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The question is not whether contemporary violence in northern Nigeria is motivated by religion; the real question is why the commentariat is loath to admit it.
Ebenezer Obadare, Author
November 24, 2025 10:00 am (EST)
Of the few guiding axioms of Nigerian politics, perhaps none is more indelible than the idea that you cannot understand the Nigerian society without reference to religion. The more you know about Nigerians’ spiritual lives and tendencies, it is postulated, the better placed you are to understand the country’s shifting ethnonational, regional, and elite contestations. Put differently, religion is the indispensable key to unlock the enigmas of Nigerian politics.
Given this consensus, it is rather perplexing that, in discussing arguably the most serious and persistent challenge to Nigeria’s stability and continued existence since the political upheaval triggered by the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, a cross section of the commentariat is insisting, not just that religion is not one of many factors to consider, but that the crisis itself has nothing to do with religion, period. Once taken for granted as an all-important source of illumination, religion is now, oddly enough, either totally jettisoned or regarded as a distraction.
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In fairness, the commentariat is not alone in its insistence that we disregard religion as the underlying explanation for Nigeria’s present discontents. Senior Nigerian government officials, too, have forcefully rejected accusations that the Nigerian government has directly or tacitly encouraged “genocide” against Nigerian Christians. Some have even ventured to suggest that relations between Nigerians of different religious persuasions have never been more amicable.
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Although implausible, the Nigerian government’s official position is perhaps understandable. Politically, President Tinubu finds himself between a rock and a hard place, desperate to preserve the political coalition that he believes he needs in order to win a second four-year term of office come 2027. In practice, this means that he can ill afford to further antagonize a religiously conservative northern political establishment, one that has already expressed displeasure at his administration, and among whom key figures have already defected to the opposition.
This reluctance to antagonize the northern establishment (and consequently the voting bloc that it controls) is also exemplified by Peter Obi, the Labor Party standard-bearer in the 2023 presidential election. After capturing the imagination of a cross section of young Nigerians, Obi had defied expectations by winning eleven states and the Federal Capital Territory , and might even have claimed a most unlikely victory had he been more competitive in the core northern states.
With 2027 approaching and the northern vote no less crucial, Obi, a practicing Catholic, has maintained a studied silence, only going so far as to note in the aftermath of Nigeria’s Country of Particular Concern designation that the country “is experiencing an unprecedented level of insecurity” that “did not start with the present government,” but that the Tinubu administration owes it to Nigerians to “effectively govern, galvanize, and lead Nigeria where (sic) no one is unwarrantedly oppressed and killed.” Notably absent from Obi’s statement was the intensity that made him declare the last presidential context “a religious war” in reference to the prospect of a Muslim-Muslim ticket that many had feared would lead to the increased marginalization of Nigerian Christians.
For the ambitious Nigerian politician, fear of the northern political elite is the beginning of political wisdom.
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If the stakes ahead of the next presidential election are such that the political class (including the incumbent administration) can ill afford to speak frankly about the religious dimension of the country’s current turmoil, hence risk direct collision with the northern political establishment, the commentariat’s stubborn refusal to admit, never mind analyze the religious origins of the current crisis, is more difficult to comprehend.
The mystery is deepened further when one considers that, of all the multilayered challenges that Nigeria currently confronts, none is more blatantly religious in character than Boko Haram’s bloody decades-long campaign to abolish the Nigerian state as we know it and replace it with a Sharia-based theocracy. As it happens, Boko Haram is the most trusted source on this. At the same time, a quick scan of Nigeria’s immediate neighborhood reveals that the group is not alone in its anti-modern crusade.
Boko Haram is cut from the same ideological cloth as peer jihadist groups like al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin , al-Shabaab, and Islamic State – West Africa Province, all of which have left a trail of terror and devastation across the Sahel and beyond.
Nor does the religious dimension to the Nigerian crisis stop there. Starting with the decapitation of Gideon Akaluka in December 1994 to the incident involving Amaye, a food vendor who was set on fire by her assailants last August, blasphemy violence, whereby random mobs have slaughtered individuals adjudged to have desecrated the name of prophet Muhammad, has been a recurrent fixture across northern Nigeria. The repeated failure of the authorities to apprehend those involved in these acts of “jungle justice” has prompted allegations of official complicity. Blasphemy violence is wrong for many reasons, among them the fact that it allows a mob to arrogate to itself the right to be accuser, judge, and executioner at the same time; a right that, legally and morally speaking, no single individual or entity can possess in a free society.
The reluctance to contend with jihadist violence in northern Nigeria as epitomized by Boko Haram is all the more astonishing when you consider that (1) Boko Haram has never been shy about its fundamentalist religious agenda; (2) Boko Haram has killed more Muslims than Christians, which is hardly surprising given that it began its operations in a Muslim majority part of the country; and (3) jihadist violence, as seen by its devastating impact across the Sahel, constitutes the most potent challenge to state stability in West Africa and risks making the region the epicenter of global terrorism. Last year, 51 percent of global terrorism-related deaths occurred in the Sahel, and recent media reports indicate al-Qaeda is on the verge of toppling the Malian junta.
Rather than take jihadist violence seriously as the threat to modern life that it is, many analysts have tried to wish it away by focusing on issues like kidnapping and banditry that, insofar as they have any relevance, are only downstream effects of jihadist terror. Others have blamed President Trump for stoking religious tension in Nigeria, forgetting that the tension has always been there, especially in northern Nigeria, and if President Trump is guilty of anything in this specific matter, it is drawing attention to a problem that successive Nigerian governments have criminally neglected. They also forget that although Nigerians as a whole may categorically reject the idea of unilateral U.S. military action against Boko Haram, victims of Boko Haram’s depredations most certainly welcome President Trump’s interest in their welfare.
Religion has not suddenly lost its power to illuminate Nigerian politics; if anything, given the situation in the country, it is more explicative than ever. What appears to have changed is the attitude and preferences of the commentariat.
When historians look back at the early decades of the 21st century, one paradox will loom large in their analysis: the emergence of violent extremism as the most potent and most organized threat to state and society across much of (West) Africa, and the singular failure of the cognoscenti to recognize it as such.
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