President Bola Tinubu and President Donald Trump

The US designation should serve neither as vindication nor verdict, but as a stark wake-up call – not just for the Nigerian government, but for all Nigerians. It underscores what many have known but prefer not to confront: We are failing as a nation, and the world is watching… Peace in Nigeria will not be granted by international pressure or government decree. It must be earned, painstakingly, at every level of society. This demands several uncomfortable reckonings.

Last Friday, the Trump administration returned Nigeria to its list of “Countries of Particular Concern” for religious freedom violations, asserting that Christians face systematic persecution amounting to an ongoing genocide in the country. The designation has reverberated through diplomatic channels and ignited fresh debates about the nature of violence in Africa’s most populous nation. Yet, for all its moral urgency, this framing risks a dangerous oversimplification of a conflict where nothing – absolutely nothing – is straightforward.

To view Nigeria’s cascade of violence through a purely religious lens is to fundamentally misunderstand its nature. The reality on the ground reveals a tangled web of historical grievances, economic desperation, climate-driven resource scarcity, political manipulation, and cyclical revenge that defies the tidy categories of international human rights discourse.

---

The Complexity Beneath the Headlines

The central fact often obscured in Western reporting deserves emphasis: these attacks, frequently perpetrated by individuals identified as Muslims, claim both Muslim and Christian victims in devastating numbers. This alone fractures the simplistic “religious war” narrative that plays well in soundbites but crumbles under scrutiny.

Targeted sectarian violence by Christians against fellow Christians remains exceptionally rare. When it occurs, it typically emerges within sporadic communal clashes, rather than systematic campaigns. Conversely, attacks by Christians against Muslims, while undeniably vicious when they erupt, usually arise in contexts of extreme communal strife or as retaliatory strikes in an endless cycle of vengeance.

The violence attributed to Fulani herders – predominantly Muslim or claiming Muslim identity – presents an equally complex picture. These attacks, devastating in their brutality, cannot be reduced to religious zealotry. They are rooted in a generations-old conflict over land tenure, water access, and grazing routes that has intensified dramatically as desertification pushes pastoralists southward into farming communities. Climate change has weaponised geography itself.

This is not a matter of comparing apples and oranges, nor of false equivalence. It is about recognising that the intricacies of mutual destruction in flashpoint regions like Plateau, Benue, Kaduna, and Southern Kaduna are deeply historical. They are underlined by political marginalisation dating to colonial administrative divisions, economic envy born of uneven development, ethnic competition for local political power, and hatred that has been carefully cultivated by entrepreneurs of violence for decades.

Historical Roots: How We Got Here

To understand Nigeria’s present agony requires looking backward. The amalgamation of 1914 yoked together disparate peoples with distinct histories, creating artificial proximities that neither colonialism nor independence adequately addressed. The North-South divide, never merely geographic or religious, reflected fundamentally different experiences of colonial rule and routes to modernity.

Post-independence politics transformed these differences into weapons. Military coups, civil war, and successive governments that governed through patronage rather than policy, deepened regional suspicions. The discovery of oil shifted Nigeria’s economic centre of gravity southward, creating resentment in northern regions that once dominated national politics but found themselves increasingly marginalised economically.

The return to civilian rule in 1999 brought democracy but also unleashed identity politics with renewed vigour. Governors discovered that ethnoreligious mobilisation could win elections and distract from failures of governance. The introduction of Sharia law in twelve northern states between 1999 and 2002 was as much political theatre as religious conviction, yet it hardened Christian-Muslim fault lines.

Meanwhile, environmental degradation accelerated. Lake Chad, which once sustained millions, has shrunk by ninety per cent since the 1960s. Desertification advanced. Fulani pastoralists, following ancient migration routes, increasingly clashed with farming communities over land that could no longer support both. What began as resource competition metastasised into ethnic and religious conflict, as politicians and local elites instrumentalised these clashes for political advantage.

The Boko Haram insurgency, erupting in 2009, further poisoned the well. While its ideology is explicitly jihadist, its roots lie in the failure of governance, mass youth unemployment, and the northern elite’s abandonment of its own people. Boko Haram’s terror has claimed more Muslim than Christian lives, yet it provided a convenient frame for viewing all northern violence as religious extremism.

A Problem That Has Evolved Beyond Its Origins

Today, the dimensions of Nigeria’s security crisis are no longer reducible to any simple binary: Not farmer versus herder, not Christian versus Muslim, not North versus South. The violence has metastasised, developing its own terrible logic and self-sustaining momentum.

More fundamentally, framing the crisis primarily as Christian persecution, while capturing a real dimension of the suffering, obscures the broader landscape of violence that claims Nigerian lives across all religious identities. Muslims in the North-East, caught between Boko Haram and the military, have endured unconscionable violence. Fulani communities have been massacred in reprisal attacks. The dead do not fit neatly into the categories of international human rights campaigns.

Criminality has merged with communal conflict. Kidnapping for ransom has become an industry, with armed groups operating across religious and ethnic lines, united only by the profit motive. Political elites at local and state levels have been credibly accused of sponsoring militia groups to intimidate rivals and manipulate electoral outcomes. The proliferation of small arms, flowing from Libya and Chad through porous borders, has militarised disputes that previous generations settled through dialogue or traditional mediation.

In this landscape of overlapping violence, attribution becomes nearly impossible. When a farming community is attacked, is it religious persecution, resource conflict, criminal enterprise, political intimidation, or revenge for an earlier attack? Often it is some lethal combination of all these factors. The perpetrators themselves may not distinguish clearly between motivations.

This complexity makes the violence profoundly difficult to solve through conventional counterinsurgency or interfaith dialogue alone. Security forces, themselves often divided along ethnic and religious lines, struggle with legitimacy and capacity. Traditional conflict resolution mechanisms, once effective at the village level, cannot cope with violence operating at this scale and intensity.

In this environment of mutual recrimination, everyone can make a claim to victimhood, and everyone does. Christians point to the statistics of destroyed churches and killed priests. Muslims counter with their own accounting of the mosques burned and communities displaced. Middle Belt ethnic minorities catalogue generations of marginalisation. Fulani herders enumerate attacks on their communities and cattle.

When we recount the dead merely to glorify our own pain and weaponise suffering for political advantage, we reveal the total erosion of compassion into which our national discourse has degenerated. This competitive victimhood, this grief-as-ammunition, only deepens the chasms between communities and ensures the violence continues.

The International Dimension: Trump’s Designation

The Trump administration’s decision to return Nigeria to the Countries of Particular Concern list reflects legitimate alarm at the scale of religious violence. International advocacy groups, particularly those focused on Christian persecution, have documented horrifying attacks and a disturbing pattern of impunity.

Yet, the designation, however well-intentioned, carries risks. It may harden the perception in Nigeria that this is fundamentally a religious conflict requiring religious solutions, when in fact the drivers are far more complex. It could embolden religious entrepreneurs who benefit from polarisation. It might push the Nigerian government toward defensive posturing, rather than genuine reform.

More fundamentally, framing the crisis primarily as Christian persecution, while capturing a real dimension of the suffering, obscures the broader landscape of violence that claims Nigerian lives across all religious identities. Muslims in the North-East, caught between Boko Haram and the military, have endured unconscionable violence. Fulani communities have been massacred in reprisal attacks. The dead do not fit neatly into the categories of international human rights campaigns.

This is not to dismiss the very real targeting of Christians or to engage in what-aboutism. It is to insist that sustainable peace requires understanding the full complexity of the conflict ecosystem. Band-aid interventions that address symptoms, while ignoring root causes will fail, as they have failed repeatedly.

The Path Forward: Earning Peace

The US designation should serve neither as vindication nor verdict, but as a stark wake-up call – not just for the Nigerian government, but for all Nigerians. It underscores what many have known but prefer not to confront: We are failing as a nation, and the world is watching.

Peace in Nigeria will not be granted by international pressure or government decree. It must be earned, painstakingly, at every level of society. This demands several uncomfortable reckonings.

First, we must reject simplistic narratives. The easy story of religious persecution, whether told by Christian advocacy groups or Muslim apologists, serves political agendas but obscures the truth. The reality is messy, multi-causal, and it implicates actors across all divides. Until we can hold this complexity without retreating to comfortable tribal certainties, we cannot address it.

…this work begins with individuals. Peace must be earned in our own hearts before it can be built in our communities. It requires each of us to reject the narratives of dehumanisation, to refuse to be recruited into cycles of revenge, to insist on seeing the full humanity of those cast as enemies. This is not naïve idealism; it is the hardest, most necessary work.

Second, we must address root causes systematically. This means genuine land reform and the codification of grazing routes. It means climate adaptation strategies for communities facing desertification. It means economic development that creates alternatives to violence for unemployed youth. It means reforming the security forces to ensure professionalism and accountability. It means restructuring governance to reduce a winner-take-all politics that incentivises identity mobilisation.

Third, we must rebuild justice and accountability. Impunity has become the norm. Perpetrators of massacres walk about freely. Politicians who incite violence face no consequences. This breakdown of accountability feeds the cycle of revenge. Without justice, there can be no reconciliation.

Fourth, we must invest in genuine peacebuilding. Not the performative interfaith photo opportunities that dominate the news cycle, but sustained investment in conflict resolution mechanisms at the community level. This means supporting traditional institutions that historically managed disputes, while also creating new frameworks appropriate to contemporary challenges.

Fifth, we need leadership that tells hard truths. Leaders who mobilise along ethnic or religious lines for short-term political gain are arsonists dressed as firefighters. Instead, we need leaders willing to call out violence in their own communities, to reject the politics of victimhood, and to make the case for our shared fate as Nigerians.

Finally, this work begins with individuals. Peace must be earned in our own hearts before it can be built in our communities. It requires each of us to reject the narratives of dehumanisation, to refuse to be recruited into cycles of revenge, to insist on seeing the full humanity of those cast as enemies. This is not naïve idealism; it is the hardest, most necessary work.

Conclusion: The Long Road Ahead

Nigeria’s path to peace will be long, uncertain, and without shortcuts. The violence has roots too deep and branches too tangled for any single intervention to succeed. International attention and pressure have their place, but ultimately, Nigerians must do this work ourselves.

The Trump administration’s designation, whatever its limitations, confirms what we already know: The world sees our failure. The question is whether this moment of international scrutiny will catalyse genuine reform or merely harden defensive positions.

The choice belongs to us. We can continue down the road of mutual recrimination, competitive victimhood, and cycles of revenge that guarantee our collective destruction. Or we can summon the courage to confront uncomfortable truths, to acknowledge the complexity of our predicament, and to begin the patient work of rebuilding trust from the ground up.

There are no guarantees. The forces driving this violence are powerful, entrenched, and profitable for those who benefit from chaos. But the alternative – allowing our nation to fragment into warring enclaves, each nursing grievances and counting their dead – is unthinkable.

We must choose peace, knowing that it will cost us. It will cost us our comfortable narratives and righteous anger. It will cost us the political advantages of identity mobilisation. It will cost us the satisfaction of revenge. These are prices worth paying for the possibility that our children might inherit something better than the ruins we are creating.

May we find the wisdom to see clearly, the courage to act justly, and the compassion to heal. May we restore peace not through grand proclamations, but through countless small acts of courage in our hearts, our families, our communities, and ultimately our nation.

The long road to peace begins with a single step. It is time we took it.

Muazu Umaru writes from Abuja.