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By Our Reporter

Abuja | October 14, 2025

A visiting American fact-finding delegation has declared that Nigeria is witnessing an ongoing genocide against its Christian population, accusing both the Nigerian government and sections of the international community of deliberately downplaying or concealing the truth.

The team, led by Mayor Mike Arnold, founder of Africa Arise International and Africa Arise USA, presented its findings at a world press conference on Tuesday, October 13, 2025 at the Abuja Hilton. Arnold, a former mayor from the state of Texas, described his conclusion as the result of more than five years of frontline research, field documentation, and humanitarian work across Nigeria’s most violence-affected regions.

“Based on more than five years of investigation, firsthand documentation, and eyewitness accounts, I declare without any shadow of a doubt that what is happening in Northern and Middle Belt Nigeria is a calculated, current, and long-running genocide against Christian communities,” Arnold said.

“To continue to deny this is to be complicit.”

From Peace to Persecution

Arnold, who said he has visited Nigeria 15 times since 2010, recalled a once-stable nation admired for interfaith tolerance and economic promise. But by 2014, he said, the tide had turned—fuelled by foreign interference, political manipulation, and the spread of extremist ideologies following the Libyan crisis and the Arab Spring.

He accused powerful local and international actors of enabling the violence that has now displaced over four million Nigerians, most of them Christians driven from ancestral farmlands across the North and Middle Belt.

“Not Clashes, But Calculated Cleansing”

Rejecting the official narrative of “farmer-herder clashes,” Arnold said such language was a dangerous euphemism that masks deliberate ethnic and religious extermination.

“Calling this a ‘farmer-herder clash’ is like calling Bosnia’s ethnic cleansing a neighborhood dispute,” he declared. “It’s systematic terror, not grazing conflict. Churches are burned while mosques stand untouched. Christian villages are erased, their lands resettled by jihadist militias.”

According to the team’s field data and over 80 hours of filmed evidence, most attacks were attributed not only to Boko Haram and ISWAP but increasingly to radical Fulani militias operating under political protection.

“These Fulani militant groups are responsible for the most widespread and sustained attacks on Christian farming communities,” Arnold said, noting that their operations now surpass Boko Haram and ISWAP in reach, frequency, and civilian death toll.

Blood, Minerals, and Politics

The report identifies three interlocking motives behind the violence:

1. Religious Conquest – The spread of extremist ideology by armed groups from Libya and the Sahel, aided by local enablers.
2. Illicit Mining – Nigeria loses about $9 billion annually to illegal extraction of minerals like gold, tin, and lithium—much of it from lands cleared by violence.
3. Political Realignment – Militants are reportedly resettled to alter electoral demographics, turning war into a tool of political engineering.

Arnold alleged that government agencies and officials often label displaced victims as “vagrants” or “criminals,” thereby excluding them from aid and masking the true scale of the tragedy.

The Silence of Complicity

The American investigator condemned what he described as the Nigerian government’s “crime of obfuscation,” warning that denial and censorship had become a form of participation in genocide.

“Sanitizing massacres as ‘conflict,’ refusing to name perpetrators, and criminalizing survivors—this is not confusion, it is complicity,” he said. “To play word games while people die is beyond obscene.”

Legal Definition and Global Implications

Citing Article II of the UN Convention on Genocide, Arnold stated that the violence in Nigeria meets all legal thresholds: targeted killings, mass displacement, psychological terror, denial of aid, and deliberate attempts to erase Christian identity.

The mission’s statement has been distributed to senior U.S. officials including Senator Ted Cruz, Congressman Chip Roy, the White House, the State Department, and international media outlets such as The New York Times.

“Here I Stand”

Despite the grim findings, Arnold expressed faith in Nigeria’s potential for renewal—if truth is faced and unity restored.

“I believe Nigeria has a bright future,” he said. “I believe in Christian-Muslim harmony. But first, we must name the evil for what it is. Here I stand. I can do no other. So help me God.”

The statement, co-signed by retired U.S. Ambassador Lewis Lucke, Pastor Jed D’Grace, and Judd Saul, calls on world governments and human rights bodies to recognize and act against what they describe as “one of the 21st century’s most ignored humanitarian catastrophes.”