By David K. Trimble

Last week, Rep. Christopher Smith (NJ-4), an unparalleled champion of religious freedom and other human rights in Congress, convened a hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Africa to discuss ongoing persecution in Nigeria.

Specifically, Rep. Smith, who chairs the subcommittee, renewed the call for the United States to redesignate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC). A CPC designation is reserved for countries that have “engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” Chairman Smith also introduced H.Res. 220 a day earlier to enable Congress to express the same sentiment.  

Nina Shea, friend of RFI and Director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, was the first panelist to speak. “Nigeria is the world’s deadliest country for Christians,” she remarked at the outset. Shea focused her testimony on mass violence perpetrated by militant Fulani Muslim herders against Christian farming communities in Nigeria’s Middle Belt. She also condemned the government’s toleration of this persecution. 

Shea rejected claims that these Fulani militants are driven largely by the desire to acquire land for cattle grazing and related economic and environmental factors. Rather, she explained that their objective is to drive Christian communities out of their ancestral land in order to Islamize the Middle Belt. To miss this dynamic is to miss the reality of the situation. Throughout her testimony, Shea recounted several stories highlighting mass murder, sexual violence, torture, kidnapping, starvation, property destruction, and forcible displacement of entire Christian villages. And these Fulani rampages continue to be greeted with little more than cold indifference by Nigerian government officials.

I began an article* last fall by pointing to a case of mass murder and kidnapping that had just occurred in the Middle Belt state of Benue to provide a window into the broader conflagration. I observed then that Fulani herdsmen account for  more attacks against Christians (and Muslims) than the already shocking levels of violence committed by either of the more prominent terrorist groups operating there, Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province.  

RFI will continue to call on the Trump administration to do what it admirably did in 2021 and designate Nigeria as a CPC. During an RFI/Pepperdine University-led panel discussion at the International Religious Freedom Summit last month I called for a consensus on petitioning the administration to do just that. During the event, we also announced that we’ll be holding IRF Summit Africa in Nairobi this coming June. The gathering will galvanize the religious freedom movement throughout Africa to take action in response to intensifying persecution across the continent, including hotspots like Nigeria. 

While much can and must be done by the Nigerian government, and other leaders on the ground there, the United States has a role to play. Admittedly, the State Department has been reluctant across administrations to use the legal tools at its disposal to induce CPCs to change course, but the tools themselves can still be put to effective use. This is why the failure to redesignate Nigeria as a CPC, thereby restricting access to these additional policy options, is so baffling and troubling. During the last administration, the United States was not even willing to add it to the Special Watch List.

The Nigerian government has permitted Islamist groups to continue to perpetrate atrocities against Nigerian Christians and a significant number of Muslims with impunity. That toleration alone means that Nigeria meets the CPC criteria. Nigeria’s neglect of its Christian population in the face of these malicious actors constitutes more than sufficient grounds for America to take decisive diplomatic action to confront the Nigerian government without delay. There are many within the administration, certainly to include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who have a track record of recognizing and addressing the dire conditions in Nigeria, a country which has become the tip of the spear for Christian persecution globally. May they move now with utmost urgency. 

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*Chairman Smith made this article part of the official record of last week’s hearing.

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David K. Trimble is President of the Religious Freedom Institute.