Speaking on Wednesday at the opening of CAN’s Fourth Quarterly National Executive Council (NEC) meeting in Jos, the national president of the association, His Grace, Most Rev. Daniel Okoh, declared that the scale, coordination, and impunity surrounding the attacks on Christian populations have reached a point where denial is no longer tenable.
“The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable,” Archbishop Okoh told hundreds of bishops, general overseers, and senior clergy drawn from the five ecclesiastical blocs that make up CAN. “Targeted killings, mass displacement, the razing of entire villages, the destruction of churches, farmlands, and ancestral homes, and the forced migration of indigenous Christian populations constitute a deliberate pattern of extermination. To call it anything less would be a grave betrayal of the victims.”
The Archbishop insisted that CAN’s position is not new but has only grown more urgent with each passing year of unpunished violence. “We have spoken clearly, courageously, and consistently. Today we reiterate with one voice: there is a Christian genocide unfolding on Nigerian soil.”
He painted a grim picture of the human toll, describing how “lives have been brutally cut short, families torn apart, communities uprooted from lands their forebears tilled for centuries, places of worship reduced to rubble, and the hopes of entire generations shattered.” Yet, he added, amid the devastation he has personally witnessed a remarkable resilience rooted in faith.
During a recent pastoral visit to Bokkos Local Government Area in Plateau State—one of the worst-hit zones—Archbishop Okoh met thousands of displaced Christians still living in makeshift camps more than a year after coordinated Christmas Eve massacres in 2023 and subsequent attacks in 2024 and 2025. Many survivors, he said, bear physical scars from machete wounds and gunshot injuries, while virtually all carry deep emotional trauma, yet continue to cling to their Christian hope.
Standing before the NEC, he relayed their message: “Tell the Church in Nigeria and the world that we are not forgotten.” In response, he pledged on behalf of CAN: “You are not forgotten. The Body of Christ in Nigeria and beyond stands firmly with you. We will not rest until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a never-failing stream.”
The CAN president expressed particular anguish at the fact that in many affected communities, perpetrators walk free while survivors have received neither compensation nor any serious plan for safe return and resettlement. Entire villages in southern Kaduna, southern Borno, southern Bauchi, Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, Taraba, and Adamawa have been wiped off the map, their inhabitants scattered into IDP camps or absorbed as refugees in neighbouring states and countries.
“This persistence of killings, kidnappings for ransom, and nocturnal raids long after the nation has been placed on notice is not mere criminality,” Archbishop Okoh charged. “It is evidence of a catastrophic failure of governance, a collapse of the state’s primary responsibility to protect lives and property, and it demands a national soul-searching of the highest order.”
For the first time in recent memory, the CAN leader openly welcomed growing international scrutiny of Nigeria’s religious freedom crisis. Reports by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion or Belief, and several UN special rapporteurs have in recent years classified the violence against Nigerian Christians as bearing the hallmarks of genocide. Genocide Watch, an independent monitoring organisation, currently places Nigeria at Stage 9—“Extermination”—on its ten-stage genocide scale for the Christian population in the North and Middle Belt.
“It is painful that it has taken foreign voices to amplify what Nigerian Christians have cried out for years,” Archbishop Okoh admitted. “But if international attention is what is finally required to jolt our own government into decisive action, then we welcome it unreservedly.”
He issued a direct appeal to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration to treat the crisis with the urgency it deserves: immediate deployment of sufficient security forces to reclaim occupied communities, prosecution of arrested perpetrators (many of whom, he claimed, are known and named in security reports yet remain untouched), reconstruction of destroyed villages, and safe, voluntary, and dignified return of displaced persons.
The continued confinement of hundreds of thousands of Christians in IDP camps years after their displacement, he warned, has become “a moral indictment on the conscience of the nation and a humanitarian time bomb waiting to explode.”
“No one—no Nigerian—should ever be persecuted, maimed, or murdered simply because of the faith they profess,” he declared, adding that Nigeria’s secular constitution and its commitments under international human-rights treaties make the ongoing atrocities not just a tragedy but a crime against the state itself.
Concluding his address to a standing ovation from the packed hall, Archbishop Okoh vowed that CAN will neither be intimidated into silence nor wearied into complacency.
“We will not relent. We will continue to demand justice, to call for accountability, to defend the vulnerable, to advocate for genuine peace, and to pray without ceasing for the healing of our bleeding nation.”
The three-day NEC meeting is expected to produce a communiqué that will detail further actions, including possible engagement with the National Assembly, diplomatic missions, and ecumenical partners worldwide.
As church bells tolled across Jos city in solidarity, the Christian Association of Nigeria once again placed the reality of a deepening Christian genocide squarely before the conscience of the country and the international community.
