“Which State Is Next?” is no longer a careless question thrown around on social media. It has become a quiet fear in many Nigerian homes, especially among Christians who feel they are living under the shadow of a slow, unending war. That fear has sharpened since President Donald Trump turned Nigeria into a global headline again. This time, he openly spoke about “genocide against Christians” and even threatened to cut aid and consider military action if the killings continue.
From the moment President Trump began to frame the crisis in Nigeria as “Christian genocide”, the Presidency moved quickly into diplomatic defence. President Tinubu’s government insists that Nigeria is committed to religious freedom and that violence here is complex-driven by terrorism, banditry, and local disputes over land and resources, not a state-backed plan to wipe out Christians. Senior officials, presidential advisers, Governors and some politicians have echoed this line in interviews and opinion pieces, arguing that Muslims have also been killed in their thousands by Boko Haram, ISWAP, and bandits, and warning that the word “genocide” is being used loosely for foreign political gain. The African Union’s leadership has also publicly rejected the genocide label, saying that while Nigeria is facing severe violence, it does not fit the classical definition of genocide.
Yet, while diplomats argue over definitions, people in villages and small towns are left to argue with gunfire. In any given year in recent times, Christian advocacy groups estimate that at least 4,000 Christians are killed in Nigeria by extremist actors–often more than in the rest of the world combined. One 2025 report put it even more starkly: an average of about 30 Christians killed every day, tens of thousands of churches attacked or destroyed over the years, more than 1,100 Christian communities displaced, and hundreds of pastors and priests abducted. Independent conflict trackers also show that attacks on Christians have risen alongside a wider explosion of violence targeting civilians of all backgrounds across the country.
This is the tension at the heart of the debate. On one side, there is a global narrative, especially in Western political and religious circles, that sees Nigeria as the world’s epicentre of Christian martyrdom. On the other hand, there is the official Nigerian and African diplomatic line that insists: “There is no genocide here; there is a complex security crisis.” Between these two narratives stand ordinary Nigerians, many of them Christians in rural areas, who have buried too many loved ones to care about terminology. For them, the argument over whether to call it “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, or “banditry” feels like arguing about the name of the fire while the house is still burning.
ALSO READ
The recent attack in Eruku, Kwara State, has pushed this tension into new territory. During a live-streaming church programme at the Christ Apostolic Church, Oke Isegun, suspected bandits invaded the community. Media reports and police accounts suggest that at least two to three people were killed, and a number of worshippers–variously reported as around ten to over thirty–were abducted from the church. Until now, Kwara was not widely seen as a frontline of religiously tinged violence. Its image has been that of a relatively calm corridor between Nigeria’s more volatile regions. That illusion has now been shattered. When an attack like this hits a church in a quiet town in Kwara, the national map of fear is redrawn. The question “Which state is next?” stops being abstract.
What is happening in Nigeria is not a single, simple story. Several fires are burning in the same house. In the northeast, groups like Boko Haram and ISWAP have a long record of targeting churches, Christians, mosques that oppose them, schools, markets—any symbol of the state or of “unbelievers”. In the north-central belt, long-running disputes over land, climate pressure, and competition between herders and farmers have mixed with ethnic and religious identity, turning local quarrels into massacres. In the northwest, criminal bandit gangs kidnap for ransom and raid villages, but often along lines that still mirror local ethnic and religious divides. In the south, sporadic attacks, secessionist tensions, and criminal kidnapping add new layers of insecurity.
When President Trump calls this whole picture a “genocide against Christians”, he is speaking to a real and painful pattern. There is clear evidence that Christian communities, especially in the Middle Belt and parts of the north, have been hit again and again with shocking brutality. For many of those communities, the word “genocide” captures their emotional reality. They feel targeted, abandoned, and gradually erased. At the same time, Nigerian and international researchers warn that collapsing all the crises into a single “Christian genocide” frame is risky. It can erase the suffering of Muslim communities who have also been massacred by terrorists and bandits, and it can feed polarising narratives that turn a complex national security emergency into an imported “religious war” storyline.
The Nigerian government’s defensive posture is therefore partly understandable. No state wants to be branded a genocide zone. But the deeper problem is that the Presidency’s response has often sounded more like image management than crisis management. Officials repeat that “both Christians and Muslims are victims,” which is true, but they rarely engage honestly with the fact that certain Christian-majority areas have been attacked in patterns that demand serious, targeted protection. They talk about sovereignty and foreign interference but appear slower to talk about specific accountability. Who ordered which attack? Who financed it? Who has been arrested, tried, and convicted—not in one or two high-profile cases, but across the hundreds of incidents that have scarred communities for more than a decade?
There are rare moments when the system shows its ability to act. In August 2025, for example, the government arraigned five men in Abuja over the 2022 massacre at St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State, where at least 50 worshippers were killed during Mass and more than 100 were injured. The suspects were charged under terrorism laws. In that case, if properly prosecuted, it could send a signal that attacking worshippers is not a cost-free crime. But for many Nigerians, it stands out precisely because it is an exception. In countless other church attacks, village raids, and community killings, justice has been a ghost—often promised, rarely seen.
The Eruku incident underlines one more uncomfortable truth. This is no longer a crisis that can be contained within familiar “hotspots”. When attackers can strike a church in Kwara and leave with dozens of abducted worshippers, the idea of “safe” states and “unsafe” states becomes a myth. Violence has become mobile. It moves along roads, forests, rivers, and phone networks. It looks for weak spots such as rural communities with little security presence, places where intelligence is poor, areas where local people have lost faith in the police and the justice system.
So what would a serious, honest response look like—beyond trading words with President Trump or foreign commentators? First, Nigeria needs clear, transparent data on attacks and victims, collected and published regularly, without fear of what it might do to the country’s image. Hiding the numbers does not heal the wounds. Second, there must be a focused strategy for protecting rural and minority communities: local early-warning systems, community policing structures that people trust, better equipment and training for security personnel, and rapid-response units that treat attacks on villages and churches as national emergencies, not local tragedies. Third, prosecutions must move from occasional showcase cases to systematic justice. Every major attack should have a follow-up trail: arrests, charges, trials, and public updates. Without visible consequences, killers learn that the state is more talk than teeth.
Beyond security measures, Nigeria must confront the deeper conditions that fuel this violence; for example, poverty, land pressure, climate stress, weak local governance, and the political manipulation of religion and ethnicity. If politicians keep seeing victims as voting blocs and killers as potential tools, no number of soldiers will solve the problem. Community-level peace processes, fair resource management, and justice for past atrocities are not “soft” issues; they are part of hard security.
The debate over whether there is a “Christian genocide” in Nigeria will continue. Some will use the term as a moral alarm; others will reject it as legally inaccurate and politically dangerous. But while the world argues over definitions, Nigerians face a simpler truth that too many people are being killed, too many communities are under attack, and too many churches and mosques have turned into crime scenes. At some point, the argument over labels must give way to a united demand for protection and justice.
This is why the question “Which state is next?” should not be left to circulate only in fearful whispers. It should be the question that confronts every policymaker, security chief, legislator, politician and religious leader in Nigeria today. It is a warning, but it can also be a turning point. Either we keep waiting to see which dot on the map will catch fire next, or we decide that there will be no “next state” because we finally treat every life—Christian or Muslim, farmer or herder, northerner or southerner—as a line the nation refuses to cross.
Until that decision is made and acted on, the graves will continue to multiply, the statistics will continue to climb, and the world will continue to argue over the name of our crisis. But deep inside the country, ordinary Nigerians already understand the only question that truly matters— not what we call the violence, but whether we will survive it together.
Dr Gbenga Afolayan is an artist and teacher who blends creativity with humour, sharing football and Chelsea banter, music, prayers, and honest takes on gender, politics, and everyday life.
