October 02, (THEWILL) — The Presidency has dismissed claims of a “Christian genocide” in Nigeria, insisting that the country’s security challenges are far more complex than a religious war.
Reacting to remarks by U.S. television host, Bill Maher, who alleged that more than 100,000 Christians had been killed in Nigeria since 2009, Gimba Kakanda, Senior Special Assistant on Research and Analytics to the Vice President, described the assertion as “misleading and dangerous”.
In an opinion piece titled “No, Bill Maher, There Is No Christian Genocide in Nigeria”, published by Al Jazeera on Thursday, Kakanda wrote: “To frame Nigeria’s security challenges as a religious war is to misrepresent the realities and deepen divisions in an already fragile society. Extremists have killed both Christians and Muslims, including Islamic clerics and traditional rulers.”
He stressed that many conflicts, such as farmer-herder clashes, are cast wrongly in religious terms.
“These clashes are fundamentally about access to land, water and grazing routes. Reducing them to Christian-versus-Muslim battles ignores the real drivers of violence”, he argued.
On government efforts, Kakanda noted that multiple military operations have been launched to restore order.
“From Operation Hadin Kai in the North-East to Operation Forest Sanity in the North-West, thousands of terrorists have been neutralised or surrendered, and caches of weapons seized”, he stated.
He also pointed to the religious composition of the nation’s security leadership as evidence against claims of systemic persecution.
“The heads of the Army, Navy, Defence Intelligence and Police are Christians. To suggest that the Nigerian state is supervising a genocide against Christians is not only false, it is reckless”, Kakanda wrote.
Warning against foreign misrepresentations, Kakanda cautioned that “Simplistic narratives like Maher’s endanger Nigeria’s fragile unity and embolden extremists. Nigeria’s conflicts demand nuance, not propaganda.”
The Presidency maintained that while insecurity remains a serious challenge, there is no evidence of state-backed or systematic violence targeting Christians in Nigeria.
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