Dogs that don’t bark and prophets who don’t speak truth in Nigeria

BY DAVE BRAT AND DOUGLAS BURTON

Civil wars are to Africa what sand is to the Sahara desert, and yet, genocidal conflict in Nigeria should concern Americans the most. 

Which is to say, the United States has a dog in the fight about whether Nigeria stays an emerging democracy or emerges as the next Islamist Caliphate. Nigeria isn’t close to collapsing, but it has been fighting an Islamic State-linked insurgency for 20 years in its Lake Chad region. The jihadists aligned with ISIS along with the  radicalised bandit terrorists  are behind what’s been called a “Christian genocide.” Radicalised Islamist killers have taken down 55,000 people in just the last four years, according to a widely published four-year study by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA). Yet, the human tragedy in West Africa doesn’t merit a cameo in Western TV news. 

But the dirty secret no one talks about is that there are three blockages to getting the news out based on Nigerians themselves.

First, some truth tellers in Nigeria’s news media have been lapdogs to government, or as Sherlock Holmes famously said, they are the dogs that  didn’t bark during a murder. Or maybe they are just paid off by the corrupt Nigerian officials to spike the story. In Nigeria, reporters get paid to attend official press events in brown envelopes stuffed with cash from the event sponsors, and for that perk, the working-class journos happily parrot the government mantra that the root causes of the violence are poverty, lack of education and life-altering effects of climate change. 

Second reason, and this is heartbreaking, Nigeria’s  prosperity preachers don’t denounce the Nigerian government’s flagrant track record of turning a blind eye to massacres of sleeping families in the nation’s Middle Belt. It’s simply bad for business at the vaulted domes of the pentecostal emporiums. When a preacher steps out of line to challenge the federal government on this point, it soon happens that the preacher lacks a building permit, or his taxes need review. 

True, there are some voices in the church who exposed the Nigerian army’s complicity with the terrorists during the bitter eight years of rule by President Muhammadu Buhari. Among them are Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah in Sokoto  and Anglican bishop Jacob Kwashi of Zonkwa Diocese.

Bishop Kwashi, for example, in August, 2021 said at a mass funeral: “We have never seen an evil government in this country like the one of today. The government is fully in support of the bloodshed in Nigeria. We are being killed just because we are not Muslim.” 

But the sad fact is that the voices of  Bishop Kukah and Bishop Kwashi are the exceptions that prove the rule in Nigeria. 

The wealthy leaders of the megachurches are themselves part of the “conspiracy of silence,”  according to Baptist pastor Joseph Hayab, a former chairman of Christian Association of Nigeria in Kaduna.

“I am disappointed with Nigerian preachers who are hiding in their churches speaking prosperity and prophecy, but they won’t’ speak truth to power,” Hayab says. 

Third, the Nigerian government spokesmen and their allies in think tanks such as the International Crisis Group, will attribute the loss of life to ethnic clashes that are centuries old, or a resource war. 

The Nigerian regime apologists are happy to follow the talking point of Secretary of State Antony Blinken himself, who told the house committee on appropriations on May 22, 2024  that  what is happening in Nigeria is horrible, “But it has nothing to do with religion.”

The Nigerian government spokesmen claim that radicalised mercenaries slashing their way through women and children shouting, “God is great,”  are just “communal clashes” between hapless farmers and frustrated herders forced by climate change to invade cornfields with endless herds of cattle. What the media never say is that the farmers are typically unarmed whereas the attackers come with assault rifles by the hundreds. By all accounts, the bloodletting in Nigeria is accelerating and is related to dozens of insurgent attacks linked to Islamic State in West Africa or Al Qaeda groups in the Sahelian nations bordering Nigeria. 

Nigeria needs the help of the West to solve a crisis that threatens the whole of Africa. The first step for Nigerian media and the nation’s leaders is to honestly diagnose the problem: sectarian hatred. 

Dr Dave Brat, PhD, is a former US congressman representing a district in Richmond and is today in Lynchburg, Virginia. Douglas Burton is the editor of TruthNigeria.