The UN’s top expert on religious freedom kicked off a two-week visit to Nigeria Monday, after politically charged accusations over Christian “persecution” roiled the country diplomatically last year.
The United States elevated the accusation — long popular on the fringes of the religious and political right — to the highest levels of government in the lead-up to its bombing campaign against Nigerian jihadists.
It has since deployed troops to the country and announced a renewed focus on combatting Islamic State-linked militants in the region.
Researchers say the reality on the ground in Africa’s most populous country is more nuanced — jihadists are strongest in the country’s Muslim-majority north, for example, which means most of their victims are likely Muslim.
Suicide bombings in the Muslim-majority city of Maiduguri in March and December — blamed on Boko Haram — targeted a crowded market and a mosque, respectively.
Nazila Ghanea, the United Nation’s special rapporteur on freedom of religion and belief, will visit the capital Abuja, along with Kano — the economic capital of the north — and Jos, in the religiously mixed Plateau state.
The weekend announcement of the trip was vague, mentioning that Ghanea would “identify existing and emerging obstacles” to religious freedom.
The country has also come under broader criticism in the past for its laws against blasphemy, for example, in northern states that have implemented sharia law based on the teachings of the Quran.
Nigeria, home to some 230 million people, is roughly evenly split between a mostly Christian south and a Muslim-majority north, and millions live together peacefully side-by-side.
But the country also is no stranger to sectarian violence.
Bloodshed has fallen across religious and ethnic lines in major riots, including in Jos in 2008 and Mangu, also in Plateau state, in 2024.
The Nigerian government denies allegations of Christian persecution or “genocide”, as US President Donald Trump charged at one point last year — as do many independent researchers.
Many making the charge point not to jihadists to make their case, but to farmer-herder violence, which often falls across religious and ethnic lines between Muslim Fulani herders and Christian farmers.
Experts say the conflict is not driven by religion but by expanding populations, dwindling land squeezed by climate change and a weak police force unable to stop the bloodshed, creating an atmosphere of impunity and reprisals.
Nigeria turned Trump’s diplomatic broadsides into increased military cooperation in its long-running fight against jihadists.
But on the diplomatic front, top US officials have insisted that Christians are particularly at risk.
