Analysis: What is driving the conflict across Nigeria?

Analysis: What is driving the conflict across Nigeria?

Michael Marshall

Mon, December 8, 2025 at 6:13 PM UTC

5 min read

UPI — The inside of St. Francis Catholic Church after a gun attack on June 6, 2022. File Photo by Stringer/EPA

Dec. 8 (UPI) -- Late last October, President Donald Trump designated Nigeria as "a country of particular concern" (CPC) under the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act for "severe violations of religious freedom." His move was prompted by pressure from certain U.S. lawmakers and religious freedom advocates in response to escalating violence and abductions across the country.

The violence and lawlessness have affected all communities, with Muslims being the primary victims in the northernmost states. But Christian churches and communities have undoubtedly been the major targets across the Middle Belt States. Churches have been attacked, people killed, and students abducted from boarding schools and held fro ransom.

Trump said there was an "existential threat" to Christians in Nigeria and some advocates have spoken of a "Christian genocide," raising the temperature in an already incendiary situation.

The CPC designation allows the U.S. government to pressure the Nigerian government through sanctions and cutting off aid. Trump has even directed the Pentagon to prepare contingency plans for military intervention if nothing changes.

The U.S. action has stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy in response. The Nigerian government strongly rejected the U.S. charges, denying that there was any targeted persecution of Christians. Their statement attributed the violence to conflict between traditional herders and farming communities over access to resources.

This view has been echoed by some public figures and NGOs internationally. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, said the violence in Nigeria "was not a religious conflict, but rather a social conflict, for example between herders and farmers."

There is a grain of truth in both the "Christian persecution" and the "herders versus farmers" narratives. But each focuses on one dimension of the conflicts, while ignoring the full complexity of the situation. It is unlikely that workable solutions can be developed without grasping that complexity as a starting point.

What is clear is that violence across Nigeria is endemic and escalating. Precise data is hard to come by with many incidents going unreported. The National Human Rights Commission reported 2,266 killings in the first half of this year by militant groups or armed criminal bands. This is more than the whole of 2024.

In the longer perspective, the Council on Foreign Relations estimates that over 100,000 civilians have been killed in armed violence since 2011. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED) has documented 52,915 civilians killed in targeted political violence since 2009.

Killings are just the tip of the iceberg. To them should be added abductions with the victims being held for ransom and their families selling possessions and land to get them back. Some victims have been kidnapped more than once and whole communities have been destroyed.

U.N. reports estimate that two million people have been displaced from their homes, in the northeast and now , increasingly, in the Middle Belt stated. Many of them now live in refugee camps.

The main instigators of violence fall into three groups: Islamist insurgents, bandit gangs, and herders. Their actions often provoke retaliatory violence from vigilante groups formed to protect communities that have been attacked.

In 2009, Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group with ties to Al Qaeda, launched an insurgency in the northeast to establish a separate Islamist republic. It hit the international headlines in 2014 when it kidnapped 276 girls from a boarding school in the region. Ninety of them still remain unaccounted for.

They fought a protracted campaign with Nigerian government forces which devastated many of the farming communities in the region. The insurgency was contained and, though Boko Haram remains, it is not the force it was at its peak.

However, more radical groups have broken away from Boko Haram, in particular the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), together with fighters from other Islamist factions operating in the semi-arid Sahel region north of Nigeria. They infiltrate easily across the porous border from Niger and Chad together with military-style weapons that flow out of post-Gaddafi Libya.

These groups have pushed out of the northeast and now operate in northwestern states and the Middle Belt where the local communities are farmers and predominantly Christian.

In the northwest, bandit gangs have preyed on local communities for some time now. They make money through ransoms from abductions even though the long-term effect, as noted above, is the destruction of communities. The Islamist groups also use abduction to fund their operations and there is evidence that they have formed working relations with the bandit groups.

Pastoralists and farmers had coexisted peacefully for many decades in the Middle Belt of Nigeria. That changed through a combination of climate change, population growth, and the activity of armed militants in the region.

The herders are mostly Fulani people. They are Muslim and range across the Sahel region. The spread of desertification across the Sahel has pushed them further south in search of pastures for their flocks.

At the same time, population growth in Nigeria has led to formerly open land, that the herders could graze on or cross freely, to be brought under cultivation. This produced tensions and clashes that, in the normal course of event, could be handled through inter-communal discussions, sensibly mediated.

However, this occurred in a region were ISWAP and similar groups were increasingly active. They played on the fact that the Fulani were Muslim and the farming villages mostly Christian and succeeded in radicalizing some, though by no means all, of the herders. This year, there have been attacks on villages by Fulani armed with modern weapons.

Any plans to improve the situation and protect communities that are under attack must take all these moving parts into account. Simplistic narratives can easily make things worse.

There are many calls, starting with the U.S. president, for the Nigerian government to do more. It is certainly capable of doing more, but does it have the capacity to do enough? John Campbell, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria in his book, Nigeria and the Nation State, likened the Nigerian federal government to an archipelago with a scattering of islands that it controlled, in the middle of a vast sea where its writ did not run.

That too must be taken into account in considering plans to address the current crisis.

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