Nigeria’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Yusuf Tuggar, has dismissed that the country is experiencing a genocide targeted at Christians, insisting that widely circulated casualty figures are inflated and misleading.
Appearing on Piers Morgan’s show on Tuesday, Tuggar challenged statistics released by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), which alleged that more than 50,000 Christians had been killed and thousands of churches destroyed since 2009.
Tuggar pushed back strongly, saying the numbers were inaccurate and that the government does not classify victims by religion.
“In the last five years, I can categorically tell you that 177 Christians have been killed. The number of those injured are 98, while seven were abducted,” he said. “We are not hiding any facts but, as I said, we don’t go about trying to identify a Nigerian’s faith when they have lost their lives.”
He added that 102 churches were attacked within the same five-year period, noting that mosques have also come under attack — a reminder, he said, of how violence affects multiple communities.
Tuggar stressed that Nigeria’s religious diversity means conflict should not be framed along simplistic lines. “Nigeria is configured in a way that you have Muslim and Christian populations across the country,” he said, calling for a more balanced interpretation of the nation’s security situation.
The minister urged international audiences to understand the broader context instead of relying on what he described as sensational narratives.
In a fiery speech delivered on November 2, 2025, Trump described Nigeria as “a country of particular concern” and threatened possible U.S. military action if the Nigerian government “continues to allow the killings of Christians.”
He declared that the U.S. “may very well go into that now disgraced country, gun-a-blazing, to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
The remarks immediately drew strong reactions from both the Nigerian government and the public, with many Nigerians condemning the comments as an attack on the country’s sovereignty.
Responding swiftly, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu dismissed Trump’s allegations and defended Nigeria’s commitment to protecting the rights and safety of citizens of all faiths.
Tinubu reiterated that Nigeria remains “a democracy governed by constitutional guarantees of religious liberty.”
