Tell a Nigerian: ‘Happy Independence Day!’
By Douglas Burton
If comedian Bill Maher – a forthright atheist – has got the world talking about Nigeria’s Christian genocide, you can take it to the bank that the emperor of mainstream media has no clothes.
The host of Real Time said Friday to Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, “I mean the fact that this issue has not gotten on people’s radar is amazing, if you don’t know what’s going on in Nigeria, your media sources suck. “You are in a bubble,” he said.
“Yeah, nobody is talking about it,” Mace responded.
The “Real Time” host said Boko Haram, an Islamist group in the region, is “literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country,” asking, “Where are the kids protesting this?”
Maher simply articulated the uncomfortable truth that Fox digital has been covering but which Fox ‘s prestige cable TV hosts — and other cable networks — have been ignoring for years.
As someone who has been reporting Nigerian terrorism for print platforms for 6 years, Maher’s “Aha! moment” was music to my ears. “Finally,” I thought. My colleagues at TruthNigeria have been churning out detailed reports of village massacres in the middle of the night for years with enthusiastic response from the religious-freedom specialists but with total silence from the war reporters at the AP and the prestige press. True, Gatestone Institute, NPR, Breitbart, National Review, Fox digital and the Washington Examiner and Washington Times take an occasional swing at it.
And credit war correspondent Lara Logan’s labored to create a path-breaking two-part documentary on Nigeria on Fox’s streaming service, Fox Nation, (which was poorly publicized in 2021).
The reason for low coverage of Nigeria’s historic and preventable loss of life is complex. Three reasons: “1.) As with Rwanda in 1994 it’s more than 5,000 miles away; 2.) Nigeria isn’t thought to be a major strategic liability for the United States (except that it is); then 3.) usually unmentioned: “They don’t look like us!” Yes, that last one might be racist, but it might also be true.
None of these reasons pass muster with TruthNigeria.com, just two years old, where we aim to penetrates the thick fog of war in Nigeria’s terrorism, which Nigerian elites have wonderfully wrapped up in a decorous euphemism: “Insecurity.”
Does the Western reader trip over that term? Feel clueless? Think about an outing with a paid psychologist plumbing the depths of childhood trauma? Perfect! You are exactly where the Nigerian government elites want you to be: Clueless. Smiling government spokesmen, whether Christian or Muslim, will assure you that the unspeakable massacres you occasionally hear about can be reduced to tragic squabbles about scarce resources, climate change, communal conflicts. Read all the Country Reports of the US Mission in Abuja. Just ask the respected International Crisis Group: the problem is as old as Cain and Abel in the Book of Genesis: farmers in a fight to the death with herders. Even the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reminded us of this last year in a fact paper.
But when did steely-eyed correspondents standing in the rubble of Gaza explain the massacre of hundreds of Israelis on Oct 7, 2023, as another example of “farmer-herder crisis.”? That’s right, never. And yet, all the land of current day Palestine has been struggled over by farmers and herders for at least 3,000 years. Why is it that the tragedy affecting 225 million people in Nigeria always get reduced to economics?
So, TruthNigeria lets the thousands of victims tell their side of the story, and nearly every man and woman points to a sectarian motive (jihadism) and a well-defined ethnic perpetrator (Fulani ethnic militia, and insurgents). And usually, they are speaking to reporters who risk their lives by riding motorbikes for hours into remote villages far from the purview of scholars at think tanks in Washington and Brussels.
Yes, climate change, high birthrate and corrupt governance are factors that economists rightly should consider when assessing root causes of conflict, but don’t discount the common sense of people in situ. Scholars do not conclude that the Rwandan genocide of 1994 was the result of a farmer-herder conflict, even though the Hutu tribe and the Tutsi tribe were linked to farming and herding respectively.
Fast forward 30 years and we may be looking at another slow-walking Rwanda phenom right before our eyes in the killing fields of Nigeria’s Middle Belt. The editors of TruthNigeria are confident that the Nigerian people are on the verge of throwing off the corrupt parties, corrupt media and cowardly thought leaders who are the invisible pillars propping up a regime in Abuja posing as an ally of the United States and an emerging democracy.
Yet, Nigerians celebrate much that is worthy of pride on this day, October 1, 2025, the nation’s 65th Independence Day. They are among the most intelligent and resilient people on earth. To their credit, they are among the most enthusiastic worshippers on the planet. Today they need our prayers, our sincere empathy, and critical concern.
Douglas Burton is a former State Department official in Iraq during the U.S. occupation and managing editor of TruthNigeria.com
