Senate President Godswill Akpabio on Thursday cautioned against framing Nigeria’s security challenges as religious conflict, stressing that terrorists and bandits attack Nigerians indiscriminately, regardless of their faith.
Akpabio made the remarks during plenary in Abuja while contributing to a motion on alleged religious persecution of Christians in Nigeria.
The debate followed reports that some foreign governments were considering sanctions against Nigeria over claims of religious intolerance.
He warned that presenting terrorism as a Christian-versus-Muslim conflict was both misleading and dangerous, as it could deepen divisions among citizens.
“When they come and start spraying bullets from, or they throw a rocket, they are not throwing a rocket into the crowd targeting a particular religion. They are killing Nigerians. I don’t know who will now go and sit down and bring out maybe their dead bodies and say, this one is a Christian, this one is from this family, this must be a Muslim,” he said.
“We are facing a situation whereby these terrorists are trying to terminate the lives of Nigerians and frustrate us from going into the farms to produce food to feed ourselves.”
Akpabio explained that the apparent religious identity of victims often reflects the dominant faith in a region, not the motive of attackers.
“If terrorism occurs in a Christian-dominated state, most of those who will die there will be Christians. If it occurs in a Muslim-dominated state, most of those who will die there will be Muslims. But if it occurs particularly in the North Central, you will notice that it will be targeted at maybe churches, because that is what they are able to get. And then at the end, they will say, oh, it’s Muslims that kill Christians.
“If it happens in Borno or Yobe, they will say Christians kill Muslims. So the way the whole situation is, we seem to need to go into executive session and get a date for our security summit, so we can have a close discussion on these matters.”
He expressed concern over how foreign narratives — particularly from Western nations — were shaping perceptions of Nigeria’s security landscape and called for proactive engagement.
“When we go into executive session, we can decide to set up a small ad hoc committee to go to the United States of America and engage our colleague parliamentarians there. If you see what these people are doing, most of them are outsiders. Some people must have gone there to give a one-sided story, and at the end, it will now look as if only Christians are being killed by terrorists in Nigeria,” Akpabio said.
He warned that such misrepresentations abroad could result in sanctions that would negatively affect all Nigerians. “What is happening in the United States is of concern to Nigeria. It’s of concern to the Christians. It’s of concern to the Muslims. Because the moment they bring sanctions, sanctions will breed poverty. And poverty knows no religion,” he added.
The Senate President cited the killing of Dr. Chike Akunyili, husband of late NAFDAC boss Dora Akunyili, as an example of violence in a predominantly Christian region that could not be reduced to religion.
“So, if you look at what is happening in the Southeast, predominantly Christians, most of those that are killed in the Southeast, including the late husband of our demised icon, Dora Akunyili—will you come and ascribe that to religion? I’m talking about what IPOB is doing. You see brothers killing brothers,” he said.
Akpabio stressed that Nigeria’s security crisis was multifaceted and should be treated as a national emergency rather than a religious issue.
“Nigeria has complex security situations. We should actually go out there and educate people so that they will know what to do. If we stay here to give figures and instances where Muslims were killed or where Christians were killed, we are not helping the situation,” he said.
He called on lawmakers to redirect their focus to national security strategies and effective counter-terrorism measures.
“We should look at what we do to ensure counter-terrorism and how we respond to the guerrilla tactics of the terrorists, whether internal or external aggressors,” he said.
Akpabio’s comments came amid growing international scrutiny of Nigeria’s human rights and religious freedom record.
In September, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz introduced S.2747 — The Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025, which seeks to have Nigeria designated as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for alleged religious freedom violations and to impose sanctions on implicated officials.
The bill is supported by longstanding recommendations from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which has repeatedly called for Nigeria’s CPC designation due to what it described as failures by state and local authorities to protect religious minorities.
However, Nigerian authorities have consistently rejected these claims, insisting that the country’s violence is rooted in terrorism, banditry, and communal clashes — not religious persecution.
