ABUJA, Nigeria The road to Nigeria’s Middle Belt cuts through a landscape of contrasts: lush green fields interrupted by charred remains of homes; bustling motor parks giving way to quiet villages where fear has settled into the soil. It is here, in this contested zone between north and south, that international discourse often narrows the country’s complexity into a single, jarring claim: that Nigeria is witnessing a genocide against its Christian population.
Yet to walk through these communities, to listen to survivors, religious leaders, local security volunteers, and women who run informal mediation circles, is to encounter a deeper, more layered truth one that resists easy categorisation.
Nigeria’s violence is devastating. But it is not doctrinally pure, nor is it unidirectional. It is shaped by geography, poverty, the collapse of rural governance, historical grievances, and the harsh mathematics of survival in fragile borderlands.
In Jos, a city that has seen its share of turmoil, two men one an imam, the other a pastor who have spent years pulling young men back from militia recruitment. “When outsiders say genocide,” the imam said, “they erase the work we do every day, the friendships across the divide, the realities of our city.”
In states like Benue, farmers speak of disputes stretching back decades, inflamed by water scarcity and unpredictable seasons. Herders say they are pushed southward by the advancing desert and disappearing grazing corridors. Climate change has sharpened old tensions, transforming local disputes into combustible conflicts.
Yet narratives imported from abroad often frame these clashes as deliberate religious warfare. Many in Nigeria view such portrayals as dangerously reductionist. “Our pain is real,” said a displaced schoolteacher in Miango. “But it is not the story people in foreign countries are telling in our name.”
Nigeria’s cities tell a parallel tale one of extraordinary coexistence. Interfaith communities rebuild after violence, traders of different backgrounds share shops, and youth movements organise peace concerts, football tournaments, and shared vigils. These stories rarely make international news.
The risk of external misunderstanding is not academic. Policymakers abroad utilise simplified stories to argue for sanctions or invoke geopolitical pressure. But when the complexity of Nigerian society is flattened into a binary moral narrative, the nation’s fragile peace architecture suffers.
Nigeria’s struggle is a struggle against insecurity, yes but also against mischaracterisation. Against the theft of its own narrative. Against the ease with which foreign debates can drown out local voices.