Former United States President Donald Trump is at it again. This time, Nigeria is his target. In one of his trademark tirades posted on Truth Social last week, Trump accused the Nigerian government of allowing the “mass slaughter of Christians” and threatened to “cut off all aid and possibly send in the U.S. military” if what he called “the genocide” continued.
It is vintage Trump — dramatic, exaggerated, and dangerous. But it also reveals something deeper about how the world views Nigeria: as a convenient theatre for Western moral performance.
Trump’s words drew immediate outrage from Nigerian officials and civil society. The federal government rightly dismissed his claims as “false and inflammatory,” insisting that Nigeria remains a multi-religious democracy with constitutional guarantees of freedom of faith. But even beyond diplomacy, Trump’s reckless comments deserve a serious response — not only because of what they say about Nigeria, but also because of what they say about truth, power, and the politics of persecution.
Let’s be clear: there is no genocide of Christians in Nigeria. None.
The word “genocide” carries a heavy legal and moral weight. It refers to a deliberate attempt to exterminate a people — as in Rwanda in 1994 or Nazi Germany’s Holocaust. Nothing in Nigeria’s painful story of violence comes close to that definition.
That said, Christians in Nigeria — especially in parts of the North and Middle Belt — have indeed suffered mass killings, targeted attacks, and discrimination because of their faith. Churches have been bombed. Clergy have been kidnapped or murdered. Christian communities have been displaced by bandits and extremist groups. These are undeniable facts, and to dismiss them is to insult the memories of the dead and the pain of the survivors.
But that is only half the story.
Muslims, too, have been killed — in greater numbers, in many instances. In the Northeast, Boko Haram and its splinter groups have murdered thousands of Muslims for being “infidels” or for refusing to join their warped jihad. In the Northwest, bandits slaughter Muslims and Christians alike in endless cycles of reprisal. Even in the Middle Belt, where ethnic and religious lines often blur, victims fall on both sides.
The reality is that Nigeria’s violence is complex. It is at once religious, ethnic, political, and economic. To label it as purely anti-Christian is to flatten that complexity and rob the debate of honesty.
Part of the problem is historical. Northern Christians carry deep scars from past pogroms, persecutions, and decades of marginalisation under a feudal, Muslim-dominated system. Like the Igbo, they often interpret new threats through the lens of old wounds. Every attack revives collective memories of betrayal and bloodshed.
This is not paranoia; it is trauma. But trauma can breed exaggeration. Many northern Christians, understandably, have developed what psychologists call a persecution complex — the feeling that the world is permanently against them. This emotion feeds a victim narrative that travels easily across Western churches and media outlets hungry for simple stories of “good Christians” under siege from “bad Muslims.”
Western politicians and evangelical organisations amplify that narrative because it serves their own ideological and fundraising purposes. Trump’s “Christian genocide” claim did not emerge from evidence or intelligence reports. It came from that same network of American evangelical lobbyists and conservative think tanks that view global politics through a crusading religious lens.
For them, Nigeria is not a nation of 200 million complex souls struggling through poverty, corruption, and insecurity. It is a stage — one where “Islamic extremism” plays the villain, “Christianity” the martyr, and the “United States” the saviour.
But narratives have consequences. When Trump declares that the Nigerian government is complicit in the “slaughter of Christians,” he is not just making a rhetorical flourish. He is feeding division inside Nigeria and justifying external interference in our internal affairs.
Already, American lawmakers have introduced the “Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act,” a bill that could impose sanctions on Nigerian officials accused of religious persecution. Such a law, rooted in one-sided assumptions, risks undermining Nigeria’s sovereignty and further complicating the fight against terrorism.
The truth is that every Nigerian life — Christian or Muslim — deserves protection. Every citizen has a right to worship freely without fear. To privilege one set of victims over another is itself a form of injustice.
That is why Nigeria must resist both the domestic politics of division and the international politics of selective empathy. We cannot allow our pain to be weaponised by foreign actors seeking applause from their home audiences. Nor can we continue to feed global misconceptions by failing to tell our own stories honestly.
Trump’s threat also reflects an old tension between Christianity and Islam in global politics — a rivalry that long predates Nigeria.
Historically, Christian nations have persecuted Jews, fought Muslims, and fought among themselves. In our era, the rise of militant Islamism has reignited Western fears of Islam. For many American evangelicals, Israel has become a fortress against Islam, and any country where Christians are attacked becomes an emotional battlefield. Nigeria’s complex conflicts are thus misread through that ideological prism.
But Israel, as I have often argued, acts for its own survival, not for Christianity or Western civilisation. Likewise, Nigeria’s internal conflicts are not a cosmic war between Christianity and Islam. They are the tragic by-products of weak governance, inequality, and a long history of ethnic mistrust.
Trump’s outburst, however offensive, is a reminder that Nigeria must fix its own security and communication problems. When attacks happen and government responses are sluggish or opaque, misinformation thrives. The absence of clear data on victims and perpetrators allows foreign actors to define our reality for us.
The government must publish verified casualty figures disaggregated by religion, region, and cause. It must support interfaith dialogue and ensure that both churches and mosques feel protected by the state.
More importantly, we Nigerians — journalists, analysts, and citizens — must resist the temptation of one-sided empathy. We must acknowledge the pain of Christians without erasing the pain of Muslims. We must demand justice for all victims, not just those who share our faith.
Insecurity in Nigeria is not a religious war; it is a national failure. And until we frame it that way, we will remain hostages to both local extremists and foreign opportunists.
Donald Trump’s threat against Nigeria is an unwelcome echo of colonial arrogance — the idea that the West can police the world’s faiths. But it is also a warning that when we fail to manage our diversity and tell our own story, others will tell it for us, often badly.
Nigeria is not a land of Christian genocide. It is a country of shared suffering, where both churches and mosques mourn their dead, and where both faiths crave peace.
The path forward lies not in trading victimhood or inviting foreign saviours, but in confronting our failures with honesty. The real war is not between Christians and Muslims. It is between truth and propaganda, justice and impunity, leadership and negligence.
If we can win that war, we won’t need Donald Trump’s pity — or his threats.
