When U.S. President Donald Trump announced that America might “intervene” in Nigeria over what he described as the systematic killing of Christians, it sent shock waves across diplomatic circles and ripples of mixed emotion through the Nigerian church.
To many Christians, Trump’s words, however undiplomatic, struck a chord long dulled by official denial and international indifference. For years, the Nigerian Christian community has cried out over the relentless attacks on churches, abductions of priests, destruction of villages, and massacres in the Middle Belt and parts of the North. Each time, the cries are met with political silence, empty condemnations, or statistics meant to blur the horror.
But when an outsider finally speaks up-albeit in his trademark bombastic tone, the Nigerian government’s first reaction is not sober introspection but defensive outrage. It rushed to reject Trump’s claim, insisting that Nigeria is not a “religiously intolerant country.” But what, then, are the thousands of graves in Plateau, Benue, and Southern Kaduna? What are the burned churches, the orphaned children, the families displaced and forgotten?
This is not an editorial endorsing some form of foreign military action. Nigeria must not become a battlefield for another superpower’s ego. But Trump’s words, however brash, reflect a painful truth: the world has noticed what our own leaders pretend not to see. When Christian lives are continually lost and the state fails to protect them, silence becomes complicity.
There is something truly sad that has been happening in Nigeria; it is the willingness to politicise pain and minimise persecution. Successive leadership has danced around the issue of religiously motivated violence, afraid to confront extremists or acknowledge bias in the system. The result is a climate of impunity. Killers walk free. Victims are blamed. And the Church is told to “pray and move on.”
It is disheartening that while Nigerian Christians bury their dead, the government prepares to impose new burdens, including the 2026 tax reforms-that will further squeeze already impoverished citizens, many of whom are victims of insecurity. A government that cannot guarantee safety has no moral right to heap economic misery on its people.
If Trump’s outburst achieves one thing, let it be this: shaming our leaders into action. Let them not hide behind sovereignty while failing in their sovereign duty to protect every Nigerian life, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise.
Nigeria’s Christians are not asking for pity or for a foreign saviour, but rather they are asking for justice. They are demanding that their lives, their worship, and their communities be treated as sacred, not as expendable casualties of political cowardice.
The Nigerian government must rise beyond denial and deception. The security agencies must be restructured and depoliticised. Perpetrators of the attacks must be named, prosecuted, and punished. Dialogue must replace cover-up; action must replace rhetoric.
If the state fails to act, it invites others to speak, and even threaten to act in its stead. That is the moral vacuum into which Trump has spoken; a vacuum created by years of leadership indifference and religious pretense.
It is a shame that Nigeria cannot claim the status of secular democracy when its citizens are being slaughtered across the country because of their faith. The killings must stop, not because Trump said so but because the conscience of a nation so demands.
Nobody wants foreign soldiers marching through our land. But nobody should have to worship God under the shadow of fear, either. The Nigerian government needs to make a choice: protect its people or continue down the path of denial and disgrace. The time for excuses is over. If we cannot defend our faithful, then no flag, no sovereignty, and no slogan will save us from moral collapse.
