Senate President Godswill Akpabio on Thursday cautioned against framing Nigeria’s security crisis along religious lines, insisting that terrorists and bandits target Nigerians indiscriminately, regardless of faith.
Akpabio spoke during plenary in Abuja while contributing to a motion on alleged religious persecution of Christians in Nigeria, which followed a debate on reports that some foreign governments were considering sanctions against the country over claims of religious intolerance.
The Senate President said portraying terrorism as a conflict between Christians and Muslims was misleading and only served to deepen divisions among Nigerians.
He said, “When they come and start spraying bullets from, or they throw a rocket, they are not throwing a rocket into the crowd targeting a particular religion. They are killing Nigerians. I don’t know who will now go and sit down and bring out maybe their dead bodies and say, this one is a Christian, this one is from this family, this must be a Muslim.
“We are facing a situation whereby these terrorists are trying to terminate the lives of Nigerians and frustrate us from going into the farms to produce food to feed ourselves.”
Akpabio explained that the nature of attacks often depended on the region where they occurred, which should not be mistaken as evidence of religious targeting.
According to him, “If terrorism occurs in a Christian-dominated state, most of those who will die there will be Christians. If it occurs in a Muslim-dominated state, most of those who will die there will be Muslims. But if it occurs particularly in the North Central, you will notice that it will be targeted at maybe churches, because that is what they are able to get. And then at the end, they will say, oh, it’s Muslims that kill Christians.
If it happens in Borno or Yobe, they will say Christians kill Muslims. So the way the whole situation is, we seem to need to go into executive session and get a date for our security summit, so we can have a close discussion on these matters.”
The Senate President warned against allowing foreign narratives, especially from Western countries, to define Nigeria’s security realities.
He proposed sending a delegation of lawmakers to the United States to engage with American parliamentarians and “educate them” on the true nature of the country’s challenges.
“When we go into executive session, we can decide to set up a small ad hoc committee to go to the United States of America and engage our colleague parliamentarians there. If you see what these people are doing, most of them are outsiders. Some people must have gone there to give a one-sided story, and at the end, it will now look as if only Christians are being killed by terrorists in Nigeria,” Akpabio said.
He warned that misrepresentation abroad could lead to sanctions that would harm all Nigerians. “What is happening in the United States is of concern to Nigeria. It’s of concern to the Christians. It’s of concern to the Muslims. Because the moment they bring sanctions, sanctions will breed poverty. And poverty knows no religion,” Akpabio said.
Akpabio further noted that insurgency and banditry had taken lives across all parts of the country, citing the killing of Dr. Chike Akunyili, husband of the late former NAFDAC Director-General, Dora Akunyili, in the Southeast.
“So, if you look at what is happening in the Southeast, predominantly Christians, most of those that are killed in the Southeast, including the late husband of our demised icon, Dora Akunyili—will you come and ascribe that to religion? I’m talking about what IPOB is doing. You see brothers killing brothers,” he said.
Akpabio emphasised that Nigeria’s insecurity was multifaceted and should be addressed as a national problem rather than a religious one.
“Nigeria has complex security situations. We should actually go out there and educate people so that they will know what to do. If we stay here to give figures and instances where Muslims were killed or where Christians were killed, we are not helping the situation,” he said.
He urged lawmakers to focus instead on “what we do to ensure counter-terrorism and how we respond to the guerrilla tactics of the terrorists, whether internal or external aggressors.”
Akpabio’s comments came amid renewed foreign scrutiny of Nigeria’s human rights and religious freedom record.
In September, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz introduced S.2747 — The Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025, a bill that would require the U.S. Secretary of State to designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern for alleged violations of religious freedom and impose sanctions on designated Nigerian officials.
The measure draws on longstanding recommendations from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which has repeatedly called for Nigeria’s CPC designation over claims of state and local failures to protect religious minorities.
Government have disputed these claims, arguing that much of the country’s violence stems from terrorism, banditry, and communal conflict, not religion.
