By Sam Jones
This month, Plateau State Governor Caleb Mutfwang went on national television and said the quiet part out loud: genocide is happening in Nigeria.
He wasn’t speaking in abstract terms or hinting at geopolitical tensions. He was describing the deliberate, systematic displacement of entire villages in central Nigeria by jihadist militias—over 64 communities in Bokkos, Barkin Ladi, and Riyom counties have been forcibly emptied, renamed, and seized. These aren’t just attacks; they are territorial conquests. Christian farming villages are being wiped from the map.
“This is being sponsored from somewhere,” Mutfwang said during his April 9 interview. “I cannot find any explanation other than genocide sponsored by terrorists.”
He’s right. What we are witnessing is a slow-motion ethno-religious cleansing, and the world is barely watching.
The most recent wave of attacks began April 2 and left more than 50 civilians dead, according to Truth Nigeria. Reports suggest the military is overwhelmed—outgunned, undermanned, and seemingly unable or unwilling to stem the tide of violence. This isn’t a new crisis. Mutfwang noted that these attacks have been escalating for nearly a decade, with no lasting federal response and little international pressure.
“If these attacks have been going on for close to 10 years, it tells you that there is a deliberate, conscious attempt to clean out populations and to reopen,” he warned.
“Reopen” is a chilling euphemism. These jihadist militias aren’t just murdering innocent people—they are repopulating the land. They are redrawing the ethnic and religious map of central Nigeria in blood.
For years, the narrative has been clouded in euphemism. Western media outlets report these atrocities as “clashes” or “farmer-herder conflicts,” as if two rival economic groups were having a dispute over land rights. But the pattern is too consistent, the victims too uniform, and the silence from Nigeria’s central government too convenient. This isn’t a land dispute. It’s a coordinated campaign by radical Islamic militias to erase Christian communities from Nigeria’s Middle Belt.
And the West—so quick to act in Ukraine, so passionate about minority rights when politically convenient—has barely acknowledged it.
How many more villages need to be razed before this is taken seriously? How many more names must be scratched off the map before we stop calling it a “conflict” and name it for what it is: a genocide?
It’s time for the U.S. State Department to re-designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern for religious freedom violations. It’s time for international human rights organizations to stop dancing around the issue and call this what it is. And it’s time for believers around the world to pray—and act—for their brothers and sisters in Nigeria.
Because if we wait much longer, there may be no one left to protect.
