Why is the BBC denying the persecution of Nigeria’s Christians?

Earlier this month, US president Donald Trump condemned Nigeria over the violent persecution of its Christian minority by Islamist groups like Boko Haram, Fulani militants and other violent actors. Trump called Nigeria a ‘country of particular concern’, and he is not alone. This weekend, Pope Leo XIV picked out Nigeria as a nation in which Christians are being persecuted.

They’re right to be concerned. Getting a handle on the specific numbers of Christians affected is difficult. But according to a report issued in August by the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety), an African nongovernmental group that documents human-rights violations, more than 7,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria in the first seven months of this year alone. Furthermore, Intersociety estimates that, between 2009 and 2023, at least 52,000 Christians have been killed and 18,500 have been abducted and are unlikely to have survived. Additionally, more than 20,000 churches and Christian schools have been attacked.

You would think that reports of the large-scale persecution and slaughter of Christians in Nigeria would have piqued the interest of Western media. But while there is certainly more attention on the plight of Nigerian Christians in recent weeks, too many outlets have responded cynically. They haven’t just questioned Trump’s claim – they have also refused to accept that Christians are really being persecuted at all.

The BBC is a case in point. ‘Are Christians being persecuted in Nigeria as Trump claims?’ ran a headline from the BBC’s ‘Global Disinformation Unit’. The article suggested Trump’s claims were simply a response to propaganda from prominent American Christians, including Republican senator Ted Cruz. The BBC concluded that the evidence of the killings was ‘difficult to verify’.

‘Difficult to verify’? The BBC has barely made an attempt to check whether the claim is true. Members of the Beeb’s disinfo unit asked the Nigerian government about Trump’s claims, which it promptly and predictably dismissed as ‘a gross misrepresentation of reality’. Citing a Nigerian security analyst, the BBC admitted that while some attacks had occurred, ‘it was not possible to justify claims that Christians were being deliberately targeted’. Indeed, the BBC quoted the Nigerian government’s own statement: ‘Terrorists attack all who reject their murderous ideology – Muslims, Christians and those of no faith alike.’

To an extent, this is true. Boko Haram, the principal jihadist group in the region, do target moderate Muslims, too. As a Salafist group, committed to returning to the ‘pure’ Islam of Muhammad’s earliest followers, it allows for no deviation from its own interpretation of Islam. It therefore deems Nigeria’s Sufi Muslims (who amount to 37 per cent per cent of Nigeria’s Muslim population) as heretical.

However, Islamist militants’ targeting of Christians is of a very different nature to its targeting of those it deems to be heretical Muslims. When Boko Haram attacks mosques, it aims to replace them with mosques preaching the ‘correct’ form of Islam. Yet when it attacks Christian places of worship – nearly 1,200 Christian churches are destroyed annually in Nigeria – it explicitly intends to erase Christian places of worship. Nigerian Christians are not merely ‘collateral damage’ of ‘various security crises’, as the BBC would have it. They are murdered with the intent to purge Nigerian society of Christians.

The media’s whitewashing of Chrisian persecution in Nigeria doesn’t stop there. Outlets, including the BBC again, claim that rural Fulani militia groups are primarily interested in access to land and water. What they neglect to mention is that the Fulani are not just a semi-nomadic group of herders and traders. They are also Muslim, and their militias are motivated by a largely ethnic animus. Indeed, Fulani gunmen have regularly targeted churches and, in addition to murdering Christian citizens, have also abducted and killed pastors. If this wasn’t evidence enough of the religious nature of Fulani-militia violence, many kidnapped Christians report being targeted only after they had their religious identity confirmed.

The persecution of Christians is further demonstrated by the imposition of Sharia law in 12 of Nigeria’s overwhelmingly Muslim northern states. Sharia codifies a whole host of gory punishments – including death – for blaspheming against Islam. There’s little doubt its introduction has emboldened Muslim mobs in their targeting of ‘infidels’. Christian student Deborah Yakubu was murdered by one of these mobs in 2022. According to CNN, she was ‘stoned, beat and set on fire’ for allegedly making a blasphemous comment online.

The exact number of Christians killed in Nigeria by Islamists is by no means easy to gauge. This is hardly a surprise in a country that hasn’t had a census in more than 20 years, and over large parts of which militias still exert control. This is why it is perfectly fine to question Trump’s claims and the scale of the persecution. But too many in Western media aren’t doing that – they are turning a blind eye or worse, actively denying there is a problem at all. Not for the first time, the likes of the BBC are running interference for violent Islamist intolerance.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is a writer based in Pakistan.