Photo: Ambassador Onoh
By Ambassador Lilian Onoh
On Boxing Day, I was alarmed to see two different reports about the U.S. Missile strikes in Nigeria which contained such egregious factual errors about Nigeria’s statistics that I abandoned my laid back plans for the last week of the year to respond.
The first was from the BBC – “US launches strikes against Islamic State in Nigeria”, 25th December 2025, in which it stated that, “Jihadist groups such as Boko Haram and IS-linked offshoots have wrought havoc in north-eastern Nigeria for more than a decade, killing thousands of people. Most victims have been Muslims, according to Acled, a group that analyses political violence around the world” (emphasis mine). Not even the Nigerian government, which has consistently framed the genocidal erasure of Christian villages across Nigeria as general insecurity, has ever claimed that the majority of the victims of “Jihadists” are Moslems. That would make nonsense of the term, “Jihadist”!
The second report was from Firstpost, a site I previously trusted for independent analysis, in a video titled, “Trump Says “Merry Christmas” as U.S. Hits Islamic State Targets in Northwest Nigeria”, 26th December 2025, in which the anchor, Palki Sharma, claimed that Nigeria is a Muslim Majority country, with 56.1% Muslims and only 43.4% Christians! (photo attached). She also claimed that whilst Boko Haram and Islamic State have been active, there was no evidence that Christians were being singled out; a statement premised on the complete abdication of reason; with the names, “Islamic State” and “Boko Haram” needing no extra brain cells to explain their target!
In one day, two very trusted global news sites re-wrote Nigeria’s current history and in an insidious move, reported the intended outcome of the ongoing genocidal killings of Christians in Nigeria as fact; first by reclassifying Nigeria as a Moslem majority country; then by reducing Nigeria’s Christian population to a mere 43%, whilst irrationally claiming that the majority of those killed by Islamic Jihadists were Moslems.
To the vast majority of their readers/watchers, these are the only “facts” that they will know about Nigeria.
Since the killings started, the BBC has constantly framed the genocidal slaughter of Nigeria’s Christians as a “Climate Change” issue, consistently describing it as farmer-herder clashes, thereby erasing the fact that the villages that are attacked and slaughtered are Christian; and no single Moslem-majority village has suffered the same fate.
I don’t know who told Firstpost that Nigeria is a moslem majority country in a video already viewed by over a hundred thousand people. The reporter was duty bound to verify the statistics she reported as fact.
To reduce Nigeria’s Christians to a mere 43% is outrageous. To claim that there is no evidence of targeted killing of Christians flies in the face of the truth that Christians experience daily in Nigeria – a truth contained in the names of the killers: Islamic State (ISWAP), Boko Haram, Fulani terrorists, Jihadist, Bandits.
None of these terror groups are Christian. There are no Christian terrorist groups in Nigeria.
No Christian group has ever kidnapped Moslems, slaughtered them, kidnapped their daughters, wives, mothers and even grandmothers, gang raped them and held them as sex-slaves for over a decade; or kidnapped their Imams and forced them to dig their own graves before beheading them on video; or kidnapped and killed their trainee Imams as Christian Seminarians and Catholic Priests have been killed by these vile murderers.
No Christian terrorist group has demanded compulsory confiscation of land in Moslem majority states to engage in their private livestock business such as pig rearing or lose their lives, as Femi Adesina, Buhari’s spokesman, threatened Christians – a threat being enacted day after day without a single arrest made by the Government since it started.
No Christian group has kidnapped Moslem schoolgirls and demanded that they forcibly convert to Christianity or be kept as sex slaves after raping them to show them the fate that awaited them should they refuse. About a hundred Chibok school girls (all Christians) remain in Boko Haram captivity since 2014, forced to give birth to children begotten of mass rapes without any serious effort by the Government to rescue them. Leah Sharibu remains in captivity since 2018, when she was only 14, undergoing the same fate for refusing the convert to Islam. Ms. Sharma and the BBC should explain how these vile acts, publicly available for their edification, are not targeted at Christians.
No Christian group traverses farmlands in Northern Nigeria destroying their crops with their livestock, taking over their land to brew alcohol, or raise pigs, or raise poultry, or simply take it over to live in after killing the land owners.
No Christian group has kept hundred of schoolgirls as sex slaves, forced them to give birth to children whose fathers they cannot identify because of the mass raping involved. They have not burnt a single Moslem settlement. They have not burnt a schoolgirl like Deborah Samuels alive simply because Ms. Samuels acknowledged Jesus Christ as the source of her success in her exams.
Whilst there are no arrests for the thousands of killings of Christians, Sunday Jackson, a Christian farmer stabbed by a Fulani herdsman, is in jail, sentenced to death for defending himself against his would be murderer. Meanwhile, “repentant” Boko Haram members who have killed, raped and destroyed, are welcomed with millions of Naira as gifts and re-integrated into the armed forces, whilst their victims and their families are dying in internally displaced camps that are still under attack by the same Islamic terrorists.
If the BBC and Firstpost willingly overlooked these facts to push a false narrative that is designed to establish Nigeria as a Moslem majority country with Christians essentially portrayed as crying wolf, then there is a more insidious game at play.
The only other time I came across such an outrageous lie was in 2010, when I was an officer at the Nigerian High Commission in London; and Mr. Sola Enikanolaiye (currently President Tinubu’s Adviser on Foreign Affairs) took the brief that I had prepared for visiting military officers from the Commonwealth and without my knowledge, changed it to claim that Nigeria was 70% – 80% Moslem. I did not see the change until the briefs were handed out to the participants; but to the credit of Ambassador Dalhatu Tafida, when he was reading it out, he immediately balked when he saw Enikanolaiye’s concoction and instead he told the military officers from at least two dozen countries that Nigeria’s Christian/Moslem population was approximately 50-50.
Unfortunately, each military officer already had copies of the brief, with the High Commission’s logo at the top, which automatically made it an official document of Nigeria with which they would write their reports. It is people like Enikanolaiye to whom foreign media revert for information and who have no qualms about disseminating false information projecting Nigeria as a Moslem majority country. We are not.
If Census figures did not count goats in Northern compounds as humans, the truth is that Nigeria has more Christians than Moslems. There is no single Northern State without a Christian population of between 15% to 51% (Adamawa State). But the 11 States of the South-Eastern and South-South Nigeria are almost exclusively Christian. The Middle belt is predominantly Christian as are the Mid-West and South West. The truth is evident to all despite the lies pushed out by compromised foreign NGOs whose integrity has been eroded by the introduction of “donors” to keep them afloat.
The false narrative of Nigeria’s statistics, pushed by various formerly reputable NGOs, is exactly the projected long-term outcome of the targeted genocide of Christians in Nigeria, whose final intention is indeed to reduce Christians to a minority and establish Nigeria as an Islamic country. General IBB secretly took Nigeria into the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
Then under Buhari, who openly refused to recant on his statement that he would impose Sharia on Nigeria when questioned by Al Jazeera in 2015, there was an active media campaign falsely claiming that Igbos were only 80% Christian and 20% Moslem, at the same time as millions was suddenly made available to translate the Koran into Igbo! This happened at the peak of the relocation of murderous Fulani herdsmen into farmland in our villages, where they killed, raped and maimed with government backed impunity.
It was at around the time that Femi Adesina issued the threat to indigenous Christian villages in Southern Nigeria to accept compulsory confiscation of our ancestral farmlands for Fulanis to take over for their private cow-herding businesses or be killed. This clear statement of genocidal intent from President Buhari’s spokesman should never be forgotten.
What we are now witnessing with the international reporting of the situation is part of a long-term strategy to establish the planned outcome of the genocidal killing of Christians as fact. The intended outcome of Nigeria becoming majority moslem after the systematic genocide of Christians, is now being broadcast as established history even before the killings are done. If left unchallenged, these lies will be the facts that most of the world will have about Nigeria. We cannot let this happen.
In today’s information highway, the person with the most money and power to amplify their narrative wins; but it does not absolve us from the responsibility to fight back with the truth.
I am hereby calling on CAN to wake up from its slumber and create a vibrant media arm to counter the false narrative being pushed, otherwise one day, Nigeria’s Christians wake up and discover that Sola Enikanolaiye’s diabolical lies are the only “facts” known to external media and that Nigeria’s Christians are reduced to a mere 20% of the population, either by genocidal slaughter or by concocted “statistics”.
I urge Bishop Matthew Kukah to use what is left of his life and his access to the Vatican to tell the real truth instead of trying to educate Nigerians on the definition of “genocide”.
I urge every Christian with a voice to speak up. Sheikh Gumi cannot be the only voice that foreign media broadcast to the world as the view of Nigerians in response to the missile strike on murderous terrorists slaughtering Nigerians with impunity.
Those with finances should support the creation of a global media team to counter the very insidious false narrative being pushed by the murderers who clearly have enormous financial resources at their disposal. The era of passively expecting truth to prevail without effort is over. This short article is my own contribution.
