In early November, United States President Donald Trump declared that “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria”. In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, he accused “radical Islamists” of “mass slaughter” and warned that the US “may very well go into that now disgraced country, guns-a-blazing“.
The claim rested on a familiar assumption: that violence in Nigeria is driven by religious ideology, with Christians targeted by Islamist militants. In mid-November, a new wave of school abductions revealed how perilous parts of northern Nigeria have become for children of all faiths. On November 17, armed men raided Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State, killing a vice principal and abducting 25 students. The school was state-run, and the victims were Muslim girls. One escaped, and the remaining 24 were later rescued.
Days later, in the early hours of November 21, gunmen stormed St Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri, Niger State, abducting pupils and teachers. While some captives later escaped or were released, many remained missing into mid-December, leaving families in agonising uncertainty. Parents continue to wait without answers, their desperation and anguish hardening into anger as official assurances fade.
Taken together, these attacks do not reflect a campaign of religious persecution. They follow a pattern that has become increasingly familiar across northern Nigeria: mass kidnapping for ransom, striking opportunistically rather than along religious lines. Trump’s remarks do more than misdiagnose this violence. They reimagine it. With a few lines of incendiary rhetoric, a country grappling with criminal insecurity and institutional collapse is recast as a front line in a civilisational struggle — a place where force, not reform, becomes the implied solution.
Once framed that way, Nigeria is no longer a society in need of protection and repair, but a battlefield-in-waiting.
That shift matters. When violence is described as religious war rather than organised crime, responsibility moves outwards, solutions become militarised, and foreign intervention begins to sound not reckless but righteous.
This pattern is hardly surprising.
American power has a habit of transforming complex foreign crises into apocalyptic moral dramas, and then acting on the story it has told itself.
Nonetheless, Nigerian church leaders, who know the terrain and the people intimately, reject Washington’s narrative. The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Kukah, a leading figure in Nigeria’s peacebuilding efforts, for example, cautioned against interpreting the violence as religious warfare, pointing instead to criminal motives and state failure.
Analysts concurred, emphasising that attacks fall on Christians and Muslims alike and often follow patterns of banditry and ransom rather than theology.
In Kebbi State, the victims were Muslim schoolgirls taken from a state-run boarding school. In Niger State, the targets were pupils and teachers at a Catholic mission school. Across Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kaduna, Niger and Plateau states, villages have been raided, farms abandoned and populations displaced.
This violence is driven primarily by profit-driven criminal violence rather than religious belief.
Chronic poverty, rural neglect and youth unemployment — with about 72 percent of rural Nigerians living in multidimensional poverty — fuel recruitment into criminal and armed networks.
True to Bishop Kukah’s analysis, ideology accounts for far less of this violence than predatory criminal behaviour and opportunism. What flourishes instead is organised crime in areas where the state barely functions. The principal threat now stems from armed “bandit” networks rather than a single ideologically driven insurgent movement.
These criminal militias kidnap schoolchildren and commuters for ransom, rustle cattle, extort villages, attack highways and, according to multiple reports, increasingly tap into illegal mining economies, often operating from forest bases across the northwest.Trump’s remarks do more than misdiagnose this violence. They reimagine it. With a few lines of incendiary rhetoric, a country grappling with criminal insecurity and institutional collapse is recast as a front line in a civilisational struggle — a place where force, not reform, becomes the implied solution.
Once framed that way, Nigeria is no longer a society in need of protection and repair, but a battlefield-in-waiting.
That shift matters. When violence is described as religious war rather than organised crime, responsibility moves outwards, solutions become militarised, and foreign intervention begins to sound not reckless but righteous.
This pattern is hardly surprising.
American power has a habit of transforming complex foreign crises into apocalyptic moral dramas, and then acting on the story it has told itself.
Nonetheless, Nigerian church leaders, who know the terrain and the people intimately, reject Washington’s narrative. The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Kukah, a leading figure in Nigeria’s peacebuilding efforts, for example, cautioned against interpreting the violence as religious warfare, pointing instead to criminal motives and state failure.
Analysts concurred, emphasising that attacks fall on Christians and Muslims alike and often follow patterns of banditry and ransom rather than theology.
In Kebbi State, the victims were Muslim schoolgirls taken from a state-run boarding school. In Niger State, the targets were pupils and teachers at a Catholic mission school. Across Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kaduna, Niger and Plateau states, villages have been raided, farms abandoned and populations displaced.
This violence is driven primarily by profit-driven criminal violence rather than religious belief.
Chronic poverty, rural neglect and youth unemployment — with about 72 percent of rural Nigerians living in multidimensional poverty — fuel recruitment into criminal and armed networks.
True to Bishop Kukah’s analysis, ideology accounts for far less of this violence than predatory criminal behaviour and opportunism. What flourishes instead is organised crime in areas where the state barely functions. The principal threat now stems from armed “bandit” networks rather than a single ideologically driven insurgent movement.
These criminal militias kidnap schoolchildren and commuters for ransom, rustle cattle, extort villages, attack highways and, according to multiple reports, increasingly tap into illegal mining economies, often operating from forest bases across the northwest.
Source: Here