Introduction

Nigeria, the giant of Africa, is a nation of staggering potential and profound complexity. It is a mosaic of over 250 ethnic groups, a vibrant tapestry of Christian, Muslim, and traditional faiths, and home to the continent’s largest economy and most dynamic cultural output. Yet, this image of vibrancy is shadowed by a persistent and deepening crisis of insecurity. From the entrenched jihadist insurgency of Boko Haram and its offshoot, ISWAP, in the North East, to the rampant banditry and kidnapping-for-ransom industry in the North West, and the deadly, resource-driven conflicts between farmers and herders in the Middle Belt, the sanctity of life is under constant threat.

This tragic reality has become a focal point of intense international debate in recent years. The scale of the killing has prompted sharp questions and even sharper accusations. Influential voices, particularly within the United States, have begun to characterise the targeted attacks on Christian communities as a “genocide.” This loaded term has triggered a cascade of diplomatic and political consequences, including the controversial designation of Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) for religious freedom violations.

This designation, and the “genocide” label, are fiercely contested. The Nigerian government, along with many independent analysts and human rights organisations, refutes these claims. They argue that the violence is not a simple religious binary but a complex, multi-faceted crisis rooted in poor governance, climate change, resource scarcity, and systemic criminality, a crisis that claims victims from all faiths.

This article seeks to navigate this contentious landscape with objectivity. It is not an argument for or against the application of “genocide” or a call for any specific foreign intervention. Instead, it is a comprehensive review of the situation. We will dissect the stringent legal definition of genocide and explore whether the situation in Nigeria meets this high bar. We will analyse the political and geopolitical motivations behind the US CPC designation, interrogating claims of “hidden agendas” from BRICS to domestic politics. Finally, and most critically, we will look inward, drawing on historical examples of national unity to suggest a sustainable, Nigerian-led path forward, one that moves beyond semantics to tackle the root causes of the violence that threatens to consume the nation.

The Anatomy of a Word: Deconstructing “Genocide”

Before we can apply the term “genocide” to Nigeria, we must first understand its profound legal and historical weight. The word itself is not merely descriptive; it is the ultimate legal and moral condemnation, often referred to as the “crime of crimes.” Coined in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, it combines the Greek word genos (race or tribe) with the Latin cide (killing). Lemkin formulated it to describe the systematic destruction of national and ethnic groups by the Nazis during the Holocaust, a crime for which no adequate word previously existed.

The international community formally adopted this term in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This treaty, formed in the shadow of World War II, provides the sole legal definition used in international law. To affirm a situation as genocidal, international tribunals must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the existence of two specific conditions: the physical element and the mental element.

The physical element, or actus reus, is the commission of at least one of five prohibited acts. These are: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

This physical element, while horrific, is not what makes genocide unique. Mass killing, rape, and displacement can also be classified as crimes against humanity or war crimes. The true, defining characteristic of genocide, and the most challenging condition to prove, is the mental element, known as dolus specialis, or “specific intent.”

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines this as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.” This is the critical legal hurdle. It is not enough to prove that members of a group were killed, even on a massive scale. The prosecution must prove that the perpetrators committed these acts with the specific goal of eliminating the group itself. The motive must be to destroy the group because of its identity, not as a byproduct of another conflict, such as a war for political control, resource acquisition, or the suppression of an insurgency.

This specific intent must be directed against one of the four protected groups: national, ethnic, racial, or religious. Political groups, for instance, are conspicuously not protected under the Genocide Convention. This intent can be proven through direct evidence, such as official orders, state plans, or public speeches (as seen in Nazi Germany or with Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda). More often, it is inferred from a systematic pattern of conduct: the scale of atrocities, the specific targeting of victims based on their group membership, the deliberate destruction of cultural or religious symbols, and the use of derogatory language that dehumanises the group.

Historical examples where this high bar was legally met, such as the Holocaust, the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi, or the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, all featured overwhelming evidence of an organised plan and clear intent to destroy a group as such. It is this rigorous standard that must be applied when examining the tragic violence in Nigeria.

The Nigerian Conundrum: Applying the Genocide Framework

The scale of death in Nigeria is undeniably staggering. According to data from various trackers like the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), tens of thousands of Nigerians have been killed in the past decade, and millions have been displaced. The violence in the Middle Belt, in particular, often pits predominantly Muslim Fulani herders against predominantly Christian farming communities, leading to brutal attacks on villages, churches, and families. Prominent Christian advocacy groups and some US politicians look at this pattern, churches burned, priests abducted, Christian villages razed, and conclude that this is a clear-cut case of religiously-motivated genocide.

However, applying the strict legal framework, the situation becomes far murkier. Most independent human rights organisations (such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch), international legal scholars, and even the Nigerian government argue that while the violence is horrific and may constitute crimes against humanity, it fails to meet the dolus specialis standard of genocide. The reasons are rooted in the complex, overlapping, and often non-religious drivers of the conflict.

First, the violence is not a single, monolithic conflict; it is a “crisis of many cancers.” The violence in the North West (states like Zamfara, Katsina, and Kaduna) is dominated by “bandits.” These are sophisticated, well-armed criminal gangs, primarily (though not exclusively) of Fulani extraction, whose primary motivation is profit. They engage in mass kidnappings for ransom, cattle rustling, and illegal taxation of communities. Their victims are chosen based on wealth and vulnerability, not religion. In fact, these bandits, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, have killed and terrorised far more Muslims than Christians, sacking entire Muslim villages and kidnapping prominent Islamic clerics.

Second, the insurgency in the North East (Borno, Yobe, Adamawa) is driven by the jihadist ideologies of Boko Haram and ISWAP. These groups do possess an eliminatory ideology and have explicitly targeted Christians, famously abducting the Chibok and Dapchi schoolgirls. However, their ideology is also virulently anti-state and anti-traditional Islam. The vast majority of their victims—numbering in the tens of thousands—have been fellow Muslims whom they deem kuffar (infidels) for not subscribing to their extremist Salafist doctrine. They have bombed mosques, killed Imams, and laid waste to Muslim-majority towns. This complicates the narrative that their primary intent is the destruction of Christians as such, rather than the destruction of all who oppose their caliphate.

Third, the farmer-herder conflict in the Middle Belt (Plateau, Benue, Taraba) is the most frequently cited as “genocide.” Yet, even here, the drivers are profoundly complex. This is a decades-old conflict over access to land and water, which has been catastrophically exacerbated by climate change, desertification in the north, and explosive population growth. Pastoralists moving south in search of pasture clash with sedentary farmers. This economic and environmental conflict maps onto existing ethno-religious fault lines, making it exceptionally volatile. While some attacks are clearly motivated by religious or ethnic animus, many analysts argue the root cause is a desperate-for-resources, not a coordinated plan to eliminate a religious group. The violence is reciprocal, and proving a one-sided “intent to destroy” is legally difficult when both sides have engaged in cycles of reprisal killings.

Finally, and perhaps most decisively for a genocide determination, there is no credible evidence of a state-sponsored plan by the Nigerian government to destroy any religious or ethnic group. The Nigerian state, and its security forces, are frequently accused of incompetence, corruption, and even complicity in failing to stop the violence. They are guilty of severe human rights abuses in their own right. But this failure of governance, while condemnable, is not the same as a state-organised policy of genocide. Without that central, coordinating intent, the legal bar becomes almost insurmountable. For these reasons, most legal experts prefer the term crimes against humanity, which captures the widespread, systematic nature of the attacks on civilian populations, as a more accurate legal description of Nigeria’s tragedy.

Geopolitics and Perception: The US “Country of Particular Concern”

The international debate over Nigeria’s violence crystallised with its designation by the United States as a “Country of Particular Concern,” or CPC. This is a formal designation under the US International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998, applied to nations found guilty of “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.” Nigeria’s relationship with this list has been volatile: designated by the Trump administration in 2020, it was controversially removed by the Biden administration in 2021, and it was now re-designated in late 2025 by a second Trump administration.

The official rationale for the CPC designation rests on two pillars. The first is the Nigerian government’s failure to prevent and punish violence by non-state actors like Boko Haram, ISWAP, and militant gangs, which, in the view of the US, disproportionately affects Christian communities. The second, and often overlooked, pillar is the Nigerian state’s own actions, such as the enforcement of strict blasphemy laws in several northern states (which primarily affect religious minorities and dissenting Muslims) and the state’s violent clashes with minority Muslim groups like the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN).

However, the Nigerian government and many geopolitical analysts view this designation through a more cynical lens, suggesting it has less to do with religious freedom and more to do with complex political and economic agendas. This leads to the question of ulterior motives.

The speculation that the CPC designation is a tool to dissuade Nigeria from joining the BRICS economic bloc (comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) or to influence the 2027 election is a common interpretation. The BRICS argument posits that, as Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, explores closer ties with this China- and Russia-led alternative to Western economic structures, the US is using its human rights framework as a “stick” to exert leverage. The CPC designation can be a precursor to sanctions, aid restrictions, and other diplomatic pressures aimed at pulling Nigeria back into the Western-led orbit.

The 2027 election theory is less about direct US intervention and more about internal Nigerian politics. The CPC designation is a profound political embarrassment for the incumbent Tinubu administration. Opposition parties can (and do) seize upon it as “proof” of the government’s incompetence and failure on the world stage, using it as a potent campaign tool to argue for regime change.

However, perhaps the most significant and provable “other agenda” is the domestic politics of the United States. The “persecution of Christians” is a powerful, mobilising issue for the American evangelical community, a key voting bloc for the Republican Party. Figures like President Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, by elevating this issue and using potent words like “genocide,” are responding to their political base. This domestic pressure creates a foreign policy imperative that may oversimplify a complex Nigerian reality to fit a familiar “Christians under attack” narrative.

This leads to the user’s poignant question about hypocrisy, juxtaposing the 11,000+ annual US gun deaths with the international furore over Nigeria. This is a classic example of “whataboutism,” but it highlights a real phenomenon in international relations: selective outrage. The critique is not that the violence in Nigeria is unserious, but that the moral lens of the global community is inconsistent. US gun violence, though systemic and staggering in scale, is framed as a domestic, social, and criminal policy failure. The violence in Nigeria, however, is often framed as an existential, religious, and civilizational crisis. This difference in framing, driven by proximity, media narratives, and geopolitical interests, allows for a situation where a nation can passionately condemn violence abroad while remaining paralysed by a similar, if qualitatively different, epidemic of violence at home.

The Nigerian government’s best response to the CPC designation, therefore, is not just a diplomatic protest. A diversity of views exists in Nigeria, from those who would reject the designation as an affront to sovereignty to those who welcome it as external pressure for reform. The most pragmatic approach, advocated by many Nigerian policy experts, is to engage diplomatically while simultaneously and demonstrably tackling the root causes of the insecurity. The most effective way to get off the CPC list is to make the facts on the ground—the security of all citizens, Muslim and Christian—undeniable.

The Path from the Precipice: A Call for National Unity

Ultimately, the debates in Washington are a distraction from the real issues at hand. The solution to Nigeria’s insecurity will not be found in the halls of the US Congress or in the semantics of international law. The solution must be Nigerian, forged in Abuja, Kaduna, Enugu, and Port Harcourt. The challenge of insecurity is a genuinely national one; it is an existential threat that requires a bipartisan, “all hands on deck” approach.

The sad incidents of Islamic insurgencies, banditry, farmer-herder conflicts, kidnapping, and all other forms of terrorism have cut short the lives of several thousand of our citizens in cold blood. These are issues that must be lifted above partisan squabbling. Insecurity doesn’t discriminate between the Broom of the APC and the Umbrella of the PDP. A bandit’s bullet does not check party affiliation; a kidnapper does not ask for a voter’s card. All over the world, such conditions are lifted beyond the purview of politicking to engage the patriotic inclinations of all leaders and, indeed, all citizens.

History provides powerful models for this exact moment. Look at the United Kingdom during World War II. Faced with the existential threat of Nazism, the major political parties (Conservative, Labour, and Liberal) formed a national unity government. Winston Churchill, a Conservative, led a cabinet that included Labour leaders like Clement Attlee. The nation’s survival against an external enemy overrode all partisan differences, demonstrating a supreme national unity that was essential for victory.

Consider the United States, a nation built on political division. The Cold War with the Soviet Union created a long-term, bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. More recently, the attacks of September 11, 2001, forged an immediate, if brief, moment of profound national unity, leading to widespread bipartisan support for new security structures to confront a common threat.

Perhaps the most potent and relevant example for Nigeria comes from within Africa: South Africa. In the early 1990s, the country was on the brink of a racial civil war. Yet, to end the obnoxious apartheid system, all parties came together. The transition required the ruling National Party (representing the white minority) and the African National Congress (ANC) (representing the liberation movement) to engage in fraught, high-stakes negotiations. The result was the 1994 Government of National Unity (GNU). This was not just bipartisan; it was multi-partisan, forcing figures from formerly opposed groups to sit at the same table. It was the ultimate act of patriotism, choosing national survival and the creation of a single, non-racial democratic state over decades of bitter historical enmity.

We, Nigerians, are under intense pressure to put our differences aside and take a united stance to combat the ravaging insecurities in our land. All our political leaders, especially the President of the Federal Republic, have an onerous responsibility to lead this charge. This is not a time for political point-scoring; it is a time for statesmanship.

This is the time for the President to bring to a national roundtable all stakeholders:

• Political Leaders: The President must invite the very opposition leaders he defeated (like Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi), alongside all 36 state governors and the leadership of the National Assembly.
• Traditional Rulers: The great royal rulers—the Sultan of Sokoto, the Ooni of Ife, the Emir of Kano, the Obi of Onitsha, and others—must be at the table. Their influence and local intelligence are indispensable.
• Religious Leaders: The heads of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) must be present to commit to de-escalating the rhetoric that fuels division.
• Security Chiefs: The military and police leadership must be there not just to brief, but to listen to a new, unified political mandate.
• Academia and Civil Society: Experts who have studied these conflicts for decades must be engaged to help brainstorm solutions that go beyond military force to address the root causes of poverty, injustice, and climate-driven resource scarcity.

Beyond the Labels

The crisis gripping Nigeria is profound. The violence is real, the loss is immeasurable, and the grief of the nation is palpable. The international debate over the word “genocide” is a legal, political, and emotional minefield. While the horrific violence against specific communities, particularly Christians in the Middle Belt, must be condemned, the term “genocide” carries a specific legal intent that, according to most rigorous analyses, is not met due to the complex, multi-causal nature of the conflict. The violence is a hydra-headed monster of extremist ideology, criminal opportunism, and resource scarcity, all thriving in an environment of poor governance.

The CPC designation, while ostensibly about religious freedom, is inextricably linked to the domestic politics of the United States and the broader geopolitical realignments of a multi-polar world. It serves as a stark reminder that Nigeria’s internal failings have external consequences.

But the real issue is not what foreign powers call this crisis. The real problem is what Nigerians are prepared to do about it. The path forward does not lie in winning a public relations war in Washington. It lies in winning the battle for peace, security, and justice at home. The solution is a return to first principles: that the primary duty of a state is the protection of its citizens, all of them.

The South African example taught the world that no division is too great to bridge if there is a political will for survival. Nigeria’s most significant strengths have always been its resilience, energy, and diversity. The time has come to channel that diversity not as a source of conflict, but as a wellspring of united strength. The time for a Government of National Unity—even if only in spirit and on the singular issue of security—is now. The nation’s survival depends on it.