By Azu Ishiekwene
Apart from tariffs, another word that the Trump presidency is fond of is genocide. First, it was South Africa. During South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s visit to the White House last May, President Donald Trump played a video suggesting that white South Africans were under genocidal attack. It was a fake video, of course, but Ramaphosa couldn’t convince Trump.
Instead of looking at Gaza, where the world has serious concerns about genocide, Trump’s fellow Republicans have now turned their attention to Nigeria, requesting Congress to call out the Nigerian government on charges of genocide against Christians.
It’s not just the calculated mischief that should cause Nigerians to worry; it’s the fact that the most prominent promoters of this deadly prank are non-Nigerians. Senator Ted Cruz, or former Mayor of Blanco, Texas, Mike Arnold, are not the first or second among a crop of doom-casters for whom the continued existence of this multifarious country remains an aberration they must discourage.
Origins of the ‘genocide’ story
Cruz may have drawn inspiration from the Armageddon foretold by former US ambassador to Nigeria, John Campbell, who, based on a CIA report in 2005, predicted the potential collapse of Nigeria in 2015 from ethnic and sectarian tensions.
Although it is 2025, 10 years after Campbell, Cruz, and some hirelings from within Nigeria still suggest that Nigeria may yet collapse, the narrative is now more sinister.
It is no surprise that the current campaign coincided with Nigeria’s position, along with 142 other countries at the UN General Assembly in September, for the recognition of the sovereign state of Palestine and the immediate cessation of the war in Gaza.
Those who originated the calumny did not just hurl “genocide” from the furnace of mischief; they thrust it at the very heart of Nigeria’s biggest fault line – religion. The roughly 50-50 Christian-Muslim population in Nigeria means that when the Church and the Mosque are up in arms, common sense is the first casualty.
Enablers of Sahelian misery
Once religion is at issue, base passions take over the streets and logic or moderation flees. This is the bait Cruz, Arnold and some other campaigners in the US Senate are casting, blatantly and blithely, oversimplifying the complex mix of terrorism, banditry, insurgency, criminality and environmental challenges/climatic conditions which are at the core of Nigeria’s security problems.
In doing so, they have conveniently ignored the fact that a significant part of the security problem in the Sahel today is rooted in the destabilisation the US caused when it violently overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and opened the floodgates for cheap and easy arms to flood sub-Saharan Africa.
Cruz is right and wrong
Cruz and others are right to express their concern about the death toll from the violence caused by insurgency-related attacks and banditry, which has claimed thousands of lives and left an estimated 2.3 million displaced. To describe the attacks in Nigeria as a genocidal assault on Christians, however, is like classifying the regrettable rise in homicidal incidents in the US as a genocidal attack on blacks and minorities. It’s like comparing apples and oranges.
As Cruz knows, there are over 11,000 firearm shooting deaths every year, excluding suicides, and tens of thousands of nonfatal injuries. Mass shootings numbered in the thousands over this decade, with several hundred U.S. school shootings contributing significantly to the toll. Unfortunately, blacks and minorities are the largest victims of these homicides.
Homicide v Genocide
According to data from sources like the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), “In the last 10 years (2015-2025), gun violence in the United States has remained a severe public health and safety crisis with tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries annually.
“In 2023, there were approximately 46,728 firearm-related deaths in the U.S., with suicides accounting for around 58 percent (about 27,300 deaths) and homicides accounting for about 38 percent (roughly 17,927 deaths).
“The national firearm death rate rose from about 10.3 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 14.0 per 100,000 by 2023.”
These statistics are alarming because every life is precious and matters. Yet, they cannot, by the wildest stretch of Cruzian definition, be classified as genocide, even though the victims are mainly blacks and minorities.
Not what they think
Murderous bandits have killed Nigerian Christians, just as they have killed Muslims and non-believers. A 2025 study of the sociology of banditry by Peer Schouten and Barnett James of the Danish Institute of International Studies distinguishes banditry from jihadism. Bandit networks operate with little ideological or religious ambition. They are roaming/stationary predators seeking authority, power and influence.
Cruz’s Republican Party has lived in denial of the mass killing of women, children and civilians in Gaza – a war fuelled by American arms and backed by the American state for all of two years. But it is for Nigeria that a label must be made.
There has been intractable sectarian violence across all the regions of Nigeria. But none of it qualifies as a genocidal campaign by one religion against another, despite reprisal attacks in many instances. All the supporting or opposing narratives from either religious side are, for the most part, reflexive self-defence – driven more by opportunism and identity politics.
All victims
The insurgency in the Northeast, which has lasted since 2009, has raged in predominantly Muslim parts of the country and has killed and displaced more Muslims in as many years. The banditry in the Northwest is not any different, with significantly the same demographics in casualties, damage and destruction.
The mutation and spread of these armed groups have been significantly linked to mineral theft and exploitation sponsored by multinational conglomerates and Western powers, which prop up shadow states and shadow rulers – as amply documented by British investigative journalist Tom Burgis in his book, The Looting Machine.
The complex farmer/herder clashes in the North Central region of Nigeria owe their persistence to a great extent to government failure, changing climatic conditions, and criminality, rather than religion.
Separatist groups in the Southeast of Nigeria are historical and derive from the Nigerian civil war, which ended more than 50 years ago. The war had nothing whatsoever to do with religion, other than the sheer accident of fate, fueled by the squalid legacy of British colonial rule.
Remember Gaza
The frightful and horrendous incidents in Rwanda (1994), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-95), the Nazi Holocaust (1941-45) and the ongoing case in Gaza are in no way comparable to what is happening in Africa’s most important country.
To conflate Nigeria’s complex troubles caused by a plethora of issues, confrontations, and their blowouts as genocide is disingenuous and alarmist. It’s a grotesque distortion of realities on the ground. Christians, Muslims and folks who don’t care about either have been caught up in the violence and are, for the most part, helpless victims.
Interestingly, sensational narratives like Cruz’s become amplified whenever Nigeria approaches an election. It might not be a bad idea also to remind Cruz of the epidemic of U.S. gun violence – and Gaza.
Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book, A Midlifer’s Guide to Content Creation and Profit.
