By SKC Ogbonnia
U.S. President Donald J. Trump has threatened military action against Nigeria over an alleged Christian genocide in the African country. This followed his designation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC). Instead of exploring meaningful solutions, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is busy playing politics with a situation he helped to inflame.
The perception of Christian genocide under the various regimes of the All Progressive Congress (APC) is not new. The campaign for global attention began when President Muhammadu Buhari appeared to be indifferent to the problem. It quickly took a deep root because of Buhari’s background–a military dictator of obstinate religious bigotry.
Various Nigerian clergymen and Christian groups alerted the global community of the alleged genocide during the Buhari democratic regime. Ordinary citizens were not left behind. The loudest echo chambers of the campaign were prominent image makers of President Tinubu in Reno Omokri and Femi Fani-Kayode. The duo traveled far and wide, using every social media platform to sensationalize the hostility. They in turn derided the Buhari regime as well as the APC as harboring a dangerous Islamic hidden agenda. In one instance, Omokri labeled the ruling party as “anti-Christ.” That quickly stuck!
More importantly, the voices of innocent Nigerians in America, most of whom are Christians, and most of whom decried the pattern of the injustice in their homeland, reluctantly aligned and validated the persecution claim. The U.S.Department of State finally acted by designating Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern for the first time in December 2020.
After a critical review, Trump’s successor, President Joseph Biden lifted the CPC designation in 2021, amid a torrent of criticisms from both the United States and Nigeria. But America remained on the alert, eagerly waiting for an alarm for any iota of further violations.
Enter Tinubu and the second coming of Trump. The emergence of Bola Ahmed Tinubu as Nigeria’s president worsened matters and is squarely responsible for why Africa’s most populous country is not only designated as a CPC again but also heightened the threat for military action by the United States of America.
Let us begin with Tinubu’s background. Everything about the Nigerian president is everything the Americans resent in foreign leaders. Too many controversies–from his identity, drug trafficking, academic records, and source of his huge wealth. This baggage does not evince trust, especially for a man leading a party heavily lampooned as “anti-Christ.” The totality of this background accounts for why Trump has continued to distance himself from Tinubu.
The next pointer is Muslim-Muslim Presidential Ticket: Upon winning the nomination of his party, Tinubu shocked the world by electing to nominate a vice-president who shares the same Muslim faith with him. What fuels the ire of the Americans is that, despite leading a political party that is alleged to have a vicious Muslim agenda, Tinubu blatantly broke from the prevailing convention that had created a sense of religious tolerance in the country.
Very alarming is that it did not take long before Nigerians started observing probable signs of Christian genocide in the country under Tinubu. Incidents and statistics abound. But a wake-up call was the first Christmas period after Tinubu took office in 2023 which witnessed a series of coordinated attacks in Plateau State. The suspects were Muslim militants who killed at least 300 people who happened to be Christians, wounded about 300, and displaced over 30,000 residents across 21 villages. The following Easter period in 2024 showed a similar pattern with major attacks documented in Plateau and Benue States.
A comprehensive report from Open Doors International, a watchdog for Christian genocide around the world, analysed the issue of religious extremism from 2023 to 2025 and suggests that Nigeria remains one of the most unsafe places in the world for Christians. Another report by the World Watch List 2025 indicated that Nigeria accounted for a majority of Christian deaths in the world from a period covering October 2023 to September 2024, noting that 3,100 of the 4,476 global Christian deaths (about 70%) took place in that African country. Even this June 2025, Pope Leo XIV condemned an “unceasingly” attack on Christians in Nigeria.
The incidents and reports above are just to name a few and took place under Tinubu’s watch. But, like Buhari, he chose to do nothing, thinking that it was business as usual. The apparent stoic silence sent a wrong signal, suggesting acquiescence to the quandary.
Commonly ignored but very consequential is that, even if genocide against the Christians is in contention, the persecution of the people of South-East Nigeria under Tinubu is profoundly evident. This zone, by the way, represents a majority of Igbo people and also the highest concentration of Christian population in the country. Of course, the history of ill-treatment towards the Igbo is a common knowledge and did not start under Bola Ahmed Tinubu, but it has heightened since he assumed office.
Some have argued that the Christians might have not been specifically targeted, which is arguably fair. Yet, the simple truth is that a majority of the population in the areas so cited are of the Christian faith. Moreover, while there are many incidents of mass killings of Christians by Jihadist extremists who hide under the name of Islam to perpetrate heinous crimes, one can hardly point to a case where Christians are slaughtering Muslims in Nigeria to propagate Christianity. Further, coordinated violence against the Muslims, if any, either by default or by design has not been pushed to receive the degree of global attention as the Christian victims. Either way, the acts of genocide in Nigeria–whether targeted or not– are indisputable and it remains the responsibility of the state to decimate the perpetrators.
Many have offered different opinions on how to get around the CPC palaver. The most laughable, however, is any thought of Tinubu jetting to Washington, DC to dialogue with Trump people in an attempt to reject the CPC label. But such a trip, if actualized, amounts to nothing but a mere propaganda envisaged to satiate the thirsty sentiment of being seen as a statesman in the iconic U.S. White House. The solution is at home. And the Nigerian medium for diplomacy has grown beyond the analog assemblage of the Aso Rock think thank!
The point, if it is not already manifest, is that the days are gone when the Nigerian Government can preach justice abroad, while promoting injustice at home. The inconvenient truth is that Nigeria now boasts of hundreds of thousands of independent ambassadors, strategically entrenched in all the nooks and crannies of the world. Nigerians in America on their part maintain a strong presence in both the American private and public sectors, including the CIA, FBI, the Congress, the White House, Judiciary, and the American Armed Forces.
These Nigerian Americans are also entrenched in the U.S. political stream and accordingly have the ears of the American leaders, including President Trump. Interestingly, a vast majority of them are Christians who hail from different tribes of Nigeria and have emerged as the Biblical Josephs of sorts. Not surprisingly, as they go, so goes the national image and much more. And Donald Trump is keenly aware that their reluctance to relocate back to Nigeria after gaining good education is not because of lack of love for their native country but because of bad governance in their homeland. He is aware that a good chunk of the funds budgeted for anti-Islamic terrorism in Nigeria, including financial assistance by the United States, is stolen by public officials.
The fact of the matter is that the United States of America knows Tinubu more than he knows himself. Therefore, instead of the mundane attempts to teleguide America with daily doses of falsehoods, President Tinubu should focus on confronting the problems head-on. We need results, no more excuses!!
SKC Ogbonnia, a former APC presidential aspirant, writes from Houston, Texas.
