By Joseph O. ILORAH.

Introduction: the echoes of silence

A spectre is haunting Nigeria—not the ghost of a past conflict, but the living, breathing reality of a systematic, targeted campaign of eradication.

In the fertile lands of the Middle Belt and the scattered communities of the North, the bones of the slain are piling up, forming a grim monument to a national failure of catastrophic proportions. The world is beginning to take notice, using words we ourselves refuse to utter: words like “pogrom,” “religious cleansing,” and “genocide.” Yet, within our own borders, a different, more insidious sound dominates the discourse. It is not the sound of alarm, nor the roar of decisive action, but the murmur of a dangerous and morally bankrupt fallacy, repeated like a protective incantation against the demands of justice: “But others are also being killed; it is not only Christians.”

This argument, masquerading as nuance, is the anaesthesia that keeps the Nigerian conscience sedated while the body of the nation is dismembered. It is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid the terrifying necessity of introspection and the difficult path of definitive action.

The anatomy of a national deception

The statement “others are also being killed” contains a kernel of truth, which is precisely what makes it so pernicious. Yes, Nigeria is a pressure cooker of multifaceted insecurity. Bandits kidnap Muslims and Christians alike along the Abuja-Kaduna highway. Criminal elements in the South-East kill for separatist ambitions. In the North-East, Boko Haram and ISWAP have murdered countless Muslims they deem insufficiently orthodox.

Conflating the random violence of criminality with the targeted, systematic violence of ethno-religious eradication is not just an error in analysis; it is an act of intellectual and moral cowardice

However, this general state of criminal anarchy is being weaponised to camouflage a specific, ideologically driven project of territorial displacement and religious cleansing. Conflating the random violence of criminality with the targeted, systematic violence of ethno-religious eradication is not just an error in analysis; it is an act of intellectual and moral cowardice. The conflict in the Middle Belt—states like Plateau, Benue, Southern Kaduna, and parts of Taraba and Nasarawa—follows a clear and chilling pattern that distinguishes it from mere criminality:

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1. Identity-based targeting: Attacks are not random. They meticulously target Christian farming communities, their churches, their villages, and their religious leaders. The victims are selected based on their faith and ethnicity.
2. Strategic timing and method: Assaults are often calculated for maximum impact—under the cover of night, during harvests to destroy livelihoods, or on worship days to desecrate the sacred.
3. Asymmetric weaponry: The attackers are not wielding sticks and stones. They are armed with sophisticated weaponry—AK-47s, RPGs, and sometimes even military-grade gear—that far outstrips the local vigilantes and police, pointing to a level of organisation and sponsorship that transcends mere farmer-herder clashes.
4. The clear objective of dispossession: The ultimate goal is not merely to kill, but to displace and conquer. Survivors are forced to flee their ancestral lands, which are then occupied and renamed. This is not crime; it is a strategy of land grabbing and demographic alteration, a slow-burn genocide aimed at rewriting the nation’s map.

When bandits kidnap a traveller, the primary motive is financial ransom. When militias massacre a village, burn its churches, and seize its land, the motive is territorial conquest and the elimination of a competing religious and ethnic presence.

To equate the two is to misunderstand the nature of the threat entirely and to provide cover for its perpetrators.

The numbers scream what our leaders whisper

Organisations like the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) and various UN reports have consistently documented a staggering death toll that our own government seems unwilling to officially acknowledge. Their findings paint a horrifying picture: tens of thousands of Christians killed in the past decade, with thousands more maimed, and millions transformed into internal refugees in their own country.

The fallacy of “others are also being killed” is a statistical sleight of hand. While true in absolute numbers, it deliberately ignores the proportionality, intent, and impact.

If a disease kills 100 people from a population of one million, and another disease kills 100 people from a population of ten thousand, the latter represents an existential threat to that smaller community. For Christian communities in specific Local Government Areas, the violence is not just “insecurity”; it is a systematic unraveling of their very existence. To dismiss their specific agony by pointing to a generalised crisis is a profound injustice.

The convenience of the “complexity” shield: A refuge for the guilty

The Nigerian state and its apologists often retreat into the fortress of “complexity.” They argue, with academic detachment, that the situation is a tangled web of climate change, desertification, resource competition, and historical grievances. While these are contributing factors, they have been elevated from context to excuse.

This obsession with “root causes” at the expense of addressing the manifest symptoms is a strategic diversion. It is like a team of doctors standing over a patient bleeding from a machete wound, delivering a lengthy seminar on regional conflict theory while the patient bleeds out. The immediate, life-threatening injury is the targeted violence. The “complexity” argument is a sophisticated form of denial, designed to paralyse action and absolve the state of its primary responsibility: to protect lives and property.

A call for national introspection: the mirror we must face

This moment demands more than just policy adjustments; it demands a deep, uncomfortable national introspection. We must look in the mirror and ask ourselves difficult questions:

• What does it say about our nationhood that we can so easily explain away the systematic extermination of our own citizens?
• Why does our patriotic fervour only ignite when foreign powers point out our failures, rather than in righteous anger at the failures themselves?
• Have we become so desensitised to death that we now engage in macabre arithmetic to justify inaction?

The fallacy of “others are also being killed” is the language of a comatose conscience. It is the sound of a nation trying to rationalise its own descent into the abyss. We must reject it utterly. But to do so, we must first understand its deceptive mechanics.

“Others are also being killed”: the lamentable fallacy of relative privation

This core argument is a textbook example of the Fallacy of Relative Privation, or the “Not As Bad As” Fallacy. It is a species of the broader Red Herring Fallacy, designed to distract from the specific issue at hand.

The mechanics of the fallacy:

Moral obfuscation: It replaces the absolute moral imperative “Thou shalt not murder” with a relativistic calculation: “Whose murder is more important?” This seeks to bury specific tragedies within generalised statistics, anaesthetising the public conscience.

Strategic Deflection: It shifts focus from the qualitative nature of the violence (targeted eradication) to a purely quantitative argument (general “insecurity”). This prevents a correct diagnosis, just as one cannot cure cancer by insisting that malaria also kills.

Erasure of specific intent: It erases motive and intent, which are central to legal definitions of genocide and crimes against humanity. By equating random crime with ideologically-driven violence, it absolves perpetrators of their specific guilt.

The consequences:

1. Paralysis of action: It creates analytical paralysis, where no specific problem can be addressed until all general problems are fixed—a perfect excuse for a complicit state.
2. Victim-blaming and silencing: It frames victims and advocates as selfish for “only” caring about their specific genocide, a profound form of re-victimisation.
3. Normalisation of atrocity: By constantly comparing atrocities, it normalises all of them, creating a macabre “hierarchy of suffering” where no suffering is ever urgent enough.

The logical and moral counter-argument:

“The existence of other crimes does not negate the reality of this specific crime. A just society is obligated to address all forms of suffering, and this requires correctly diagnosing and naming each specific malady.”

To illustrate with an analogy: If a patient arrives at a hospital with a gunshot wound, and another with pneumonia, a competent doctor does not refuse to treat the gunshot wound because pneumonia also exists. He provides the specific, urgent care required for each ailment.

In Nigeria:

• The “gunshot wound” is the targeted eradication of Christian communities. Its treatment requires specific security, legal, and political interventions.
• The “pneumonia” is generalised banditry and kidnapping, requiring different strategies.
• The “cancer” is the ideological insurgency of Boko Haram/ISWAP, requiring military engagement.
• A government that treats a gunshot wound, pneumonia, and cancer with the same aspirin—calling it all “insecurity”—is not a government; it is a mortuary in waiting.

Conclusion: the crossroads of redemption or ruin

Nigeria stands at a precipice. Down one path lies continued obfuscation, the slow-motion erosion of our territorial integrity, and the permanent staining of our national soul with the blood of the abandoned. Down the other lies the difficult but redemptive path of truth and decisive action.

This is not a call for sectarian division, but for a united stand against a common menace that, left unchecked, will consume us all. Justice is not a finite resource; protecting one group does not mean abandoning others. True patriotism demands that we first secure the most vulnerable in our midst.

The solution requires a move beyond rhetoric to quick, intentional, decisive, and definitive action:

1. Name the crime: The government must demonstrate courage by officially commissioning an independent investigation to document and label these attacks for what they are: acts of ethno-religious cleansing.
2. Provide overwhelming security: Deploy a definitive, well-equipped security presence to vulnerable communities, implementing proactive, intelligence-driven protection, not the tokenistic and reactive deployments of the past.
3. Disarm the perpetrators, decisively: Launch a systematic, no-quarter campaign to identify, dismantle, and disarm the militias. This includes tracing and blocking the sources of their sophisticated weaponry.
4. Administer swift and exemplary justice: Establish special tribunals to ensure the speedy prosecution not just of the foot soldiers, but of the financiers and ideologues who mastermind this violence from the shadows.

The blood crying out from the fields of Plateau, Benue, and Southern Kaduna is a judgment upon us all. It asks a simple, searing question: When will we stop making excuses for the monster devouring our nation and find the collective will to slay it? The time for sophistry is over. The hour of national salvation and definitive action is now. We must choose: will we continue as the mortuary in waiting, or will we finally become the hospital that heals its specific, grievous wounds?

Ilorah is a Catholic priest and a lawyer. He also serves as the National Chaplain of the National Association of Catholic Lawyers (NACL), Nigeria.