We need to talk about Nigeria’s brutal war

As Nigerian culture rises globally, why do we ignore seven decades of killing?

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

A TV interviewer sits across from a young woman in an outdoor setting

Michael Palin interviews Amina Ali Nkeki, a Boko Haram abduction survivor.

Themichaelpalin.com

Nigeria is the world's largest Black-majority country. Its richly diverse population includes over 235 million citizens, and its global diaspora numbers 17 million people. Famous for their cultural emphasis on education and professional achievement, Nigerians occupy senior positions of leadership and influence in every prominent industry on earth. From Los Angeles to London and Geneva to Rome, the world is replete with Nigerians working to create better lives for themselves, their families, and their communities.

In April 2024, British TV station Channel 5 first aired Michael Palin in Nigeria, a three-part travel documentary hosted by English actor and comedian Michael Palin. The series exposed viewers to the magnificence and difficulties of life in the Giant of Africa. From the destitute, famous floating mega-village Makoko in Lagos to thrilling polo games in the North, the docuseries testifies to how the world remains fascinated by Nigeria, despite the significant geopolitical, socioeconomic, and inter-religious challenges it faces.

Shockingly, one of the gravest of these challenges has escaped the world's gaze for decades. A brutal war has persisted in Nigeria for over 70 years. It has gained scant attention from leading Western media and has been largely ignored by the Nigerian media. Just one short segment of Palin’s series hints at it – when he interviewed a survivor of a Boko Haram abduction of schoolgirls a decade ago.

The war against Christians in Nigeria began in the middle of the twentieth century but was exacerbated by the Biafra War (1967-1970), a bloody civil war from which Nigerian society has never fully recovered. The war led to over one million casualties. Its causes included economic, political, interethnic, and interreligious factors. It brought out the ugly side of religion in Nigeria: violence between Muslims and Christians colonially coerced to cohabitate.

Since 2000, over 62,000 Christians living in Nigeria have been murdered for their faith. The International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law reported the killings of over 8,000 Christians in Nigeria in 2023 alone. Perpetrators of these lethal acts of violence include Boko Haram insurgents, Islamic State West Africa Province agents, and militias associated with the Fulani ethnic group. Despite the protracted duration of this unacceptable violence, Nigerian and Western Christian communities continue to turn a blind eye. Monthly attacks against Christians have grown by 25 per cent since 2021 and will likely increase.

Hundreds of miles from these outbreaks of sectarian violence, many Nigerian Christians feel too geographically removed for the violence to feel relevant to them personally.

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What factors might explain the global apathy towards anti-Christian violence in Nigeria? I have three answers to this question.

Firstly, many Nigerian Christians tend to prioritise other aspects of their identity, like their ethnicity or socioeconomic status, over their religion. This is because for these Nigerians ethnicity is the part of their identity most able to help them access networks, opportunities, and protection in a country where ethnic networks open doors socially and professionally. In 2014, Nigeria, then Africa's largest oil producer, had a continent-leading GDP of $574 billion. In 2024, Nigeria's GDP is projected to fall to $252 billion and its oil production has nosedived. Nigeria is experiencing one of the most debilitating downturns in its economic history.

In a desperate economic climate, many Nigerian Christians find themselves struggling to survive and simply lack the time or energy to support their fellow Christians. Prioritising non-religious features of their personal identity over their Christian faith leads these Nigerian Christians to ignore and emotionally distance themselves from the reality of anti-Christian violence in Nigeria.

Geography also contributes to this emotional distancing. Most murders of Christians happen in the Muslim-majority North of the country and in the Middle Belt, where the Muslim-majority North and Christian-majority South collide. Hundreds of miles from these outbreaks of sectarian violence, many Nigerian Christians feel too geographically removed for the violence to feel relevant to them personally.

Black suffering seems to only matter when linked to the Black Lives Matter movement or civil rights abuses of Black Americans mistreated by an unforgiving American system.

Secondly, the lack of Western Christian interest in Nigerian Christian suffering reflects an ambivalence rooted in a casual Christianity incompatible with biblical Christian solidarity. Christianity, despite misleading popular narratives characterising the faith as a declining religion of antiquity, remains the world’s largest religion by over half a billion followers. People living in Western societies, like the USA, UK, and many European countries, take for granted the civil, political, and legal freedoms they enjoy. They fail to acknowledge the historical spread of Christianity helped create the conditions for these freedoms to emerge. Lukewarm genres of cultural Christianity in the West could not be more different to the pure and authentic faith of Christians in Nigeria killed every day for their loyalty to Christ.

Thirdly, the Western media gaze deprioritises the significance of Black Christian suffering. In particular, the Western media gaze downplays the relevance and the ratings-oriented worthiness of suffering endured by Black Christians living outside of Western societies. White Christian suffering might appear as a footnote on websites of major media outlets. Black Christian suffering will unlikely be mentioned in the content of these platforms at all. Liberal values of Western media actors only drive them to report news of anti-Christian violence when it is linked to politically sexy stories able to increase consumer engagement. Moral outrage of anti-Christian violence, sometime in the historical lifespans of Western media entities, declined in ways no longer justifying its worthiness of headline coverage. Black suffering seems to only matter when linked to the Black Lives Matter movement or civil rights abuses of Black Americans mistreated by an unforgiving American system.

Jesus taught that the ultimate cost associated with being one of His true followers is high. Christians in Nigeria killed for their faith represent some of the best examples of genuine Christianity on earth and will be greatly rewarded for their sacrifices in the New Creation. Jesus teaches his followers to fear spiritual death rather than earthly death. Christians living today should do the same. Christianity’s Bible teaches Satan is the king of our sinful world. Satan delights in violence against Christians because as the ultimate predator he seeks to destroy the children of his enemy. The world ignores the killings of Christians in Nigeria because doing so serves the interests of its master.

The murder of one Christian anywhere globally is an assault on all Christians worldwide. Christians living in peaceful – both socially and religiously – regions of Nigeria (including the Southwest and Southeast) and in the Western world have a religious responsibility to repent of their apathy towards the killings of Christians in Nigeria. Still, more action must be taken. The global Christian community includes many thousands of Christians working in politically and financially influential centres of power globally. These Christians have a sacred duty to leverage their proximity to that power to petition leaders to intervene in any way possible to end the violence against Christians in Nigeria. Until every Christian in Nigeria is safe, the sanctity of the global Christian community will remain blemished.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Freedom of Belief

Politics

17 July 2025

4 min read

Anna Politkovskaya took on the Kremlin and she paid the ultimate price

The Russian journalist who became a martyr for truth

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A journalist wearing a body armour and a helmet looks defiant

Maxine Peak plays Anna.

Rolling Pictures

While truth recedes as a global public good, a war on journalists is taking shape. In 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded the highest number of journalists killed since collecting data thirty years ago. A large number of these were killed in Gaza, but there were deaths elsewhere: in Mexico, Syrian, Pakistan, Haiti, Myanmar. Many more than these at least 124 journalists were physically threatened and abused online; an unknown number have been imprisoned and abused by state authorities, shadowy militias or criminal gangs.

The illiberal tide is more powerful than the flow of liberal ideas today in the unregulated online market of opinion. A groundswell of distrust in so-called mainstream media has been effortlessly generated by sources with no obligations to impartiality and fewer professional standards round fact checking and evidence gathering. While every news source needs to be assessed for accuracy and fairness, the labelling of journalists as ‘enemies of the people’ by President Trump in his first term strayed into language used by the world’s despots. Territory occupied for many years by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The 2025 film Words of War tells the story of Anna Politkovskaya, reporter for the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta who rose to fame, and therefore to the attention of the Kremlin, through unvarnished despatches from the first Chechen war that uncovered terrible war crimes. Moscow learned its lesson for the second war in Chechnya by declaring the whole region off limits to reporters. For Politkovskaya, this provided an extra incentive to be there, returning to the country over forty times to document ever more awful crimes of disappearance, rape, and torture.

‘I witness very grave events and no-one else is reporting on them. I can’t not write about it’, Politkovskaya told the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford when they met. The meeting ended with some blunt Slavic advice: instead of interviewing a journalist about the war in Chechnya, the interviewer should be going there herself.

Words of War has an unreal quality to it. The actors are English, but the scenes are entirely Russian. It is a reminder of Armando Iannucci’s dark comedy The Death of Stalin and even shares an actor in Jason Isaacs, who swaps General Zhukov’s blunt Yorkshire accent for the more cultured tones of Politkovskaya’s anxious husband, Sasha.

Politkovskaya was a force of nature, and a devout Christian. She knew the kind of people she was messing with and what they were capable of, but she carried on the same, driven by an implacable will to truth. On flying to cover the appalling school siege at Beslan in 2004 – a scene the film begins with - she became violently ill, almost certainly a targeted poisoning like Alexei Navalny suffered on a plane over Siberia.

I get intimidating calls, people hovering in my hallway, she observed. There’ve been so many threats, there was a time when my editors decided my life really was in danger. But I’m used to it. If the FSB is so opposed to me, it only proves that what I’m doing is effective.

On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead as she entered her block of flats with a handful of groceries. It was Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Five men were eventually found guilty of organising and carrying out the murder, but the person who ordered the killing was never found out. Speculation round how high the order came from is, in a way, superfluous: this is the nature of Russia’s state in the twenty first century.

Elena Kostyuchenko is a millennial writer who features in the film as a young Novaya Gazeta intern and was inspired by her contact with Politkovskaya, ensuring a legacy in a younger generation:

She was the first person I saw when I came to the Novaya Gazeta editorial offices. Tall, radiant, with silver-white hair, flying down the hall. I didn’t recognise her. I was just struck by her beauty.

Stalin’s alleged mantra: no person, no problem, remains barely deniable Kremlin policy. The late politicians Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny are simply the highest profile of a large cohort of individuals barely known in the west who have opposed Putin with stunning levels of bravery. Caricaturing Russians as corrupt, rapacious and violent – as well as being a lazy trope - is to abuse the names of an untold number who retain their dignity, integrity and agency.

New histories are written in nations where regimes fall, but whether they tell a truthful story about the past depends on the environment the new authorities allow. The human rights group Memorial began this work in the early post-Soviet era, only to be shut down by Putin’s police officers. Words of War should have been made in Russia by Russians. One day maybe it will be, and Anna Politkovskaya will be seen across Russia for what she is: a martyr for truth. And not an enemy of the people.

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