Anti-Christian attacks in Nigeria threaten precarious balance of faiths
In the first weekend of August, Chidinma Ibeleji, a deaconess in the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Nigeria, was kidnapped along with four others on her way to her Pentecostal denomination’s annual convention in Lagos.
All five were rescued within days, but not all stories in this West African country end so well. The week before, Paul Offu, a Catholic priest, was shot dead in the south of the country. Catholic priests called for government action in response to his slaying and that of another priest, Clement Ugwu, who was kidnapped in March and found dead days later. Both deaths have been blamed on Muslim Fulani herdsmen.
The attacks have put Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, in a tight spot as he tries to manage a country nearly evenly split between Christians and Muslims. Many considered his reelection in February to bode well for all Nigerians, but the uptick in anti-Christian violence has opened Buhari, a Fulani Muslim himself, to increasing criticism. In a public letter, former president Olusegun Obasanjo said he now fears “spontaneous or planned reprisal attacks against Fulani which may inadvertently or advertently mushroom into pogrom or Rwanda-type genocide that we did not believe could happen and yet it happened.”
