Nigeria is the world’s most deadly place to be a Christian. John Pontifex asks when the West will shake off its apparent indifference to the plight of those targeted for their faith and call the country’s new government to account.
Standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street with colleagues from Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), the memory of what a priest had told us kept ringing in my ears:
“We do not want to believe that justice will be denied to those people who came to [our] church to kill many people, to massacre, to maim and destroy the Church of God and kill many souls.”
Father Michael Abugan is parish priest of St Francis Xavier’s Church, Owo, in south-west Nigeria, where 41 people were killed and more than 80 were injured in a terrorist attack during Mass on 5 June 2022.
And here we were, exactly one year on from that terrible day, presenting the ACN petition calling on the UK government to do more to lobby its Nigerian counterparts to bring the perpetrators to justice.
This was an atrocity in which numerous terrorists brandishing guns and explosives had committed a crime in broad daylight in the presence of hundreds of people. Despite this, nobody has been charged in connection with the attack, according to police reports given to Father Abugan and other Church leaders.
Early on, extremist militant group Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) was identified and implicated but the trail seems to have gone cold.
What makes the situation so frustrating for the people of Owo is that right from the moment the atrocity took place up until the point we handed in our petition and beyond, Church leaders have spared no effort in trying to cajole the Nigerian authorities to bring the criminals to book.
Nor have they ceased pleading with the West for help.
But who is listening?
It is a question all the more timely after Bola Tinubu was sworn in as president of Nigeria promising to tackle the country’s insecurity as a “top priority”.
As a Catholic charity supporting persecuted and other suffering Christians, ACN has worked with Bishop Jude Arogundade of Ondo, whose diocese includes Owo, to raise awareness of what happened that dark day and appeal to the international community to spur the authorities in Nigeria into action. For us, a high point in this advocacy endeavour came when the charity invited the bishop to come to the UK. Lord Alton of Liverpool and Baroness Cox of Queensbury, both long-serving champions of the rights of religious minorities, were quick to welcome the bishop to parliament.
In the House of Lords, where there was a launch of ACN’s 2022 “Persecuted and Forgotten? A Report on Christians oppressed for their Faith”, which highlighted the Owo massacre, Bishop Arogundade said the atrocity is just one example showing how religious hatred is a key driver in the conflict.
Highlighting, among others, Islamist militant group Boko Haram, the so-called “military wing” of Nigeria’s Fulani herdsmen, as well as ISWAP, he said: “They all have the same goal and objective, to establish [an] Islamic caliphate in Nigeria, to expand their territorial control over Nigeria’s land and resources and to subjugate the infidels, that is the Christians and non-Muslims, and Muslims who are not as radicalised as they are.”
By the time Bishop Arogundade came to the UK, he had already encountered difficulties persuading some in the West of the religious dimension to Nigeria’s conflict. Few, including the bishop, would dispute the complex factors at work in the spiralling conflict, drivers which include security breakdown, the illegal spread of sophisticated weapons, ethnic divisions as well as clashes between farmers and herdsmen, driven by climate change to seek pastures new.
But for church leaders including Bishop Arogundade none of these factors obscure the role played by religious hatred.
The bishop spoke out when, two days after the Owo massacre, Ireland’s President Michael D Higgins warned against “any attempt to scapegoat pastoral peoples who are among the foremost victims of the consequences of climate change”.
In response, the bishop stated on Facebook: “Alluding to some form of politics of climate change in our situation is completely inappropriate.”
The Owo atrocity was by no means the first time that Christians had been singled out for attack. As published in ACN’s “Persecuted and Forgotten?” report, more than 7,600 Christians were killed between January 2021 and June 2022.
Of the 5,621 Christians who were slain around the world last year, as reported in Christian persecution charity Open Doors’ World Watch List, covering the worst 50 countries, 90 per cent of the deaths took place in Nigeria.
According to research by SBM Intelligence, 39 priests were killed last year in Nigeria and more than 30 were abducted. Although ransom lies behind many attacks, a religious motivation is evident in numerous others.
Bishop Arogundade is among many to have warned that the killings have increased and, with the religious freedom environment so volatile, Nigeria has risen up the World Watch List rankings and now stands at sixth place, not far behind the likes of Eritrea, Libya and Yemen.
Many Christian persecution observers also noted that the atrocity in Owo in south-west Nigeria suggested that religiously motivated violence is spreading across the country, well away from its epicentre in the north-east and the Middle Belt.
Further demonstrating the reach of the extremists, in Benin city, also in south-west Nigeria, Father Charles Igechi, barely 10 months into his priesthood, was ambushed and shot dead on 7 June this year.
In 2020, for the first time, Nigeria was included in the US State Department’s list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC). The reasons given included systematic, ongoing and serious violations of religious freedom, attacks by Boko Haram and ethno-religious violence.
But the following year, despite evidence suggesting that the situation had got worse, Nigeria was removed from the list. Writing in Newsweek, Lela Gilbert, a fellow of the Hudson Institute, stated that the US had removed Nigeria from the CPC list “with no explanation whatsoever”. She added: “The delisting amounted to a license for ongoing violence and an outrageous betrayal of Nigeria’s increasingly brutalised Christian community.”
As a pastoral charity, ACN emphasises the violence’s impact on the victims.
Welcoming Bishop Arogundade to London last November on behalf of ACN and chaperoning him to meetings across the capital, for me one of the moving moments came when we stopped for a coffee and he showed me a picture of one of the survivors of the atrocity.
It was of a woman in hospital who had lost both legs and her sight in one eye. I suppose one reason why I identify with Margaret Attah is that she is almost exactly my age – 48. On the day of the attack, Margaret was singing up in the organ loft. When the shooting started, she and the other musicians ran downstairs.
There was an explosion and Margaret’s life changed forever. This nurse and mother of four young children is now learning to live reliant on prosthetic legs.
All of this she was to tell me herself when I interviewed her. I remember, towards the end of the conversation, I asked if she was angry about what had happened to her. But she said: “I know I will not be able to live quite as I did before but I thank God I am alive. I have so many reasons to be grateful to God.”
Margaret is gradually becoming accustomed to her new life. But for the scars to heal, she and the 80 or more injured need justice. They need to see those who carried out such barbaric acts brought to book.
The trouble is that, at the time of writing, that search for justice looks barely any closer than on the day of the attack.
Nearly 6,000 people signed ACN’s Nigeria petition. In presenting it at 10 Downing Street, Aid to the Church in Need is begging government to start listening to the cries of those who suffered that day and take action to ensure that they have not suffered in vain.
John Pontifex is head of press and public affairs at Aid to the Church in Need (UK).
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