For yet another year, Nigeria has been named the most dangerous country in the world for Christians, according to the 2025 Global Persecution Index. The numbers tell a truly horrifying story. Over the past two decades, at least 50,000 Christians have been murdered in Nigeria. Hundreds of thousands more have been displaced, forced to flee their homes as villages are set ablaze, churches are ransacked, and entire communities are wiped off the map. The persecution is not sporadic, nor is it random.
The real question is whether the world will finally acknowledge the pogrom before it’s too late.
It is targeted, systematic, and worsening. And yet, the world remains silent.
Nigeria’s Christian population, particularly in the northern and central regions, faces an unrelenting campaign of terror. The perpetrators operate under various banners — Boko Haram, the Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP), and, perhaps most alarmingly, Fulani herdsmen extremists, whose role in the bloodshed has been grotesquely downplayed by the international community.
Traditionally nomadic cattle farmers, Fulani herdsmen have become one of the most lethal forces of Christian persecution in the world. Heavily armed and well-coordinated, they conduct attacks with military precision. They strike at night, torching homes while families sleep. They ambush churches during Sunday services, gunning down entire congregations. They raid Christian farming villages, slaughtering men, raping women, and abducting children. These are coordinated acts of ethnic and religious cleansing.
To compound matters, the Nigerian government, whether through negligence or outright complicity, allows these atrocities to continue. Security forces routinely arrive too late — if they arrive at all. Survivors have reported instances where police and military personnel simply watched as Fulani extremists carried out massacres. In some cases, Christian communities that tried to defend themselves were disarmed by authorities, leaving them even more vulnerable. Arrests are rare. Convictions are virtually nonexistent.
President Bola Tinubu continues the same pattern as his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari: anemic condemnations, vague promises, and no real action. In some cases, officials even downplay the violence, dismissing it as a “farmer-herder conflict” driven by climate change. A convenient narrative if there ever was one, absolving the government of responsibility and erasing the religious nature of the attacks.
But this has little, if anything, to do with land disputes. The overwhelming majority of these attacks target Christian communities, while Muslim-majority areas remain largely untouched. The violence is rooted in ideology. It is genocidal and never-ending.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, Western governments and international organizations continue to look the other way. In 2021, under Joe Biden, Nigeria was removed from the U.S. State Department’s list of “Countries of Particular Concern,” even as the massacres intensified. Mainstream media barely covers the crisis, treating it as a regional dispute rather than what it is: one of the worst religious persecutions of the modern era.
The United Nations issues occasional statements, but no real intervention follows. The Vatican expresses “concern,” yet Christian communities continue to be slaughtered. The world has chosen to abandon Nigeria’s Christians, either out of political cowardice or willful blindness.
Why?
Nigeria’s Strategic Importance Throttles Action
I suggest that it’s because Nigeria is too important geopolitically. It is Africa’s most populous nation, a major oil exporter, and a key player in Western counterterrorism efforts (somewhat ironically). Acknowledging the full scale of Christian persecution would necessitate action — military pressure, economic sanctions, and diplomatic consequences. Instead, world leaders choose silence, allowing the slow-motion extinction to continue unchecked.
The crisis in Nigeria must be viewed through a broader lens. Christian persecution is spreading across Africa at an alarming rate. The same forces at work in Nigeria — radical Islamism, weak governance, and Western indifference — are fueling similar atrocities in other nations.
In Burkina Faso, for instance, jihadist groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS have declared war on Christians, shutting down churches and forcing thousands to flee. Priests and pastors are frequent targets, kidnapped and executed for refusing to renounce their faith. Entire Christian villages have been destroyed, with survivors forced to convert or be killed. In Mozambique, Islamic militants known as al-Shabaab have seized entire regions, beheading Christians and burning churches to the ground. Towns that were once Christian strongholds have been hollowed out, their populations either massacred or living in hiding.
Sixteen hundred miles away, in Ethiopia, long regarded as a Christian haven, religious violence has escalated. Orthodox Christian churches have been burned down, and clergy members have been killed by radical factions aiming to establish an Islamic state. In Somalia, al-Shabaab enforces one of the most brutal campaigns of Christian persecution in the world. Any Somali suspected of converting to Christianity faces immediate execution.
Things are so bad in Africa that even Kenya — where Christianity dominates — has become a hunting ground. Al-Shabaab militants routinely cross the Somali border, seeking out Christian communities to massacre. They have executed believers en masse, forcing them off buses, separating them from Muslim passengers, and gunning them down in the streets.
Unless serious steps are taken, much of Africa’s Christian population will be either wiped out or forced to flee within a generation. The question isn’t whether Christian persecution in Africa will worsen; that’s a given. The real question is whether the world will finally acknowledge the pogrom before it’s too late.
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