By Ademola Adekusibe
November 3, 2025.
Governor Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra State has rejected recent comments by U.S. President Donald Trump that Nigeria is witnessing a “Christian genocide,” arguing that the country’s security challenges are far more complex and cannot be reduced to religious targeting.
Speaking during a media chat on Sunday, Soludo said Nigeria’s situation goes beyond a Christian-versus-Muslim framework and criticised Washington’s simplistic characterization of the violence. “People are killing themselves, Christians killing Christians … It has nothing to do with religion,” he said, citing incidents in the South-East where he noted that both perpetrators and victims share Christian names.
He also called out what he described as the U.S. double standard. “You had policemen killing some blacks … I remember the #BlackLivesMatter protest … Maybe Africa should have gone and invaded America because blacks were being killed? I’m not quite sure,” he added, challenging Western logic on intervention.
Soludo urged the U.S. and others to engage Nigeria in a deeper conversation rather than issuing threats. He said any support requested by Nigeria should be in the form of military hardware, intelligence sharing, or capacity building – not military intervention without consent. “It must end in conversation and I am sure the government of Nigeria will respond very robustly,” he said.
Background to Soludo’s remarks: On Friday, Trump designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) over alleged mass killings of Christians and threatened that the United States may “go into that now disgraced country, guns-a-blazing” if the violence did not cease.
In response, the -led federal government rejected the genocide claim and stated that violence in Nigeria affects citizens of all faiths and is driven by a mix of terrorism, banditry, resource conflict and ethnic tension.
