In early November, US President Donald Trump declared that “Christianity faces an existential threat in Nigeria.” In a series of posts on his platform Truth Social, he accused “Islamic extremists” of “genocide” and warned that the United States “could very well move into a now disgraceful country full of guns.”
This claim was based on the well-known assumption that violence in Nigeria is driven by religious ideology and that Christians are targeted by Islamic extremists.
In mid-November, a new wave of school kidnappings revealed how dangerous northern Nigeria has become for children of all faiths. On November 17, armed men attacked a public girls’ comprehensive secondary school in Maga, Kebbi State, killing the vice principal and abducting 25 students. The school was state-run and the victims were Muslim girls. One person escaped, and the remaining 24 people were later rescued.
A few days later, in the early hours of November 21, gunmen attacked St. Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri, Niger State and abducted students and teachers. Some prisoners later escaped or were released, but many remained missing as of mid-December, leaving their families suffering from insecurity. The parents continue to wait without answers, and as the authorities’ assurances fade, their despair and anguish turn to anger.
Taken together, these attacks do not reflect religious persecution. They follow a pattern that is becoming increasingly common in northern Nigeria: mass kidnappings for ransom, attacks that are opportunistic rather than along religious lines.
President Trump’s statements not only misdiagnose this violence. They reconsider it. With a few lines of inflammatory rhetoric, a country suffering from criminal insecurity and institutional collapse is recast as the front line of a civilizational struggle, a place where force rather than reform is the implicit solution.
Once framed in this way, Nigeria is no longer a society in need of protection and repair, but a battleground.
That shift is important. When violence is explained away as religious warfare rather than organized crime, responsibility shifts outward, solutions become militarized, and foreign intervention begins to sound like justice rather than recklessness.
This pattern is not surprising.
American power has a habit of turning complex foreign crises into apocalyptic morality plays and acting on the stories it tells itself.
Nevertheless, Nigerian church leaders who know the land and the people well reject Washington’s version. For example, Sokoto’s Catholic Bishop Matthew Kukah, a leader in Nigeria’s peacebuilding efforts, warned against interpreting the violence as a religious war, pointing instead to criminal motives and state failures.
Analysts agreed, stressing that the attacks hit Christians and Muslims alike and were more a pattern of robbery and ransom demands than theology.
In Kebbi State, the victims were Muslim schoolgirls taken from a state boarding school. In Niger state, students and teachers at a Catholic missionary school were targeted. Villages were attacked, farms abandoned and people evacuated across Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kaduna, Niger and Plateau states.
This violence is primarily driven by criminal violence motivated by profit rather than religious beliefs.
Chronic poverty, rural neglect and youth unemployment, with approximately 72 percent of Nigeria’s rural population living in multidimensional poverty, are accelerating recruitment into criminal and armed networks.
As Bishop Kuka analyzes it, ideology plays a much smaller role in this violence than does predatory criminal behavior or opportunism. Instead, organized crime prevails in areas where the state is largely non-functional. The main threat today comes from networks of armed “bandits” rather than from a single ideologically-based insurgency.
These criminal militias kidnap school children and commuters for ransom, raid cattle, extort villages, attack highways, and, according to reports, are increasingly exploiting the illegal extractive economy, many operating from forest bases in the northwest.
At the same time, Nigeria is not facing one armed threat, but multiple armed threats. Boko Haram and the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISIS) affiliate group (ISWAP) remain active in the northeast. Armed bandit networks dominate the northwest and north-central regions. Further south, in the intermediary region, militia violence is fueling land disputes and communal tensions.
The result was mass evacuations and civilian deaths on a catastrophic scale.
Amnesty International estimates that more than 10,000 civilians have been killed in armed attacks in the two years since President Bola Tinubu took office on May 29, 2023. Hundreds of villages were destroyed or left empty. Thousands of children abandoned school. Attacks are reported to be occurring weekly and even daily in parts of the North West. Even more worryingly, kidnappings are now hitting highways and commuter routes in and around the capital, Abuja.
Treating this catastrophe as religious persecution is not only inaccurate, but extremely dangerous. This false framework turns organized crime and state collapse into a myth of religious war, obscuring the causes and leading to disastrous treatments.
That’s why language matters, and it shapes intentions and outcomes.
When Washington defines internal collapse as a moral failure, Nigeria ceases to be seen as a country in need of rebuilding and begins to look like an international threat to be managed from the outside.
Global attention has shifted from strengthening local institutions to using fiscal leverage, coercive measures, and military force.
Community becomes a hot topic in American politics.
In the process, Nigerians are reduced to abstractions rather than treated as living human beings with rights, and regions like Kebbi and Niger are recast as war zones rather than places in need of urgent repair.
Once a powerful state defines a crisis, it begins to shape its outcome.
History brings no comfort.
From Iraq to Libya, US-led interventions have caused untold devastation, leaving public institutions in ruins and continuing endless wars.
Importantly, all military operations promised peace and stability. Over time, thousands of civilians were killed in every mission and entire countries were left in ruins.
If even a small number of U.S. forces were to invade Nigeria, foreign forces would quickly become targets for attack and retaliation, turning villages and forest areas into potential battlegrounds.
As criminal networks splinter, rebrand, and adapt to new battlefields, communities find themselves squeezed between bandits and foreign military forces.
This is the structure of the American war cycle. First, excuses, second, force, and last, civilian lives.
Nigeria should not be exempt from this great power logic as countries do not become war zones overnight. They are first described as failures, then reframed as threats, and then treated as acceptable targets.
Nigeria’s institutional weakness is no coincidence. It is rooted in a longstanding commitment to protecting property on behalf of people, while neglecting police, justice and basic services.
Colonial and postcolonial governance created systems for natural resource extraction rather than citizen protection. For decades, often under military regimes, securing oil revenues and political control were more important than effective governance, public welfare, and human security.
In the Niger Delta, this approach has meant environmental destruction, loss of livelihoods and disregard for institutions, the real price to pay for protecting wealth in front of the people.
Even today, that institutional design continues. While the state remains more effective at protecting property than human life, inequalities and neglect are exacerbating civilian casualties.
Still, Nigeria still has options.
In late November, President Tinubu declared a national security emergency, ordered the recruitment of 20,000 additional police officers as part of a broader expansion plan, redeployed VIP escorts to front-line duties, and authorized the deployment and expansion of DSS Forest Guards to hunt bandits and insurgents.
Whether these moves will yield results will depend on implementation and widespread reform, not announcements.
Police and intelligence agencies need to be redirected and strengthened to protect communities, with appropriate oversight and resources, not just desk-based expansion.
Only about 15 percent of Nigerians say they trust the police, but many view police officers as corrupt or violent, leaving communities fearful of both criminals and law enforcement.
Courts and financial regulators need the ability not only to pursue perpetrators, but also to dismantle ransom and extortion networks as business systems.
Regionally, Nigeria must promote serious cooperation on intelligence sharing, border control and joint operations. Otherwise, armed groups will continue to move freely across borders with almost complete impunity.
From Washington’s perspective, Nigeria does not need troops or threats.
We need support to rebuild the institutions that protect the security of our people, including forensic capacity, practical intelligence, training, and diplomatic support that strengthen rather than override Nigeria’s sovereignty.
This should be a national wake-up call for Nigeria’s political class, as some 61 percent of Nigerians report feeling unsafe in their communities in recent years.
Only a comprehensive solution can bring peace and protect besieged communities in northern Nigeria.
Trump needs to calm tensions. Tinubu must act decisively.
What will determine Nigeria’s future is not foreign firepower, but whether Nigeria’s institutions are rebuilt to protect its people, not its assets.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
