Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who has denied the existence of persecution against Christians in his country, was obliged to postpone his trips to the G20 and AU-EU summits on Wednesday due to the ongoing crises of a mass schoolgirl kidnapping and a brutal jihadi attack on a church.
Tinubu was scheduled to depart for Johannesburg, South Africa, on Thursday to attend the G20 summit, and then travel to Luanda, the capital of Angola, for the African Union-European Union (AU-EU) summit next week.
Instead, Tinubu postponed his trip to deal with the security crises in the states of Kebbi and Kwara. Kebbi was the scene of a violent mass kidnapping on Monday, when a gang of “bandits” somehow waltzed past military checkpoints, hopped over the fences around a girls’ school, murdered several staff members, kidnapped 25 of the students, and vanished into the wilderness.
One of the kidnapped girls reportedly escaped from her captors a few hours after the attack and has returned home safely. As of Thursday, the kidnappers have not identified themselves or made any demands.
“Authorities say the gunmen are mostly former herders who have taken up arms against farming communities after clashes between them over strained resources,” Al Jazeera News delicately suggested on Thursday.
Those “former herders” would be the Fulani, a Muslim tribe that has been attacking Christian farming villages for years, in what human rights groups describe as a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing or genocide to drive them away from their lands.
“Nigeria is grappling with an Islamist insurgency in the northeast, abductions and killings by armed gangs mainly in the northwest and deadly clashes between mainly Muslim herdsmen and mostly Christian farmers in its central belt,” Reuters noted in the course of reporting Tinubu’s postponed trip to South Africa.
On Wednesday, a gang of masked jihadis armed with rifles and machetes stormed the Christ Apostolic Church in Kwara, firing wildly into the pews and killing at least three of the worshipers. Videos of the event showed terrified parishioners seeking cover from the hail of bullets and children screaming amid the gunfire.
A local community spokesman said on Wednesday at least ten members of the Christ Apostolic Church congregation were kidnapped.
The spokesman said desperate pleas for help to state and local government officials while the attackers were penetrating the local community and scouting the church went “unanswered,” although he commended local police for “doing a fantastic job by following our local hunters to the forests to track the hideout of the bandits and chase them away.”
Within hours of the church shooting, Tinubu’s office confirmed the death of Nigerian Army Brig. Gen. Musa Uba, who was kidnapped by jihadis from the Islamic State – West Africa Province (ISWAP) in an ambush on Friday that killed four of his soldiers. Uba was reportedly “interrogated” by the jihadis and then killed.
The Nigerian army initially denied Uba’s kidnapping, but ISWAP published photos of the ambush and Uba’s execution on Monday, and two days later Tinubu made the acknowledgement official. The Nigerian president said he was “depressed with the tragic death of our soldiers and officers on active duty.”
“I am also depressed that heartless terrorists have disrupted the education of innocent schoolgirls. I have directed the security agencies to act swiftly and bring the girls back to Kebbi State,” he said.
President Donald Trump called out Tinubu’s government on November 1, warning that if Nigeria “continues to allow the killing of Christians,” the United States would “immediately stop all aid and assistance,” and might “very well go into that now-disgraced country, guns a-blazing, to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
The Trump administration has designated Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for religious persecution due to the ongoing abduction and murder of Christians.
Tinubu and his officials responded by angrily denying there was any particular persecution of Christians in Nigeria, offering the uninspiring defense that everyone in Nigeria is at constant risk of murder and kidnapping. Tinubu said he regarded Trump’s warning of possible military action as a “threat” to his government and Nigeria’s sovereignty.
The Times of London on Thursday reported Nigerians have grown weary of their government making constant excuses for not protecting them, and the church attack in Kwara might be the last straw:
As the video of the church attack spread on social media, showing gunmen stalking the church and seizing terrified congregants, anger has grown among Nigerians at what they see as their government’s failure to protect them from threats from every direction. These include jihadist insurgencies, violent banditry, mass kidnappings, clashes between herders and farmers, and a secessionist uprising.
Opposition leader Atiku Abubakar said on Thursday it was time for Tinubu to either “ask for help or resign.”
