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Nigeria Is Erasing its Christians — and Canada Is Looking Away By Kevin Klein Winnipeg Sun Nigeria is the most dangerous place in the world to be a Christian. That’s not my opinion — it’s a fact backed by years of data. More Christians are murdered for their faith in Nigeria than in the rest of the world combined. Yet here in Canada, you hardly hear a word about it. If your news sources haven’t told you what’s going on in Nigeria, they’re failing you. Since 2009, when Boko Haram launched its insurgency, over 62,000 Christians have been murdered by Islamist groups. These aren’t isolated incidents or random flare-ups. They are targeted killings, organized and systematic. The perpetrators include Boko Haram, its ISIS-affiliated offshoot ISWAP, and radicalized Fulani herdsmen militias. Their actions go beyond violence. They burn churches, attack schools, abduct women and children, and drive families from land they’ve farmed for generations. More than 18,000 churches have been destroyed. This isn’t a conflict. This isn’t a clash of cultures. This is an attempt to wipe out Christianity in Nigeria. The numbers for this year alone are staggering. From January through August of 2025, more than 7,000 Christians have been killed — an average of about 30 every single day. Another 7,800 have been abducted. Benue State, in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, has been hit the hardest, with more than 1,100 deaths in that period. The massacres are often carried out with impunity. In June, 280 Christians were slaughtered in a single two-day attack in Yelwata. Imagine the outrage if 280 people were killed at once anywhere else in the world. Yet most media outlets barely gave it a mention, if at all. To date, the violence has displaced millions of people. Families have been forced to flee their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Villages are emptied. Churches and schools are reduced to rubble. In some areas, the Christian presence has been erased entirely. Rights groups are warning that Nigeria is on the brink of obliterating entire Christian communities. So why the silence? Why are Canadians not hearing about this? We are quick to weigh in on conflicts in the Middle East, and rightly so. But when thousands of Christians are being killed in Nigeria, the silence is deafening. To quote Bill Marr, “To put it bluntly, if you don’t know what’s happening in Nigeria, you’re living in a media bubble.” The Nigerian government’s record makes matters worse. Critics, including American lawmakers and international human rights organizations, have pointed out again and again that Nigerian authorities rarely prosecute perpetrators. Security forces fail to protect communities under attack. In some cases, officials look the other way. That failure of basic governance has allowed violence to spread from the north into the central farming belt and southward. Nigeria currently ranks sixth on Open Doors’ World Watch List for Christian persecution, which measures where Christians face the worst hostility worldwide. Given the scale of killings, that ranking feels almost generous. Some dismiss this as a local conflict over land and resources, pointing to tensions between Fulani herders and Christian farmers. But that explanation ignores the jihadist ideology driving the militias. This is not just about grazing rights or farmland. It is about religion. Christians are being targeted as “infidels” in an explicit campaign to establish an Islamic caliphate in Nigeria. Boko Haram has said so openly. The Fulani militias that carry out mass raids blend this ideology with the resource conflict, making it even more lethal. Pretending otherwise is dishonest. This is closer to genocide than anything else. The goal is not coexistence, but elimination. Compare the numbers. More Christians have been killed in Nigeria since 2009 than the total number of people killed in Gaza in that same period. Yet the global outrage is nowhere to be found. Where are the marches? Where are the emergency debates at the United Nations? Why is the Canadian government silent? Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Canada is complicit if we continue to look away. We trade with Nigeria. We maintain diplomatic relations with a government that has proven either unable or unwilling to protect its citizens from extermination. Every barrel of oil purchased, every diplomatic courtesy extended, becomes harder to justify when weighed against the body count of Christians. Canada needs to take a stand. End trade with Nigeria until it demonstrates real action to protect its Christian population. Suspend diplomatic relations until we see prosecutions of those responsible. Use our position in international forums to push for sanctions and accountability. We can’t fix Nigeria’s problems, but we can stop pretending nothing is happening. Some will argue that disengagement won’t solve the problem. That’s true. But continuing business as usual sends a message that Canada doesn’t care about mass killings when the victims are Christians. At a minimum, Canada should be vocal in condemning these atrocities. Instead, we get silence. The numbers are undeniable. Over 100,000 Christians have been killed since 2009. Nearly 200,000 civilians in total. Millions displaced. Eighteen thousand churches burned. Those are facts, not exaggerations. This is happening right now in Africa’s most populous country, a country Canada trades with and recognizes as a partner. Silence in the face of that reality is cowardice. Canadians deserve to know the truth. They deserve to be told what’s happening to Christians in Nigeria. Because if we ignore it, if we turn the page and pretend it’s someone else’s problem, we are no better than the governments that look the other way while their people are slaughtered. What’s happening in Nigeria is alarming. The fact it hasn’t broken through to the top of our headlines is even more alarming. The Christian population in Nigeria is under siege, and if current trends continue, large parts of it will be erased in our lifetime. That is not speculation. That is the trajectory, unless something changes. Canada can’t claim to defend human rights while ignoring one of the worst human rights crises in the world today. We can’t claim to care about religious freedom while turning a blind eye to the systematic killing of Christians. If we want to stand for something, this is where we draw the line. Ending trade and suspending diplomatic relations with Nigeria may seem drastic. But when entire communities are being wiped out and millions are displaced, doing nothing is worse. The time for silence is over.