A Nigerian-American scholar says President Donald Trump’s recent statements condemning the persecution of Christians in Nigeria were “long overdue,” arguing the violence carried out by Islamist terrorists has been overlooked by global leaders for years — even as the perpetrators have openly declared their intent.
Ebenezer Obadare, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the Free Press Nov. 4 that Trump’s decision to label Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) reflects a grim reality long visible to close observers of Nigeria.
Nigeria, he noted, is “split roughly in two between Christians and Muslims,” and the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram has waged a brutal campaign to overthrow the nation’s secular government for years. Since 2009, Boko Haram has killed more than 52,000 Nigerian Christians, destroyed more than 19,000 churches and 2,200 Christian schools, and displaced more than 2 million people.
The terrorist group’s name, meaning “Western education is a sin,” signals its ideology, Obadare said.
“Its self-identified reason for existence is to overthrow the secular Nigerian government and establish a fundamentalist Islamist theocracy governed by Sharia law,” Obadare wrote. “To realize this vision, the group has committed unimaginable acts of terror.”
He cited multiple atrocities, including a June massacre in which militants “butchered hundreds with machetes before drenching them with gasoline and setting them on fire.”
Despite such atrocities, Obadare said international leaders have been reluctant to acknowledge the religious nature of violence, preferring to blame “land disputes” or “climate change.” But, he added, Boko Haram’s own words refute that narrative.
“[N]ot only is any reference to economic grievance or climate change notably absent from Boko Haram’s rhetoric or list of demands,” he wrote, “the group is clear about its goal: to abolish the Nigerian state as we know it and replace it with a Sharia-based theocracy.”
Obadare cited statements from the late Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, who in 2014, boasted about kidnapping more than 200 Christians — most of whom were Nigerian girls.
“I abducted your girls, I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” Shekau said, according to a 2014 CNN report. “There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will sell women. I sell women.”
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Later that year, Shekau declared, “Know, people of Nigeria and other places, a person is not a Muslim unless he disavows democracy and other forms of polytheistic unbelief,” according to a July 2025 paper in the AL-ARFA: Journal of Sharia, Islamic Economics and Law.
The scholar also noted that Boko Haram targets both Christians and mainstream Muslims, viewing them as “one and the same: infidels.”
The international community’s reluctance to diagnose the problem in Nigeria likely has to do with a desire to avoid bigotry or intolerance, Obadare wrote, but the Nigerian government even characterizes the group as “‘violent extremism’” rather than “by their religious character.”
Obadare said Trump’s blunt language has finally “put international pressure on the Nigerian government to take seriously the elephant in the room: a decades-long Islamist reign of terror that has turned much of the northeastern corridor of the country into an unofficial theater of war.”
He urged the U.S. and international community to take a firmer stand, recommending material and intelligence aid to Nigeria’s military and the possible creation of a regional stabilization force under the Economic Community of West African States.
“Whatever the best approach, the point is this: It’s time to take the fight to Boko Haram,” Obadare concluded. “That begins with what Trump appears to have done last week: calling them exactly what they are.”
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