Most people outside Nigeria who have heard about the killing and abduction of Christians in the country are likely to know only a fraction of what has been happening. On average, 11 Christians are killed each day, while 24 people, including Christians, are abducted daily, according to recent estimates.
The scale of this violence is alarming, but so too are accounts of how most of these killings take place, what happens before the attacks, and how authorities respond.
Communities have repeatedly reported that where they have received warnings of impending attacks the security forces, although alerted, have failed to respond in time. They have also raised serious questions about what happens after people are killed.
In some cases, communities say they have been made to bury victims in mass graves before proper medical examinations could take place. Autopsies are rarely performed, evidence is often not systematically collected, and arrests seldom follow attacks, even in areas where residents say the locations and movements of armed groups are widely known.
Middle Belt killings
International attention to Nigeria’s security crisis has tended to focus on Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), both of which have been responsible for mass atrocities.
But another major source of violence has received considerably less international attention: armed Fulani militias. Research on the killing of Christians in Nigeria has attributed more than half of Christian civilian deaths to Fulani militias, with most of these killings occurring in the Middle Belt.
Nigeria’s Middle Belt is the region where the predominantly Muslim north meets the largely Christian south. About 30 million Christians live in this part of the country, where communities have for years reported killings, abductions, the destruction of villages and displacement from their land.
Nigeria’s security forces, meanwhile, have reportedly concentrated substantial counterterrorism and security operations in the northeast and northwest. This has left many vulnerable areas in the Middle Belt inadequately protected.
To deflect attention from the failure of the state to protect lives and allegations of official complicity, Nigerian authorities have frequently presented attacks by Fulani militias as conflicts over land, water and other resources caused by climate change, or as part of the country’s wider problem of armed banditry.
Addressing the reporting gap
The problem is compounded by a shortage of sustained reporting. Major individual attacks may briefly make the news. But the circumstances preceding them, the identities and motives of the attackers, the official response, the treatment of victims and the longer-term fate of affected communities receive far less scrutiny.
Having visited affected areas in Nigeria and spoken with local Christian communities, Christian Solidarity International (CSI) has launched a six-month media fellowship to help address this gap in reporting.
The CSI Fellowship for Nigerian Voices fellowship has brought together 15 carefully selected Nigerian journalists from mainstream news organisations. Reporting from the ground, the fellows will investigate attacks and their aftermath, speak with survivors and affected communities, examine the response of authorities and security agencies, and document developments that might otherwise receive little sustained attention.
Their reports will be published on CSI’s website and made available to credible partner media organisations participating in the programme.
Through the fellowship, CSI hopes to help create a more detailed public record of what is happening in affected parts of Nigeria, so that the experiences of communities facing killings, abductions and displacement are heard and receive public attention.
The CSI Fellowship for Nigerian Voices is a six-month programme for a select cohort of Nigerian journalists to shed light on the struggle that local Christian communities have been facing in the Middle Belt, thus increasing public awareness and engagement by the international community.
