Why Violence in Nigeria Persists

An Unreported Atrocity

As Easter approaches, we feel a lump in our throat at the horrors in Gaza and the sickening executions in Syria. Yet the genocide we don’t hear enough about is in Nigeria, where 9 out of 10 Christians martyred each year end their earthly walk.

The current unreported atrocity in Nigeria’s Northcentral State of Kaduna is rampant kidnappings-for-ransom of hardworking Christian farmers by vicious Fulani ethnic militia breaking into their mudbrick homes at night.

TruthNigeria investigative reporters started interviewing famished and traumatised survivors of hostage camps on Feb. 24 in Kauru County and continued to find others in three rural counties of Southern Kaduna for 4 straight weeks, concluding that close to 1,000 victims had been force-marched into death camps in the vast forests that drape most of the Middle States.

Most heartbreaking is that the vast majority of these kidnappings were not reported at all by the authorities. And because the patriotic, hardworking reporters in Kaduna report only what the spokesmen announce to them at press conferences, if the spokesman didn’t announce it, it didn’t happen.

Our reporters rushed to dial up local Nigerian military spokesmen and police supervisors to get the dragnet going against the perps, only to find that authorities slammed down the phones as soon as they identified themselves as TruthNigeria.

Government Action or Inaction?

You might conclude that the authorities don’t aim to rescue hostages in the bush and to quash the large, radicalised bandit-terrorist gangs that infest Nigeria’s vast Northwestern forests. But you would be wrong.

The government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has launched air attacks and ground attacks against the bandits in majority-Muslim northwestern states for 18 months. More than 8,000 terrorists were killed, and approximately 11,000 suspects were arrested from January to December 2024.

In fact, on Feb 18, just one week prior to the ground-breaking story by TruthNigeria about the 200-person death camp in the Rijana forest 35 miles south of Kaduna City, the office of the Senior Security Advisor to the President, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, paraded 59 smartly dressed survivors of a kidnapping near Rijana and symbolically took a bow.

But neither was there a press kit to tell how and when the citizens had been kidnapped or how they were treated, nor was there explanation about how a kidnap torture camp could be collocated in a forest hosting several Nigerian military bases for infantry and artillery.

"Why hasn't the Nigerian Army freed the hostages in this bandit concentration camp just a few kilometres from a Nigerian Army base?,” asked the learned Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, founding president of Genocide Watch. More than a fair question! “What generals are accepting bribes? Has Nigeria become a failed state?" Stanton asked in a text to TruthNigeria.

Disinfo Dust

The fog of war weighs down the reporting task in any conflict, but the complex Nigerian conflict is buried under layers and layers of Disinfo Dust. Either that or the authorities refuse to talk about the myriad of murders of unarmed Christian farm families in the nation’s Middle Belt, also called “the Christian Belt.”

Disinfo Dust was thoroughly scattered at a March 12 hearing of Rep. Chris Smith’s Africa Subcommittee meeting on Capitol Hill. For years, the development economists testifying at these hearings insisted that the legions of Christian victims were simply chewed up by a resources war or else “inter-tribal conflict.” But Hudson Legal Scholar Nina Shea pierced the layers of dissimulation at the hearing:

“Observers on the ground assert that the Fulani militants are not attacking to graze cattle, as some maintain, but to take control of farms, villages and larger geographic areas and drive out the Christian residents from their ancestral lands,” Shea said. A recent UNHCR report states about survivors of Fulani attacks in hard-hit Benue State: "Nearly all the 3,790 registered residents of Ichwa (IDP) camp were small holder farmers [….] forced here by violent land grabs." A Benue Catholic priest told reporters: “It is all about seizing the lands and changing the demography of Benue State.”

Whereas previous panels of expert witnesses had been divided on whether the State Department should name and shame Nigeria with the label of “Country of Particular Concern,” on March 12 they were unanimous in making that recommendation. Somehow the dam had burst. It seemed the experts had decided to call out the denial of the oligarchs in Abuja and their paid lobbyists inside the Beltway.

Tough Love is needed.

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Douglas Burton

Managing Editor | TruthNigeria