selective law enforcement, and a disturbing pattern of preferential treatment toward the very perpetrators of these attacks.

Most alarming is the characterisation by the current National Security Adviser of violent terrorists as “brothers who want peace” , a description the coalition calls not only tone-deaf, but deeply revealing of bias at the highest levels of Nigeria’s security leadership. This is the same office, Middle Belt Concern notes, that has championed the country’s Disarmament, Demobilisation, Rehabilitation and Reintegration (DDRR) programme — a policy that offers rehabilitation packages to so-called “repentant terrorists” while their victims remain landless, traumatised, and without justice.

The coalition is also raising urgent alarm about mining activities continuing in conflict zones where indigenous populations have been violently expelled. These operations, they argue, are not incidental to the violence, they are incentivising it. Terror, in this reading, has become a business model for land seizure, and the Nigerian state, through its inaction, is a silent partner.

The consequences of continued inaction, the coalition warns, will not be contained within Nigeria’s borders. As Africa’s largest country by population, Nigeria’s instability has a gravitational pull on the entire sub-region. A spiralling humanitarian catastrophe in the Middle Belt could trigger mass refugee flows into neighbouring West African states, nations that are already grappling with their own fragile security environments. What begins as a domestic failure of protection could rapidly metastasise into a regional crisis with global ramifications.

Middle Belt Concern is therefore demanding that the international community bring firm diplomatic, legal, and economic pressure to bear on Nigeria, not out of interference, but out of a moral obligation that the post-Holocaust promise of “never again” actually means something.

Their demands are clear: restructure Nigeria’s national security leadership, beginning with the immediate removal of the National Security Adviser; halt all mining in terror-affected regions; ensure the safe return of all displaced persons; deliver reparations to survivors; end the DDRR programme that rewards terrorists; and invite independent international press to document what is happening without reliance on government narratives.

The farms lie fallow. The churches stand burned. The survivors wait.

The world has been given the facts. The only question now is whether it will choose to act before the Middle Belt becomes yet another entry in history’s long, shameful catalogue of genocides the international community watched unfold in real time and did nothing to stop.

To read the full petition or add your voice, visit: https://bit.ly/NigeriaMBCPetition10Apr26

WIKIPEDIA: JUKUN WAPAN LANGUAGE TO GET ITS OWN EDITION 

Not less than 50 Jukun Wapan speakers gathered on Friday, 20th February 2026, as the news of the Nenzit Wikimedians team coming to help start the Jukun Wapan Wikipedia was heard, to participate in the Jukun Wikipedia Outreach. The Wikimedia team, consisting of members of the Tyap Wikimedians User Group from Tyap-speaking background (Kambai Akau and Kuyet Friday Musa) and Jju-speaking background (Joshua Jacob Nzamah and Abukam Peter Adamu) on arrival, headed to see the Aku Uka of Wukari in his palace, to brief him of the reason for their visitation. The Aku Uka was very delighted and gave the team his blessings. The Wikimedia team was accompanied to the Aku Uka’s palace by members of the Jukun Wapan bible translation team, led by the coordinator, a retired clergyman and village head of Byepyi, Atando James Kinda Agbu, and another member of the team, Amos Jonathan Ajotsatutu, who made sure that the Wikimedia team was well taken care of. After the visit to the Aku Uka, the team headed back to meet the venue at Rohi Grand Suites, 20 Kwararafa Crescent/19 Agwabji Street, GRA, Wukari, where they began the first of the three-day session with the aspiring editors.

Image: L-R: Friday Kuyet Musa, Kambai Akau, Aku Uka of Wukari (Dr. Ishaku Adda Ali, Matakitswen I), Joshua Jacob Nzamah, and Abukam Peter Adamu. (File:Nenzit Wikimedians and the Aku Uka, Matakhitswen 02.jpg. (2026, March 17). Wikimedia Commons.

The Jukun Wapan language, one of the about 17 Jukunoid languages in existence today, will be the first of them to have a Wikipedia edition in Taraba State, and maybe one of the few languages in the Middle Belt after the Tyap, Igala, Nupe, Jju, and Karekare Wikipedia editions. There are currently language editions like Bole, Berom, and Hyam Wikipedia editions being developed in the Wikimedia Incubator, and Jukun Wapan just got added to the list.

In 2022, the Tyap language, spoken in Southern Kaduna and Plateau States became the very first language in the Middle Belt to get its own Wikipedia. The Tyap Wikimedians User Group became an approved affiliate of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. (WMF), later in the same year, and the Tyap Wikimedians Organisation registered with the CAC in January 2023. Kambai Akau (Levi Kambai Timothy) leads the activities of the group and is supported by Kuyet Friday Musa and other community volunteer staff. Nenzit Wikimedians is a tag for all editors of Central Nigerian (Nenzit or Platoid) languages, consisting of the likes of Tyap, Jju, Berom, Hyam, Jukun, Tarok, Tsuvadi, and many more belonging to the Plateau, Kainji, and Jukunoid subbranches.

The Nigerian Middle Belt boasts of over 200 languages, but most of them are underdeveloped and endangered. The bigger languages spoken in Nigeria, namely: Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, including English and Nigerian Pidgin languages, are dominant. These languages tend to have more attention from the Nigerian government at the expense of the minoritized languages. Through the support from the WMF, the Nenzit Wikimedians hope to change that narrative, and document, preserve, and promote the wealth of the cultures of the Middle Belt for posterity’s sake and to instill the needed confidence for the natives of these languages to continue speaking their languages and developing their identity, especially the youths.

Image: Participants on the second day of events (File:Attendees during the Jukun Wikipedia Outreach 02.jpg. (2026, March 17). Wikimedia Commons. 

The Jukun Wikipedia Outreach was a success. It lasted from Friday, 20th to Sunday, 22nd February, 2026, with Kambai taking most of the workshop sessions, supported by Kuyet and Joshua. Prior to the program’s kick-off, many participants followed the guidelines on the Event:Jukun Wikipedia Outreach page on Meta-Wiki to create their user accounts. In the program, they learned about the Wikimedia sister projects and were shown how to navigate and create their first articles and edit them in the Wikimedia Incubator, where new Wikimedia language editions are developed before being launched publicly. At the end of the event, not less than 140 articles were created by the participants, among which was one of the sons of Dr. Shekarau Angyu Masa-Ibi (Kuvyon II), the previous Aku Uka of Wukari, Prince Ajifada Shekarau, who was an event co-organizer alongside Amos Jonathan Ajotsatutu, Peter Agan, and Sike-Uwbu Daude Gbana. Many writers and scholars of Jukun Wapan extraction were present, and books written in Jukun Wapan were donated to the Nenzit Wikimedians, and others were purchased. The Nenzit Wikimedians were fed with huge wraps of pounded and fish from the Benue River, experiencing the Jukun hospitality at its utmost!

Day 3’s group picture (File:A group photograph on the Day 3 of the Jukun Wikipedia Outreach 2026.jpg. (2026, March 17). Wikimedia Commons.

The top editors in the outreach program were gifted with souvenirs on the last day of the event, with Joseph Atebo N. Afyenakun, Yavini Ladi, and Jibo Paul Aten-wunu topping the first three highest editor ranks. Others were also encouraged to keep editing even after the event, to enable the project to move out of the Wikimedia Incubator within the next couple of months.

The Nenzit Wikimedia team travelled all the way from Kaduna and Zonkwa to attend the program in Wukari, and had to cross the Benue River at Ibi, where the a bridge is yet to be constructed, for the sake of bringing more underrepresented languages in the Middle Belt into lamplight because they take it s a responsibility which they owe the next generations unborn, for the preservation of the identity of the peoples of the region through online open source documentation on Wikimedia sister projects like Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons.

The group seeks the partnership of non-governmental organizations working along the same terrain to boost synergy and increase the momentum needed to preserve and enhance the linguistic identity of the underrepresented in the Middle Belt.

WHO IS THE GENOCIDE CULPRIT IN NIGERIA?

A Critical Examination of the Claim That “Muslims Are Also Killed” as a Response to the Genocide of Christians and Indigenes/Natives of Nigeria

by

Barr. John Apollos Maton

20th December 2025

INTRODUCTION: THE DANGEROUS SIMPLICITY OF FALSE BALANCE

In every conflict marked by sustained violence against a particular group, there emerges a predictable rhetorical maneuver: false equivalence. When the subject of mass killings of Christians is raised, especially in locations plagued by sectarian violence, a familiar refrain is deployed; “Muslims are also killed.” This statement is often presented not as a call for universal justice, but as a rhetorical shield meant to dilute, deflect or delegitimize the claims of targeted persecution. The purpose is not to mourn all victims or empathise with survivors, but to suspend moral urgency, silence advocacy and neutralize accountability.

The unanswered questions by the protagonists of “Muslims are also killed” despite repeatedly asking is a simple but uncomfortable one: Who is the culprit of the gangster killing spree in Nigeria?

When Christians are being killed systematically, and the response is that ‘Muslims are also killed’, then logic demands further inquiry; Who is killing whom? Under what circumstances? With what intent? And in whose name? These are not questions of sentiment but of truth, evidence and responsibility. To refuse to ask these questions is not neutrality, it is complicity in obscuring reality.

DEFINING GENOCIDE AND TARGETED VIOLENCE

Genocide is not defined merely by the existence of death inflicted by gangster and selective violence; it is defined by domestic cum international law based on observed pattern, intent and identity. The killing of members of a group because they belong to that group constitutes a crime of a fundamentally different moral and legal category than killings resulting from crime, collateral conflict or intra-group violence (eg. arising from boundary disputes).

When Christian communities are attacked and killed in their bedrooms while asleep, in their villages, churches, farmlands and market places, often without reprisal aggression, the issue is not about quantum numbers alone. It is targeting. It is the selection of victims based on ethnoreligious identity. It is the destruction of lives, livelihoods, properties, sacred spaces and communal continuity. To respond to such evidence with the vague assertion that “others are also killed” is to evade the definition of genocide entirely.

No serious moral framework allows the suffering of one group to be dismissed simply because suffering exists elsewhere.

THE “MUSLIMS ARE ALSO KILLED” ARGUMENT: A LOGICAL AUTOPSY

At first glance, the claim that “Muslims are also killed” appears humane. Who would deny that all lives matter? Yet when examined closely, the argument collapses under its own contradictions.

If Muslims are also killed, then by who and why? Are they killed by Christians acting collectively? Are Christian militias invading Muslim villages? Are churches mobilizing armed groups to attack mosques? What is the evidence, public declarations or ideological manifestos supporting such claims?

The answer, based on available historical records including data, is unequivocal: No. Christians, as a collective religious group, have not organized, celebrated, or justified mass attacks on Muslims in the territorial locations under discussion. There are no evidential records and data of Christian mobs chanting religious slogans while burning Muslims or their settlements, worship places, livelihoods and markets. Nor are there such records and data of sermons by Christian clerics calling for the extermination of Muslims. No coordinated religious campaigns encouraging violence or crime. This absence of evidence is not accidental. It reflects a fundamental asymmetry that the claims in “both sides” narrative refuses to confront.

THE QUESTION OF EVIDENCE: RECORDINGS, ADMISSIONS, AND PATTERNS

One of the most damning aspects of modern conflicts is that they are often documented by the perpetrators themselves. Videos, photographs, statements and social media posts have become tools of intimidation and ideological signaling.

In the cases under discussion on genocides against Christians, there exist repeated instances where attackers openly identify themselves, invoke religious language, and frame their violence as justified or divinely sanctioned. These are not anonymous accidents. They are ideological acts. When individuals proudly record and disseminate evidence of their crimes, they remove ambiguity about intent.

By contrast, there is no comparable archive of Christians collectively boasting about religiously motivated mass violence. This is not a claim of moral perfection, but of empirical reality. Individual crimes exist everywhere. Organized religious extermination by Christians in these contexts does not exist. Thus, when Muslims are killed, the crucial question remains unanswered by deflection: who killed them, and why?

COLLATERAL DEATH VERSUS TARGETED EXTERMINATION

Another deliberate confusion lies in the failure to distinguish between collateral deaths and targeted killing for extermination. In territorial locations affected by insurgency, banditry, and terrorism, civilians of all identities may tragically die. But not all deaths are equal in meaning.

When a Christian farmer is killed because his farmland is trespassed and crops ravaged, his homestead is seized, his church burned, and his village erased, the motive is clear. When worshippers are massacred during religious services, the symbolism is undeniable. When survivors are told to convert, flee, or die, the intent is explicit.

If Muslims are killed in clashes between armed groups, criminal networks, or internal disputes, those deaths are tragic and demand justice, but they do not negate evidence of a parallel, targeted campaign against Christians. Conflating the two is not analysis; it is obfuscation. Yet, the question remains; who killed the Muslims and why?

WHY THE FALSE BALANCE IS POLITICALLY USEFUL

The insistence on “both sides suffer” serves powerful political interests. It allows governments to avoid naming perpetrators. It enables international actors to maintain diplomatic comfort. It shields extremist ideologies from scrutiny by dissolving them into generalized chaos.

Most dangerously, it gaslights victims including survivors. It tells survivors that their suffering is exaggerated, their fear misplaced, and the death of their kinsfolk is a mere statistic in a symmetrical tragedy. This rhetorical strategy does not promote peace—it perpetuates silence. History shows that genocide is rarely denied outright in its early stages by the perpetrators and supporters of the evil. Instead, it is minimized, relativized, pacified and buried under calls for patience and restraint, so the voices of the victims are lost and the true agenda hidden. In Plateau State and many parts of Nigeria, the strategy denying cries against this Genocide is to have even the government misnormered it as being “Insecurity” or the infamous “Farmer-Herder Clash”.

THE MORAL FAILURE OF SILENCE AND DEFLECTION

There is a profound ethical failure in responding to cries of persecution with deflection. Moral seriousness requires specificity. Justice requires naming crimes accurately. Peace requires confronting uncomfortable truths. To acknowledge that Christians are targeted does not require hatred of Muslims. To demand accountability does not require collective blame. But to refuse acknowledgment because it disrupts a preferred narrative is to abandon both truth and humanity. The question is not whether Muslims are also killed. The question is whether Christian deaths are being used as a bargaining chip in a moral shell game designed to avoid responsibility.

WHY CONDEMN THE AID COMING FOR CHRISTIANS?

1. The Moral Contradiction at the Heart of the Objection

The first question that must be confronted honestly is this: why would any morally serious person oppose humanitarian aid to civilians facing mass violence, regardless of their faith? Aid is not a theological endorsement; it is a response to human suffering. Condemning assistance to Christian communities under attack does not reduce violence, save Muslim lives, or advance justice—it merely withholds relief from victims. When opposition to aid becomes louder than condemnation of the killings themselves, priorities are exposed. Humanitarian intervention should never be framed as a zero-sum competition between communities, especially in a context where civilians of multiple faiths are being brutalized by armed groups.

2. The Missed Opportunity for Collective Advocacy

Nigeria’s insecurity has attracted rare international attention, and this moment could have been used constructively to amplify all civilian suffering. Instead of rejecting the framing of Christian victimhood outright, critics could acknowledge it while simultaneously presenting evidence of Muslim civilian casualties and calling for inclusive protection. International actors are capable of responding to multiple crises at once. Denial does not broaden concern; it narrows it. By rejecting the language of “Christian genocide” rather than supplementing it with documented accounts of Muslim suffering, critics inadvertently weaken the overall case for international engagement against terrorism.

3. Denial as a Strategy—and Its Consequences

There is a profound difference between contextualizing violence and denying it. When denial becomes the dominant response, it signals that controlling the narrative matters more than protecting lives. If Christians are being targeted in identifiable patterns—through church attacks, village raids, forced displacement, or selective killings—then disputing terminology should never take precedence over stopping the violence. The insistence on denial, especially when paired with hostility toward aid, creates the impression that reputational defense of a group or ideology has eclipsed compassion for victims. This perception, whether intended or not, damages trust and deepens communal suspicion.

4. If the Culprit Is the Same, Why Resist Intervention?

If both Christians and Muslims are suffering at the hands of the same armed actors—terrorist groups, criminal militias, or transnational extremists—then logic demands a united civilian front. Aid, investigations, and security interventions aimed at dismantling those networks should be welcomed, not resisted. Shielding perpetrators indirectly—by downplaying their impact on one community—undermines the safety of all communities. Terrorist violence does not respect religious boundaries; it exploits them. Any response that fragments civilian solidarity only strengthens the attackers.

5. The Responsibility of Muslims in Indigenous Communities

Muslims who are of the Indigenous tribes of Nigeria, like indigenous Christians, have deep historical, cultural, and communal ties to their regions. Their interests are aligned with peace, stability, and the protection of ancestral lands—not with violent actors who destabilize societies and invite external chaos. Standing against terrorism does not mean standing against Islam; it means standing for life, dignity, and coexistence. When indigenous Muslim voices openly support interventions that protect all civilians, they reclaim moral leadership and make it harder for extremists to masquerade as defenders of faith.

6. Aid Is Not the Enemy—Violence Is

Ultimately, the question is not whose suffering counts more, but whether suffering is allowed to continue unchecked. Humanitarian aid for Christians under attack does not negate Muslim suffering; it establishes a precedent that civilian lives matter. The appropriate response to selective attention is not obstruction, but expansion—demanding broader protection, deeper investigations, and comprehensive aid for all affected communities. Condemning aid aimed at one group risks normalizing cruelty. Supporting aid, while insisting on inclusivity, affirms a shared commitment to justice and human life above sectarian rivalry.

WHO, THEN, IS THE CULPRIT?

If Christians are not attacking Muslims as a religious collective, yet Muslims are also among those killed, then the perpetrators must be clearly and explicitly identified: armed extremist groups, criminal militias, terrorist organizations, or ideological movements that exploit religion for power and violence. Historical and contemporary data suggests the Islamist Fulani jihadists as the only group that fits this narrative; immigrants whose pristine motive from their first incursion to some territories that are constituent parts of what comprise present-day Nigeria was an Islamic jihad aimed at conquest and displacement of native people and institutions.

The refusal to distinguish between Islam as a faith and the Fulani violent actors who profess Islam harms everyone. It allows the Fulani settler immigrants and extremists to hide behind populations of indigenous ethnic groups and critics to be accused of bigotry for asking legitimate questions. Precision is not prejudice; it is the foundation of justice.

CONCLUSION: TRUTH IS NOT HATRED

Asking “Who is the culprit?” is not an act of hostility. It is an act of moral responsibility.

The lives of Christians lost to targeted violence cannot be erased by the rhetorical symmetry of the culprits. Nor can justice be achieved by pretending that all deaths arise from the same causes or carry the same intent.

If Muslims are killed, they deserve justice. If Christians are targeted for extermination, they also deserve justice, recognition and protection. These truths are not mutually exclusive. What is unacceptable is the weaponization of one tragedy to silence another. Truth demands clarity. Justice demands courage.

And, history will judge not only those who killed, but those who refused to ask who did it, and those who keep pretending not to know it’s the continuation of the genocidal campaign of the immigrant Islamist Fulani jihadists against the Native Indigenous Ethnic People and Christians of Nigeria.

When the State Arms the Terrorist: How Nigeria’s Security Architecture Is Collapsing from the Inside

By Steven Kefas

On December 12, 2025, Nigerian security operatives arrested a group of armed Fulani militants in Ifelodun Local Government Area of Kwara State. What followed should have triggered an immediate national security emergency.

In a video recorded during interrogation, one of the suspects calmly explained that the AK-47 rifles and patrol vehicle in their possession were supplied by officials of the Kwara State Government. According to him, they had been operating in the area “for a while” under the guise of patrol duties. “Ilorin government na him give us this motor and the weapons,” he said. “They were the ones that gave us the rifles.”

This was not the rambling of a cornered criminal improvising a story. Days later, the Kwara State Government itself issued a clarification confirming that the arrested armed men were members of Miyetti Allah, the Fulani socio-cultural organization, and that they were participating in a federal security operation coordinated through the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA).

In one stroke, Nigeria crossed a line that should alarm every serious observer of national security, human rights, and national stability: armed ethnic militia members linked to a group repeatedly accused of terrorism were officially embedded into state-backed “security operations.”

This is no longer about incompetence. It is about institutional collapse.

Vigilantes or Proxies?

Kwara State is not Fulani territory. It is a predominant Yoruba state, notwithstanding the historical emirate structure imposed during the 19th-century jihad of Usman dan Fodio. Over the past six months, Yoruba farming communities in Kwara have increasingly come under attack by Fulani terrorists.

Against this backdrop, a fundamental question arises: why are Fulani “vigilantes” deployed in Yorubaland to provide security for Yoruba communities while those same Fulani militias are widely implicated in the violence those communities are fleeing?

Where are the Yoruba vigilantes? Why are local populations excluded from securing their own communities, while an armed ethnic group with an established record of violent expansionism is empowered, armed, and legitimized by the state?

This is not community policing. It is demographic and security engineering.

A Pattern, Not an Incident

What happened in Kwara is not an isolated scandal. It fits a disturbing and well-documented pattern.

In January 2024, Miyetti Allah leader Bello Bodejo announced the formation of an armed Fulani militia of 1,144 fighters, euphemistically labeled a “vigilante group.” The launch ceremony took place in Lafia the Nasarawa State capital had among its invited guests the Governor of Nasarawa, Abdullahi Sule as special guest.

Nasarawa State has long been accused by survivors, journalists, and international monitors and even neighbouring state officials of hosting Fulani terrorist camps from which attacks against Plateau, Benue, Taraba Southern Kaduna, and other Middle Belt communities are launched.

When Bodejo was eventually arrested and charged with terrorism, his confessional statement reported by Punch newspaper in April 2024 contained an explosive allegation: he claimed that Governor Sule pressured him to form the militia group known as Kungiya Zaman Lafiya.

Bodejo was later released without trial.

The alleged architect of his release? Nigeria’s National Security Adviser, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu.

The 1,144 armed “vigilantes” subsequently disappeared into thin air. No disarmament. No accountability. No explanation.

From Appeasement to Empowerment

The Kwara arrests now place the Office of the National Security Adviser squarely at the center of another scandal involving armed Fulani operatives embedded in state-sanctioned security frameworks.

If confirmed, this represents a catastrophic breach of counterterrorism doctrine. No serious state fighting terrorism arms ethnic militias tied to insurgent violence. No professional security architecture outsources public safety to groups accused of mass atrocities. And no responsible National Security Adviser permits such an arrangement.

Yet this is precisely what Nigeria appears to be doing, repeatedly.

This pattern lends overwhelming credence to growing national and international calls for Nuhu Ribadu’s immediate removal as National Security Adviser. National security cannot be entrusted to an individual who repeatedly champions peace deals, protection, or legitimacy for armed groups responsible for spreading terror among citizens.

The Matawalle Question

The crisis deepens further with renewed allegations surrounding Bello Matawalle, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Defence.

In recent weeks, Matawalle has been implicated by his former aide in allegations of sponsoring key bandit leaders in Zamfara State. These claims resurrect older, widely circulated videos in which notorious bandit leader Bello Turji openly stated that Matawalle, then governor of Zamfara paid some bandits with public funds in the name of “peace.”

Turji is not a misunderstood local actor. He is a terror commander linked to the killing of hundreds, possibly thousands, of farmers across the North-West.

Matawalle denies wrongdoing, arguing that payments and negotiations were part of a peace strategy. But peace bought with impunity, cash, and legitimacy for terrorists is not peace, it is state-funded terror management.

When combined with the Kwara revelations, the allegations against Matawalle reinforce a chilling conclusion: Nigeria’s defence and security leadership is populated by individuals whose policies consistently reward, empower, and normalize terrorism.

This alone justifies Matawalle’s removal.

“Bombs Cannot Penetrate Forests”

Perhaps nothing illustrates the depth of rot more than the parting statement of Nigeria’s immediate past Defence Minister, Abubakar Badaru, who reportedly remarked during the week of his resignation that “bandits live in forests where bombs cannot penetrate.”

This is not merely false, it is professionally disqualifying.

Modern militaries conduct forest warfare across the globe. Nigeria’s armed forces have done so successfully outside Nigeria. The claim that bombs “cannot penetrate forests” is not a tactical assessment; it is an excuse, one that exposes a leadership class more interested in rationalizing failure than confronting terror.

Why the World Is Responding

In recent days, the United States announced visa restrictions affecting Nigerians. Predictably, outrage followed. Many Nigerians consider the decision unfair or excessive.

They are wrong.

The United States, like any rational state, has a duty to protect itself from countries where terrorism is being mainstreamed into governance structures. When armed ethnic militias tied to terror networks are armed by the state, embedded into official security operations, shielded from prosecution, and rewarded with political appointments, terrorism is no longer an aberration, it is policy-adjacent.

Visa restrictions are not punishment. They are self-defense.

Recommendations: What Must Be Done Immediately

If Nigeria wishes to arrest its rapid descent into international isolation and internal collapse, urgent action is required:

Nuhu Ribadu must resign or be removed as National Security Adviser. His continued tenure undermines confidence in Nigeria’s counterterrorism commitment and poses a grave risk to national cohesion.

Bello Matawalle must be relieved of his defence portfolio pending an independent investigation into allegations of terrorist sponsorship and appeasement.

Miyetti Allah-linked armed formations must be formally investigated for terrorism-related activities and barred from any security role.

Security appointments must prioritize professional competence over ethnic, religious or political proximity. National security is too serious to be managed through sentiment.

International partners must escalate targeted sanctions and visa restrictions against officials credibly linked to terror appeasement.

Conclusion: A State at a Crossroad

The arrest of armed Miyetti Allah operatives in Kwara State is not merely another scandal. It is a warning flare.

Nigeria now stands at a crossroad: continue mainstreaming terrorism through appeasement and ethnic favoritism, or reclaim the basic function of the state, protecting citizens without fear or favor.

The world is watching. And increasingly, it is acting.

Whether Nigeria chooses reform or further collapse will determine not just its security future, but its standing among nations that still believe terrorism must be confronted, not accommodated.

…Steven Kefas is an investigative journalist, Senior Research Analyst at the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, and Publisher of Middle Belt Times. He has documented religious persecution, terrorism and forced displacement in Nigeria’s Middle Belt for over a decade.

WHY ARE THEY SO SCARED AT THE MENTION OF MIDDLE BELT?

By Col Gora Albehu Dauda Rtd
13 December 2025

They are feigning ignorance about the Middle Belt geographical space of Nigeria. Of course they know the Middle Belt, their pretences not withstanding. If they do not know where the Middle Belt is, then why are they always in a state of palpable fear at the very mention of the Middle Belt. One thing is very clear, the Middle Belt of Nigeria has existed in time and space and they know this to be true. The pretences aside, and their contrived blindness aside, WE shall help them register the Middle Belt of Nigeria in their brains.

The Social media space in the North of Nigeria has had to accommodate huge volume in of traffic on the subject matter of the Middle Belt. What is responsible for this state of affairs? The reason(s) cannot be too far fetched as it has to do with the potential unraveling of the old North into its component parts that were compelled into an unequal union by the Fulani settlers who the British colonialists helped to take over many of our lands. How can they now say they do not know where the Middle Belt is? Do they not understand that what was then called the Northern Region was more than 60 percent of Middle Belt territory?

How could they have forgotten so soon in the day about a Tiv man and one of the fighters for Nigeria’s independence Joseph S Tarka and whose main preocupation was to secure the independence of the geographical Middle Belt on the platform of the United Middle Belt Congress? Have they also forgotten that the Fulani settler political party NPC fought with all its might and strengthened by British colonial interest made sure that the agitation by JS Tarka for the creation politically of a Middle Belt was defeated?

They may have forgotten that there is a subject called History. We remind them that History lives. Surely they will remember the Tiv riots or have they forgotten that too? If they remember, they will do well to also remember the reasons and or background to the riots. If they are able to recall the History very well, then they cannot but remember that the Middle Belt which they are now conveniently denying is alive and well. Ordinarily, responding to their denial would not have been necessary but because the records have to be updated and preserved, it became imperative to tell them to their faces that the Middle Belt is here to stay.

Through time, it was convenient for them to harvest our numbers as Middle Belters during all of the many fraudulent head counts of the past to find the strength they needed but only to disregard the very fact that the Middle Belt was deserving of the goodies and wealth the Northern Region of that time produced. They promoted their faith whilst also preventing the spread of other faiths, particularly the Christian faith. They have deployed all the means at their disposal to not only undermine or hinder the spread of Christian values, they have sought to acknowledge that there are Christian in the behemoth North.

Not surprising at all, because they have conveniently forgotten that it was largely Middle Belters who answered Gen Gowon’s wartime call “To keep Nigeria One is a Task that Must be Done” of the Nigeria Civil War years. Sadly after the victory, elements from the feudal regime pulled the carpets from under the feet of those who won the victory and now, they cannot tell on the map of Nigetia where the Middle Belt is located. They can continue living in denial for all we care but the reality of the Middle Belt will come upon them much like a thief in the dead of night.

The truth remains that their elite know for a fact the place as well as relevance of the Middle Belt in the Nigerian equation and by extension that of Nigeria as a country . Those ranting the denial of the Middle Belt are inconsequential and blind as bats but the scales will soon be falling from their unclean eyes. Because of the dictum that “Impossible is Nothing”, I thought that they should have been redying themselves for the reality that will in due time dawn on them. Some of the reasons they are so scared of what is to come to pass shortly includes the loss of votes, lands, cheap revenues they have been enjoying to sponsor terrorists, bandits as well as jihadists. Put in another way, they will no longer have others doing their dirty jobs. They are better adviced to face up to the imminent changes on the way. To God Be The Glory

Archaeology of a Reflex (II)

By Ahmed Yahaya Joe

“Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.” – Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955

What subtlety in statesmanship can President Bola Tinubu grasp from the recent detente between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani?
The American president’s “exceedingly warm reception” of the Mayor-elect of New York at the Oval Office was quite surprising even for close watchers as the duo have hitherto had a very vexatious relationship that even descended to constant name-calling and frequent taking swipes at each other. Despite the lack of parity between Tinubu and Trump as commanders in chief as Mao reminds us “Politics is warfare without bloodshed,” against the background of Clausewitz’s “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” If so, “The target of your strategy should be less the army you face than the mind of the man or woman who runs it.” – p.165 33 Strategies of War (2006) by Robert Greene

Little wonder, Ms. Onubogu entitled her November 21 presentation to the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, “A Serious, Well-founded Wake-up Call” – a rapprochement that should collectively jolt us to recover the pan-Nigerian story. More so, President Tinubu, as she had prior highlighted Nigeria’s unnecessarily longstanding ambassadorial vacuum in Washington DC, a huge challenge in bilateral relations albeit the recent better late than never foreign service nominations.

Interestingly, the Wikipedia page of our “master strategist” states that he got admitted into Chicago State University in 1975. This was when Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) was still in office as the 56th Secretary of State during which he famously enunciated “Diplomacy is the art of restraining power,” adding that “when statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk.”
How could Asiwaju’s handlers whilst formulating the “Renewed Hope agenda” have missed that Kissinger in his 1994 912-page book simply entitled Diplomacy, states that “Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy”?
Again, if so, why are Nigerians getting so worked up over President Trump’s sabre rattling when, as we have already encountered in Part I, how Nigeria deftly outflanked an entrenched Italian position during the late 1960s?

The “12 disciples of Nigeria” were the pacesetting career diplomats who formed the nucleus of Nigeria’s foreign service ahead of national independence. These pioneers were recruited and trained by the British purely based on merit after rigorous vetting, a series of qualifying examinations, and extensive interviews that took place in Lagos and London in 1957.
They were as follows in alphabetical order of surnames: Phillip Asiodu, Chike Chukwura, John Garba, Adedokun Haastrup, Leslie Harriman, Chukwuemeka Ifeagwu, Dickson Igwe, Omotayo Ogunsulire, Olumide Omololu, Aminu Sanusi, John Ukegbu and Soji Williams.

Hear the Igbobi oldboy in his own words on that select group;
“We came from all parts of the federation with vastly varying degrees of years in the public service, and also a variety of academic backgrounds. All of us were put through the same furnace of training and were expected to emerge at the end of the conveyor belt as accomplished diplomats (and without any attempt at self-adulation), I could assert that by the time of our independence three years later, we were more or less reduced to a common level of awareness. We had brought to our new vocation, different ideas of what it meant to us, and what were our obligations, towards it. – pp.371-372

After the demise of Ambassador Omotayo Ogunsulire (1930-2023) leaves Chief Phillip Asiodu b.1934 as the last surviving of those magnificent men. Then there was Ambassador Aminu Sanusi (father of Khalifa Muhammadu Sanusi II), the only other Northerner apart from Old Grammarian Garba in that distinguished seemingly pan-Nigerian line-up regardless.

Arguably, no proudly Nigerian icon abroad is as symbolic as the Nigeria House along Second Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York. Built and commissioned in 1992 at a reported cost $32 million the 22-storey skyscraper wrapped in green reflective class was designed under the watch of President Shehu Shagari in 1982 by the now rested Kano architectural firm, Ella Waziri & Associates but delivered by the Lagos multinational outfit, AIM Consultants.
It remains mindboggling that such a massive investment in the financial capital of the US with over 90,000 square feet of letable space would not have since 2023 the compliment of hosting any Permanent Representative from Nigeria at the United Nations headquarters just next block on First Avenue. Unfortunately;

“The Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation has advised that since the New York edifice is strategically located, deteriorating and underutilized, it should as a matter of urgency, be comprehensively rehabilitated before it constitutes an embarrassment to Nigeria.” – Nation newspaper edition of September 5, 2022

Apparently, Ambassador Garba and Ms. Onubogu are not the only Nigerians at a precarious junction of inter-communal existence. Hear the 81-year-old ace columnist, Debo Sobowale, who puts it that;

“Irrespective of who is making the one-sided narrative regarding religious conflict in Nigeria, people like me feel cold. In the storm of national controversies ignited by President Trump’s threat to invade Nigeria, I am one of a very tiny minority of Nigerians caught in all the crossfire – whether religious, political, ethnic or just mischievous.
On my father’s side in Lagos, Christians constitute about 85 per cent of the people I serve as Head of Family. By a twist of fate, it is the same side of the family which, has linked me/us to the North. My paternal grandmother – Aisha — was a Fulani born and raised in Shinkafi, Zamfara State.
My grandfather was a Muslim and an Imam. His vault is still in our family house at Agbowa-Ikosi. My father, his only surviving son, was forced to convert to Christianity when he was dragged off to war in Europe. That was how generations of Sobowales became Christians. Muslims are in the overwhelming majority in my mother’s side of Lagos Island. My grandmother, also a rebel, married a Christian and had only one daughter, who also married a Christian. I was brought up as a Christian. But, my wife was the daughter of a chief imam in Lagos Island.”
– Vanguard newspaper edition of November 16, 2025

Now a final word on Ambassador Garba’s parental background in his own words but not before some more on his extraction. This writer believes such to be salient as we are all members of an increasingly cosmopolitan village in Nigeria. While how Nigerians would wrestle the behemoth of “politicization of religion” to the ground and exorcize the demon of the “religionization of politics,” is mainly left to us it is not entirely to the 47th President of the United States or the 119th Congress on Capitol Hill.
As Nigerians, we must endeavour to remain vigorously tolerant, positively optimistic, and overly inclusive in our national project lest we take that a tortuous road to Sudan. Unfortunately, Ambassador Garba’s book reprinted in 1998 is again out of print again. Sadly, many Nigerians have not benefitted from his vicissitudes;

“My people were originally Kanuri who lived in some unspecified part of the present-day Borno State. Owing to untoward circumstances, there was a large exodus a long time ago, which included members of my family. They moved westward until they reached Katsina. When my people reached Katsina, they were not allowed to settle within the city walls, being foreigners, but had to camp some distance outside it.
They eked out an existence through pursuits peculiar to rural dwellers, namely hunting and farming. My ancestors became great hunters, and it is a well-known fact in the Hausa social arrangement of earlier days, the hunting class formed the backbone of the army whenever there was war; and there were quite a few of these.

My people, being as renowned great hunters were invited from time to time by Sarkin Katsina to help him in his various wars against his numerous enemies, which ranged along all the four cardinal points of the compass. Having proven their prowess on the battlefield in the various campaigns over the years, Sarkin Katsina, on an occasion, in recognition of his appreciation and as a mark of gratitude, invited the elders among my people to nominate a leader who would be titled.
According to family legend, the title of Kauran Katsina (Chief Warrior of Katsina) was bestowed on our chosen leader, and this title was held by us until shortly after the Jihad of Shehu Usumanu dan Fodio.

Later on, Sokoto had appointed a Pullo (Fulani) Sarkin Katsina whose appointment had been rejected by a section of the Katsina community, including our own faction. Instead, we had appointed a rival Kado (Hausa). We rose in revolt but were worsted by the Fulani in the encounter by the Fulani and their supporters.
Our people had to flee westwards, once again and took refuge in places (in today’s Niger Republic) such as Damagaram, Tasawa, and Maradi. It is significant that the Chief (Emir) of Maradi, even today, which is a little short of two hundred years after the departure from Katsina, continues to style himself Sarkin Katsina, while the erstwhile French colonial rulers refer to Maradi as Katsina.” -pp. 1-2

In conclusion;

“My father (born in Gazawa near Maradi) spoke Hausa, Kanuri, Fulfulde, Shuwa-Arabic, and Sara-Kabam fluently. But this resourceful man had also taught himself English sufficiently as to bear the title of ‘Tafinta’ (Interpreter) at the Provincial Office, Nassarawa, Kano, between the years 1929-1930, and with the UAC at Gusau, from 1930 to 1934.
He had no formal education but never missed the opportunity to learn, to which I had contributed in no small measure. In the early years in Maiduguri, his Kanuri companions called him Garba Jibdama (Garba of the Jibda, or civet cat). Later in life, when he had risen to be foreman and lining-sinker in the well sinking section of the Geological Department, they called him Garba Baramma (Garba of the Wells).

He addressed himself as Mallam Garba Katsina throughout his life. Only after he had gone to the Hajj in 1960 did he change his name to Alhaji Garba Muhammadu, assuming his father’s name.
From 1939 to 1943, he worked for the Kano Local Authority, sinking wells mainly in the Hadejia, Gumel, and Kazaure emirates.
He retired in 1944 but continued to live in Kano City. During the years that he had been in and out of Kano, he had lived at Yakasai, Dan-Agundi, Gwangwazo, Tudun-Wazirci, and finally back to Kofar Dan-Agundi ward where he lived his last days on earth.
Here, he died on 13th March 1972, at the age of about eighty-seven years. My mother had left my father when I was about six years old. There was never a formal divorce. Before I was born, my father had married Fatu, a Fulani from the same Geidam where he had married my mother.” – pp 13-14

Concluded.

Archaeology of a Reflex (I)

By Ahmed Yahaya Joe

“Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.” – Georg Hegel (1770-1831)

What is the moral for Nigeria from the Sudanese conundrum?
The question is pertinent because neither Sudan nor Sudan Sudan have known sustainable peace, significant progress, or any meaningful development ever since those nations parted ways in 2011;

“With its people deeply divided along ethno-geographic and religious fault lines, under a tense socio-political atmosphere arising from heightened insecurity, the situation in Nigeria today reads like a tragic plot from the Sudanese playbook. Like Nigeria, Sudan was a British colonial creation, in which the colonials lumped ethnic and religiously diverse peoples together in a self-serving scheme of nation-building experimentation. Nigeria, like Sudan, is almost evenly split into predominately Muslim North and Christian South.”
– Nigeria: On the Road to Sudan by Majeed Dahiru posted 5/28/2021

Yet, here we are in a protracted battle for the soul of our nation, of which according to Ignatius Kaigama, Prelate of Abuja, “God has nothing to do with it.” It has always been about power and control he opines on the recurrent strife bedevilling the presumptive capital of the Middle Belt, “No crisis in Jos is religious. The real issue is the competition for who owns Jos.”
The insight of then Archbishop of Jos and more are contained in the 2016 book by Tom Burgis entitled The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers, and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth pp.175-187

Using Jos as a microcosm for Nigeria, irrespective of our polarized opinions on the “Christian genocide” thesis and the “religion is not the key driver in the attacks” antithesis, it is noteworthy that one of ours, senior fellow & Africa program director, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Oge Onubogu presented what Hegel describes as “sublation” – a synthesis.
In her must-watch presentation to the Africa Subcommittee of the US House of Representatives, Ms. Onubogu carefully reconciled the truths in the thesis with the shortcomings of the antithesis by transcending the limitations in both entrenched positions asserting;
“In Nigeria today, ethnicity, religion and language – not nationality – remain the benchmarks for identity for the country’s highly diverse population.”

While she warned against reducing the prevailing thesis to “a single story” she nonetheless admitted that the antithesis is laced with “religious extremism,” but she still deliberately glossed over the virulent marginalization and systematic oppression by Muslims against non-Muslims and vice versa as the case may be.
Overtly her testimony was a conciliatory beacon for a way forward. It is still however afflicted the selective amnesia on how the fallout of Muslim-Muslim rhetoric of 2023 had deepened the political fault lines still reverberating to date.
Regardless, every discerning Nigerian knows that the root cause of the very challenged inter-communal relations in our nation is variously the “politicization of religion,” and “religionization of politics,” across the board.
Here, The Manipulation of Religion in Nigeria Today: Its Social and Political Basis, published in New Nigerian newspaper edition of 13th- 14th January, 1978 by Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman remains instructive after 47 years and still counting.

Ms. Onubugo was probably not even born when, in the mid-1960s – twenty years prior to the heated Organization of Islamic Controversy (OIC) controversy of 1986 under General Ibrahim Babangida, when religion was on the front burner.
But she grew up “In Jos, Plateau State, an area that has been plagued by ethno-religious violence. Her upbringing in this complex environment profoundly shaped her understanding of conflict dynamics. Growing up in Jos during periods of recurring violence gave young Oge a front-row seat to the devastating impact of governance failures on ordinary communities.”

In looking back, the must-read memoirs of John Mamman Garba (1918-1989) entitled The Time Has Come: Reminiscences and Reflections of a Nigerian Pioneer Diplomat (1989) is collector’s item for us particularly for us in the present-day.
A book full of painstaking details drawn from his personal diaries spanning nearly a 60-year period is included a minutiae of when then military governor of the Eastern regional government in 1967 wrote the Italian Prime Minister and the Vatican City horrendously claiming that;

“Weapons and planes manufactured by Catholic Italy, were being sent to Muslim Northern Nigeria to be used in killing the Catholic Ibos of Eastern Nigeria….
In the beginning, a good number of Italians had been led to believe that the conflict between the federal government and Colonel Ojukwu was based on religious differences.” – pp. 291-293

As the babel of voices on “Christian genocide” continue to divisively rage in our polity the need to reflect upon Churchill’s maxim of “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see” cannot be overemphasized particularly with a man in the middle of sorts who introducing his recollections writes;
“Dedicated to my grandfather, Muhammadu Sarkin Hako, who died at Maisandari on the outskirts of Maiduguri town in July 1931, and had vowed, I would never attend the Whiteman’s school while he lived.”

Ambassador Garba then goes on to give a glimpse on how the worst fears of Sarkin Hako were processed in the overall context;

“My father did not receive the news of my having embraced Christianity in good spirit. This was as expected. When he and his friend, retired Regimental Sergeant Major Sule Gumsuri took me along to the Church Missionary Society (CMS) bookshop school at Kano in 1926, such an eventuality of turning a Christian had never crossed their minds even for a moment.
They were then solely preoccupied with the thought of placing me in an institution that would prepare me for a better place than they themselves had had the privilege of attaining in our society.
No more, no less.
There was a serious rift between me and the family, or rather my father, for some years after my conversion. But neither of us wanted to see this as the permanent parting of ways. My father eventually accepted the situation as ‘Kaddara’ (fate, already predetermined by God).
He did not die until forty years after I had been baptized into Christianity, and he, as well as my mother, two brothers and one sister, and all their children and grand-children were and have remained today, professed Muslims.” – pp. 384-385

This writer encounters in Garba and Onubogu (even Kaigama) not only unique perspectives but what Bernard-Henri Levy describes as the “archaeology of reflex” which in the trio is neither “an immutable automatism,” nor “immune to learning,” in the Nigerian project as that French public intellectual puts it in 2021 book entitled The Will To See: Dispatches From A World of Misery and Hope.
Outstanding is how Ambassador Garba was able to reclaim the Nigerian story in Italy and Vatican City. This hugely contrasts present-day diplomatic vacuum during the gestation period of the “Christian genocide” more so that quite recently Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy has become the second G7 leader to internationally subscribe to that thesis as Mallam Garba goes on in retrospect;

“The Italians were made to believe that Colonel Ojukwu’s succession attempt and declaration of total war on his fatherland represented the manifestation of the determination of ‘the very progressive, intelligent, Westernized and hardworking Roman Catholic Ibos to live their own existence in peace and prosperity, free from domination and annihilation by the backward Hausa/Fulani Moslems of the North.’” – p.293

Ambassador Garba, a scion of al-Barnawi and al-Kashinawi, “that is a Bornoan and also a Bakatsine, at one and the same time,” not unlike Abu Abdullahi b. Masanih b. Nuh also known as Dan Masani (1595-1667), further puts it;

“As part of the counter for the expressed suspicion that the civil war had a religious undertone, the federal government decided to send to Rome from time to time some leading members of our government who were of the Catholic congregation so that these highly-placed persons could speak to the Holy Father as one Catholic adherent to his Pontiff.
Amongst those who came to Rome for this purpose may be mentioned Louis Orok Edet, first Nigerian inspector-general of police; Federal Commissioner Joseph Serwuan Tarka; Federal Commissioner Anthony K. Enahoro; Admiral Joseph E. Akinwale Wey; and the military padre, Monsignor Colonel Pedro Martins.
As I had the duty of arranging the audiences for these senior representatives of our government with the Holy Father, I had opened a corridor of communication with the Vatican. I found the Papal Secretary of State – the Pope’s prime minister, as it were – Cardinal Amleto Cicognani, a man of friendly disposition and charming personality.” – p.294

The veteran diplomat whose fluency in Latin eased Nigeria’s access in the Vatican kick-started the acquisition after a 21-day trek from Maiduguri to Kano. He then attended middle school in Zaria before proceeding to CMS Grammar School Lagos, where he picked Greek. He was eventually admitted into Igbobi College, where he fine-tuned his French and bagged the Latin prize sitting for his Senior Cambridge in 1934 but not before attending the World Scout Jamboree in the United Kingdom in 1929.
After an extensive training and brief working career in the British colonial agricultural value chain, he proceeded to the London School of Economics, graduating in 1950.
Ambassador Garba rose to the position of Executive Director at the World Bank in 1963 when Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was still in primary school, a good 44 years before she became Managing Director there in 2007.
Ambassador Garba became Nigeria’s envoy to Italy with accreditation to Vatican City, Spain, Greece and Cyprus in succession eventually the United States in 1972 from where he eventually retired from public service in 1975 living out the rest of his idyllic days in quiet contemplation in Kano.

Ambassador Garba’s tour of duty based in the “Eternal City” between 1966 and 1970 was peculiarly challenged against the background that;

“Immediately after the military incidence of July 29, 1966, Colonel Ojukwu’s agents had launched an extensive propaganda campaign in Italy as they did in other places. Because of the understandable sensitivity of the Italians to religious matters, this wicked and erroneous interpretation of our crisis was accepted even in some responsible circles. The rebel camp had certain advantages in this regard in Italy.
As the late Dr. Nabo Graham-Douglas, onetime Attorney-General of the Eastern Region, and later of the federation as a whole, had pointed out in his well-written pamphlet: Ojukwu’s Rebellion and World Opinion, the intention of the Catholic church was to constitute the Eastern Region into a Catholic state.” – p.293

While this writer has not been able to actually go through any copy of the erstwhile Biafra insider’s 1968 publication to independently verify the details on the reported clamour for a faith-based breakaway entity from Nigeria, the following under the title Clandestine Role of Religious Bodies in the Nigerian Civil War 1967-1970, beggars the question: if history is apparently repeating itself currently?

“In a bid to attract sympathy and support of the international community, the Biafran government hired Markpress, a Geneva-based public relations firm. The public relations firm constantly used genocide and religion as its propaganda themes.” – pp. 78-85 American Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research (AJHSSR) Vol. 3, Issue 12, 2019

It, therefore, remains to be seen if there are any lessons for the recent ambassadorial nominees of President Tinubu from Ambassador Garba’s capacity and cognition.
One thing fundamentally remains;
“There was once a country.”- Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)

Continued in Part II

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.

They paid for it; give them their certificates!

By Shalom Kasim

I am deeply concerned about the recent decision to suspend the evaluation and accreditation of degree certificates from Benin Republic and Togo. While the government’s response is rooted in addressing certificate racketeering, we must consider the human angle of this situation.

The investigative report sheds light on a complex issue, revealing the existence of a certificate racketeering syndicate. However, the decision to suspend accreditation without a thorough examination of the circumstances surrounding each certificate undermines the educational pursuits of countless genuine students who earned their degrees legitimately.

It is crucial to acknowledge that not all degrees from these countries are tainted by fraudulent activities. Suspending the evaluation of all certificates casts a shadow of doubt on the entire academic community of Benin Republic and Togo, impacting innocent graduates who have worked diligently to obtain their qualifications.

Furthermore, the collateral damage extends to Nigerians who pursued education in these countries in good faith. Many students choose international institutions for various reasons, seeking diverse educational experiences and opportunities. The blanket suspension risks penalizing these students unfairly.

Instead of a sweeping suspension, a more targeted and nuanced approach should be adopted. Investigative efforts should focus on identifying and penalizing those responsible for the racketeering, rather than punishing an entire academic system. Collaborative efforts between the involved countries, educational institutions, and regulatory bodies can ensure a fair and just resolution.

The decision to involve multiple ministries, security agencies, and internal administrative processes may prolong the resolution, causing unnecessary delays for genuine graduates awaiting accreditation for employment or further studies.

In addressing the issue of degree mills, it is essential to differentiate between reputable institutions and those engaging in fraudulent activities. The global problem of diploma mills requires a coordinated effort, but caution must be exercised to protect the interests of legitimate students and educational institutions.

While the government’s intention to curb certificate racketeering is commendable, the suspension of degree accreditation should be approached with a balanced and targeted strategy. Failing to do so risks harming the futures of countless deserving individuals who pursued their education in good faith.

Someone reminded me the Minister of Education is a professor. I said, “yes, yes.”.

Kasim is public affairs commentator, a poet and a journalist. He writes from Wukari, Taraba State, Middle Belt Nigeria