Religious Freedom in Nigeria: What We Get Wrong
In November, the Trump Administration weighed in on Nigeria’s religious freedom record. The White House formally designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern - a designation reserved for governments engaging in or tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of international religious freedom. The controversy over this decision is a long-standing debate in the U.S.-Africa policy space. Few professionals are as familiar with the players, the rhetoric, and internal dynamics of this debate as myself - and I think it’s about time I say my piece.
For over a decade, I have conducted research and designed policy to reduce violence and protect vulnerable communities in Africa. This portfolio includes more than three years (2020-2023) as an Africa Policy Analyst with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) - an independent, bipartisan U.S. government advisory body that advises both the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government. It also includes a brief stint as working-level lead on strategic civilian security efforts in Nigeria at the State Department, before that project fell to internal restructuring.
Throughout my tenure at USCIRF, which spanned both Trump and Biden administrations, I conducted deep research into religious freedom concerns in Nigeria and began to recognize common misconceptions that were fueling these debates. As violence against civilians continues to rise in Nigeria, I have become increasingly concerned, dismayed, and even angry at how these misconceptions feed the debates that are ultimately hamstringing a sorely needed U.S. response.
While I was in government, narrative wars across party lines and internal bureaucratic fissures overrode constructive good faith dialogue and progress towards creating and implementing a coherent strategic approach. Individual policymakers began to see their main adversaries as other U.S. policymakers, devoting entire strategic meetings and memos to countering each others’ anticipated moves and coming out on top of the internal policy debate. While infighting is a common dynamic in U.S. foreign policy, in my opinion what I saw in the U.S.-Nigeria policy space was on another level. The hours, days, weeks I spent attempting to foster constructive dialogue across U.S. government stakeholders to pursue a cohesive way forward often felt, and continue to feel, entirely wasted.
In the U.S. our partisan politics often hinders our inability to work together as a country to address atrocities and their ramifications for religious freedom and other U.S. values and in interests in Nigeria are having real, dangerous ramifications for Nigerian civilians, not to mention the global FoRB agenda more broadly. In this series, I summarize the ten most common misconceptions I’ve encountered while working on religious freedom in Nigeria. These include what most Nigeria experts get wrong about FoRB, and what religious freedom experts get wrong about the Nigerian context. At the end, I summarize what divides us and why we need to push past those divides and coalesce around the commonalities to actually be a force for good in Nigeria and beyond.
U.S.-Nigeria policy matters. It matters to the quarter-of-a-billion Nigerians navigating fragility and an uncertain future. It matters to the thousands of U.S. businesses who rely on the billions of dollars of revenue gained through trade with Nigerian companies. It matters to consumers in the U.S. and across the globe who rely on a predictable global energy market to conduct business and remain solvent. It matters to faith communities and minorities around the world watching to see how the U.S. shows up for its values. It matters to our allies and partners on the frontlines who are helping us to fight our enemies abroad. It matters to our adversaries - including the People’s Republic of China, Nigeria’s largest trade partner - who are watching and waiting for openings to undermine U.S. interests and seize an upperhand.
Given these stakes, the question is: can we come together as a country to bridge our internal ideological divides and deliver a unified strategy that actually protects lives, secures our interests, and honors our commitments on the global stage? I refuse to believe the answer is no.
*A note on terminology - in this series, I use the terms “freedom of religion or belief” (FoRB) and international religious freedom (IRF) interchangeably.
**A note on sources - in addition to providing written/digital sources as available, this analysis also draws from hundreds of individual and group discussions and meetings with relevant stakeholders from throughout my career.
ESSAY 1: WHAT NIGERIA EXPERTS GET WRONG ABOUT RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
Over the course of a decade spent advising policymakers on atrocity prevention and the protection of vulnerable communities across West Africa, I have navigated my fair share of bureaucratic friction and strategic debates. None have been as heated, distracting, or downright destructive as the internal U.S. policy infighting surrounding religious freedom and mass violence in Nigeria. What should be a unified, bipartisan effort to protect civilian lives and U.S. values abroad has instead devolved into a paralyzing narrative war.
We cannot afford to let perfect be the enemy of the good when lives are on the line. For stakeholders to work together effectively, we must first clear the ideological debris and establish a foundation of mutual understanding. Having spent years as an analyst operating precisely at the intersection of international religious freedom (IRF), identity-based violence, and U.S.-Africa policy, I have seen firsthand where these critical communication breakdowns occur. I am writing this series to bridge that divide.
This is the first installment in a series dedicated to bridging the gap in understanding between regional and human rights specialists focused on U.S. policy in Nigeria. In this essay, I turn the lens on the Africa policy experts. Drawing from countless closed-door meetings and strategic debates, I break down the most common - and most detrimental - misconceptions regional U.S.-Africa policy experts hold when they engage with the legal and philosophical frameworks of international religious freedom.
MISCONCEPTION 1: Religious freedom is about protecting religious groups.
REALITY 1: Religious freedom is about protecting individuals’ rights, sometimes at the expense of group rights and protections.
This is the most common misconception I encounter by Nigeria experts when they engage on issues of religious freedom, both from people who agree with the CPC designation and those who oppose it. Some experts attempt to use evidence of group targeting/structural discrimination in government response as evidence of religious freedom violations. Some experts argue that restrictions on religious expression are needed to protect public safety, national security, and group rights. Both arguments misinterpret one of the core tenets of religious freedom work.
At its core, religious freedom is about protecting individual rights, sometimes even at the expense of group protections. It’s about protecting the lone proselytizing atheist from the mob of offended believers. It’s about ensuring that a Muslim artist can paint a picture of Mohammad if he wants, despite what his community believes. It’s about a woman’s right to believe that God wants her to consecrate her union with someone of the same sex, regardless of if her priest or pastor will oblige to perform the ceremony.
This is why religious freedom advocates are often unswayed by statistics that aim to put the role of religion into perspective in the Nigerian context. They are not interested in the experience of those in the middle of the bell curve - your average Nigerian Christian, or your average Nigerian Muslim. They are interested in the welfare of those on the margins - converts, atheists, animists. Weirdly enough, religious freedom purists advocate for the protection of religious extremists - not for the violence they sometimes choose to engage in, but for their right to interpret religious texts and philosophies through an extreme or harsh lens.
MISCONCEPTION 2: Ethno-religious violence is/is not a religious freedom violation.
REALITY 2: Identity-based violence exacerbates religious freedom concerns.
Often in the Nigeria space, I see debates center on a frustrating technicality: Does ethnoreligious violence count as a religious freedom violation? The simple legal answer is: not necessarily. Since freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) provisions protect religious practices and individual conscience rather than group demographics, FoRB is not the mechanism of international law designed to protect people from all types of targeted or structural violence. If an individual or community is attacked outside the context of religious practice (e.g., in their fields or homes rather than at a house of worship or a religious ceremony), their fundamental right to life and security has been violated, but not strictly their right to freedom of religion.
Let’s be clear: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) absolutely protects individuals from identity-based violence, even if we don't code it as a FoRB violation (Article 18). When a person is killed because they belong to a specific religious demographic, that is a direct violation of their inherent Right to Life (Article 6) and Right to Security of Person (Article 9). Furthermore, the ICCPR strictly prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion (Article 2) and guarantees equal protection under the law (Articles 26). If a state fails to protect a community, or fails to prosecute its attackers, based on religious identity, it is violating international law, full stop.
What’s most important to understand is that the overlap between identity-based violence and religious freedom violations is significant, especially in a society with high religiosity like Nigeria. Communities targeted by violence inevitably struggle to attend religious services in safety, celebrate sacred rituals like weddings and funerals, or dress in public in accordance with their faiths. If structural intimidation or insecurity forces individuals to abandon these practices for fear of retribution, the violence has a direct, chilling implication for religious freedom.
In addition to these individual burdens, structural discrimination in justice and security provision further endangers specific communities. If state institutions are less likely to successfully provide security or justice to specific religious groups, the deterrent threat those institutions pose to bad actors plummets. While an absent police force is not itself a religious freedom violation under Article 18, it is a glaring FoRB concern because it structurally guarantees that violations against a marginalized group will become more frequent and severe.
MISCONCEPTION 3: Religious freedom is about promoting interfaith harmony.
REALITY 3: Harmony can sometimes be at odds with tolerance for marginal views.
In the Nigeria policy space, interfaith harmony is often espoused as the ultimate goal. Many point nostalgically to a bygone era of interfaith cooperation, framing it as an ideal status quo to which Nigeria must return.
What this framework fails to understand is that interfaith harmony can come at a cost for marginal beliefs. In an attempt to curate their respective religious communities into ones that the other side can “accept,” religious influencers often begin to view members of their own faiths with disparate or unorthodox beliefs as liabilities. We see this in the state's treatment of Shi’a Muslims, and in the arrests of minority Muslim figures like Yahaya Sharif-Aminu or Sheikh Abduljabbar Nasiru Kabara. The precedents set against these Muslim minorities set the societal expectations that blasphemy should be punishable by death, which led to the brutal mob violence that killed Deborah Yakubu in 2022.
Narratives advocating for an uncomplicated interfaith harmony by pushing moderate expressions of common religious traditions should be interrogated with scrutiny. Interfaith harmony at the middle of the bell curve will not solve all of Nigeria’s religious freedom challenges, and it might just make things worse.
Case in point? Once, while conducting research in Nigeria, a prominent religious leader relayed to me his genuine belief that Muslims and Christians needed to set aside their differences and work together to defeat the true enemies: pagans and Jews. Attempting to force Nigeria’s diverse population into expressions of faith that exemplify an idyllic, bygone era of Muslim-Christian “harmony” in a context of great growth and change will only aggrieve those at the margins and create new, greater threats to religious freedom and to stability more broadly.
MISCONCEPTION 4: Mass violence impacting a specific group is always genocide.
REALITY 4: Mass violence against civilians is an atrocity, but not all atrocities are genocide.
There are four types of atrocity crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. In the context of Nigeria, people use these terms interchangeably all the time, selecting the label that best suits their political narrative in a given moment. Currently, the debate over whether or not a genocide is taking place against Christians in Nigeria is one of the most heated - and distracting - frictions in the policy space.
Genocide is a crime of intent. To legally prove genocide, one must demonstrate that perpetrators acted with the specific, calculated objective to destroy a group. One of the most frustrating truths that genocide prevention experts know well is that genocide, as a crime of intent, is often only provable after the fact. The legal bar for evidence is high, and that evidence is hard to come by in an active mass violence context. While from a justice perspective this can be highly frustrating, it also creates a useful reality from an analysis perspective: heightened debate around whether a crisis technically qualifies as "genocide" is often a distraction. It can signify that actors are trying to circumvent their responsibility to respond to atrocities.
Let’s be clear: atrocity crimes are illegal and punishable under international law. Furthermore, the obligation that U.S. foreign policy prioritize atrocity prevention and treat mass atrocities as a threat to its national security interests is codified under U.S. law. The U.S. is required to respond to atrocity crimes with preventive and punitive measures aimed at reducing violence abroad and to attempt to reduce the risk that such crimes would occur in the first place.
Mass violence against civilians need not be identity-based to rise to atrocious levels; it is a government’s fundamental responsibility to protect its citizens from mass violence regardless of demographics or of perpetrators’ motives. Additionally, while not all identity-based targeting qualifies as genocide, it may qualify as another specific type of atrocity that U.S. policy concerns itself with, such as ethnic cleansing. "Ethnic cleansing" - a bit of a misnomer, as it encapsulates the forced displacement of groups based on religion and race - is considered a mass atrocity by the United States government. Moreover, while not all identity-based violence meets the threshold for ethnic cleansing, when perpetrated on a mass scale, it may meet the policy definition of atrocities as laid out in U.S. law nonetheless.
MISCONCEPTION 5: The Nigerian government is not complicit in violence impacting religious communities.
REALITY 5: Non-participation in violence is not the same thing as non-complicity.
In the D.C. policy space, a persistent narrative absolves Abuja of responsibility for the country's localized crises. Because the most visible perpetrators of identity-based violence are non-state actors - militias, bandits, or insurgent factions - many argue the Nigerian government is simply overwhelmed. The proposed solution under this framework is almost always capacity building: the argument goes that if the U.S. just provides more funding, better training, and more advanced weapons, the Nigerian state will finally be able to protect its people.
This argument ignores the structural reality of the Nigerian state. Nigeria is a fairly wealthy nation, although its economy is highly prone to price shocks. Still, the operational weakness of its military and police forces is not simply a symptom of poverty; it is often a feature of its political design. Public funds are routinely pilfered by elites, and entire war economies are sustained by "violence entrepreneurs," highly influential individuals both inside and outside government who financially benefit from a baseline level of national insecurity. Additionally, there is a grim political logic at play: in a region where neighboring civilian governments are falling to military coups like dominoes, political elites have a vested survival interest in keeping the armed forces somewhat fractured and dependent.
Yet, we know the Nigerian state can project overwhelming force when it feels its core interests are threatened. We saw this in the government's response to the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) separatist movement in the southeast. The military mobilized rapidly and aggressively. While no human rights advocate would endorse the vicious, extrajudicial tactics used to quash that insurgency, the operational speed demonstrated a clear capability. If the Nigerian security apparatus consistently fails to respond to mass violence targeting civilians in the north, it is not simply because it cannot act; it is because it is choosing not to act. That selective deployment of protection means that discrimination in security provision is structural.
Now, most deep experts would agree that a security-forward response will be ineffective in addressing many of the civilian security threats Nigeria faces. Given this reality, addressing biased responses by security forces likely won’t fix the problem. However, structural discrimination at this level can have second and third order effects: for example, the perception of bias in the security forces on the part of the citizenry can be enough to politicize identity to mobilize more violence. Moreover, since Nigeria is a civilian-led democracy, discrimination in the security apparatus may indicate wider structural bias in other aspects of governance as well.
In the modern era of statecraft, mass violence is preventable. Just as developmental economists now recognize that modern famines are man-made failures of political will rather than mere crop failures, modern atrocity crimes are failures of governance. A sovereign state with Nigeria's GDP, diplomatic leverage, and intelligence capabilities has no justifiable excuse for allowing structural, identity-based mass violence to persist year after year within its borders. A failure to protect, when the capacity or means are attainable, is a policy choice.
On our way towards a common understanding…
To effectively protect vulnerable communities in Nigeria, regional experts must stop treating international religious freedom as a competing security interest and start recognizing it as a fundamental human right. Protecting the margins of society is not antithetical or peripheral to promoting national or regional security - in fact, addressing the role that minority marginalization plays in exacerbating wider fragility and wider security threats is exactly what human rights frameworks are designed to do.
But bridging the narrative divide on U.S.-Nigeria policy is not a one-way street. The narrative wars paralyzing the U.S. response are driven by misunderstandings on both sides of the aisle. Just as Africa policy experts must commit to understanding the legal nuances of FoRB, human rights advocates must commit to understanding the complex realities of Nigeria. In the next essay of this series, we will turn the lens in the opposite direction and examine the blind spots of the advocacy community: what religious freedom experts consistently get wrong about the Nigerian context.