Trump repeats falsehood about Nigeria, claims “genocide” ongoing

“I think Nigeria is a disgrace. The whole thing is a disgrace,” the American president said on Fox News.

US President Donald Trump doubled down on his attacks on Nigeria on Friday, accusing the country of failing to protect Christians, and using the term “genocide” for the first time to describe the violence in Africa’s most populous country.

“I think Nigeria is a disgrace. The whole thing is a disgrace,” the American president said on Fox News Radio’s The Brian Kilmeade Show. “They’re killing people by the thousands. It’s a genocide. And I’m really angry about it.”

Earlier, Mr Trump threatened to take military action in Nigeria if its leaders did not take urgent and deliberate steps to halt the killings of Christians by non-state actors.

These murders, he claimed, have reached genocidal proportions. He doubled down on this false claim with an unprovoked denigration of the country on Friday.

“And we pay, you know, we give a lot of subsidy to Nigeria, which we’re going to end up stopping.

“The government’s done nothing. They are very ineffective. They’re killing Christians at will. And you know, until I got involved in it two weeks ago — nobody even talked about it.”

Mr Trump re-designated Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) over the allegation of persecution of Christians. Nigeria is one of the 13 nations that the US has placed on that pariah list. Mr Trump had included the oil-rich nation in the same category during his first term in office in 2020, but his successor, Joe Biden, delisted it in 2021.

According to Mr Trump, “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the USA may very well go into that now disgraced country, guns-a-blazing, to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

He further declared that the military action would be “fast, vicious and sweet.” As a result, he claimed to have ordered his Department of War to prepare for the assault.

In response to Mr Trump’s rhetorics, President Bola Tinubu said Nigeria would continue to engage the US diplomatically and welcome support to defeat terrorism.

PREMIUM TIMES reported that Nigeria’s National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, and top government officials met with US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon on Friday to discuss the allegations of Christian genocide.

How true is the claim of Christian genocide in Nigeria

Nigeria faces different forms of insecurity with various armed groups operating in different parts of the country. The groups, with different motives, kill and kidnap thousands of people across the country.

On Friday, gunmen abducted over 200 students from a Catholic school in central Nigeria. Before then, on Monday, kidnappers took about 25 Muslim students from a school in the northwestern part of the country. Rescue efforts are underway, but the fate of the kidnapped students is not known.

Armed violence in Nigeria manifests in different but overlapping forms, driven by a mix of historical grievances, ethnic tensions, economic disparities, religious extremism, climate change, and weak governance. A single narrative cannot accurately capture this situation, according to a PREMIUM TIMES analysis of the security situation.

While the North-east region faces insurgent attacks from Boko Haram and other Jihadi groups who seek to eradicate Western education and civilisation, the North-west struggles with armed banditry.

The North-central region deals with frequent communal, ethno-religious, and farmer-herder conflicts, the South-east faces agitations by separatists, and the South-south battles with militancy. None of the major sects has solely targeted Christians as part of an organised, systematic effort to eliminate them, as Mr Cruz and other Americans have claimed.

Security analysts and researchers also say the claim of a “Christian genocide” in Nigeria is false and misleading. They argue that it reflects a deep misreading of Nigeria’s security realities and exposes the undercurrents of a clearly mischievous agenda.

The Nigerian government has repeatedly rejected the allegations, describing them as “a gross misrepresentation of reality.” Officials argue that terrorists “attack all who reject their murderous ideology — Muslims, Christians, and those of no faith alike

Credible media reports, including one by the BBC, have found that much of the data used to support the genocide claims cannot be independently verified.

The New York Times reported on Friday that there is no clear evidence to suggest Christians are attacked any more frequently than Muslims.

“Contrary to Mr Trump’s claim of a genocide, there are different types of violence happening across the country, with no one-size-fits-all explanation. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation, with, by some estimates, more than 230 million people. It’s geographically huge and ethnically diverse, with over 300 languages spoken.”

“Even within a single region, attributing the violence to a single group or motivation is tricky,” the New York Times reports.

PREMIUM TIMES editorial also dismissed the genocide narrative as “false and misleading,” given that there is no official mastermind of such impunity.

“Yet, we acknowledged the reality of killings affecting both Christians and Muslims, perpetrated by non-state actors. This context exposes Washington’s gross misrepresentation of the facts of Nigeria’s security situation and betrays the underbelly of a clearly mischievous agenda,” the editorial read.

Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project, which uses verifiable sources, presents a different picture from the one used by Mr Trump.

ACLED estimates that just under 53,000 civilians of all faiths have been killed in targeted political violence since 2009. Between 2020 and September 2025, about 21,000 civilians were killed in abductions, attacks, sexual violence and bombings.

ACLED identified 384 incidents where Christians were specifically targeted, leading to 317 deaths, and 417 Muslims were killed in similar targeted attacks.

On Thursday, the Director of the Africa Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Oge Onubogu, warned that US military intervention would worsen Nigeria’s fractures.

“If the Trump administration proceeds with unilateral military action in Nigeria, it could endanger the Christians it aims to protect and worsen divisions along religious lines, she told the American Congress, adding, the US–Nigeria engagement must be “from a place of honesty” and Nigerians must “acknowledge something must be done quickly about the levels of insecurity.”

Ms Onubogu cautioned against a “narrow narrative that reduces Nigeria’s security situation to a single story.”