THE forced displacement and killing of Christians in Nigeria is not the product of climate change, or clashes between farmers and herders, but religiously motivated persecution, a bishop there said this week.
The RC Bishop of Makurdi, Dr Wilfred Anagbe, whose diocese is in the Middle Belt state of Benue, said on Tuesday that the international community needed to acquire a “clear narrative of what is going on. Previously it has been said it was based on climate change and farmers and herders clashing. . . That is not the reason.”
He spoke of a “clear, orchestrated agenda or plan of Islam to take over the territories” of people who were “predominantly Christian”. In some parts of Nigeria, villages were being given new Islamic names. “It is about the conquest and occupation of the land.”
Climate change was occurring in other countries, without simultaneous forced displacement, he said. Benue State was 99 per cent Christian; its economy was not based on rearing cattle.
In November, the UNCHR put the number of people in Benue State displaced by “conflict between communities” at an estimated half a million. “Similar clashes are playing out across the Sahel region as climate change disrupts traditional livelihoods and intensifies competition for dwindling supplies of water and productive land,” it said in a press release.
Changing rainfall patterns and severe desertification had driven cattle herders to central and southern Nigeria, “where population growth and frequent flooding have reduced the amount of land available for grazing”.
Earlier this month, Bishop Anagbe addressed members of the United States Congress, telling the House of Representatives’ foreign-affairs subcommittee on Africa that “the experience of the Nigerian Christians today can be summed up as that of a Church under Islamist extermination”, the National Catholic Register reported. The authorities had failed to arrest perpetrators of violence, he said, enabling them to act with impunity.
He told the Church Times this week that, between 2018 and 2025, he had lost about 40 to 50 parishes, and that parishioners had been “slaughtered” in their dozens. The number of people displaced in Benue State had reached two million, he said. In just one of the nine IDP camps in his diocese, 3000 people had taken shelter.
Fr Remigius Ihyula, a project partner of Aid to the Church in Need and head of the Foundation for Justice, Development and Peace in Makurdi diocese, said that people in the camps were “almost being starved to death”. The situation was worse than in Gaza. “They are reduced to live worse than animals. . . Nobody is speaking about this. When you do try to speak about it, your life is threatened.”
Agenzia Fides, a news agency of the Vatican, reported this month that data collected by the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria indicated that, between 2015 and 2025, 145 priests had been kidnapped in Nigeria. Of these, 11 had been killed, while four remained missing. Last week, the diocese of Auchi, in southern Nigeria, told Vatican News that a 21-year-old seminarian, Andrew Peter, had been murdered by his abductors.
On Tuesday, Dr Anagbe addressed a meeting in Parliament organised by Aid to the Church in Need and hosted by Lord Alton of Liverpool. Aid to the Church in Need reported last year that, in the past 12 years, more than 17,500 churches had been attacked, two million Christian schools had been destroyed, and at least three million people had been internally displaced across the Middle Belt of Nigeria. In any given year, the numbers of Christians killed by extremist groups was “rarely less than 4000 — often more than in the rest of the world combined”.