1
For years, the story of Plateau State was written in fire and fear. Scroll through any social media feed, and you would see the same grim pattern: burned churches, grieving families, and headlines screaming about a “Christian genocide.” It was packaged neatly, shipped overseas, and sold to an international audience that had no way of checking the details. And for a long time, it worked. The world believed it. But here is the thing about narratives: they eventually collide with reality. And in Plateau, reality has become very inconvenient for the people who profit from the lie. The cotton has fallen. The false narrative has been unmasked. Not because the violence isn’t real—it is, devastatingly real—but because the story being told about that violence was always incomplete. Nigerians living on the ground know it. The affected communities know it. And now, thanks to tireless documentation and a growing refusal to accept easy labels, the rest of the world is beginning to know it too. What is happening in Plateau is not a simple religious crusade. It is a tangled, painful, human crisis—one that cannot be understood through the narrow lens of genocide, and one that will never be solved by people who are more interested in using the dead for their own ideological agendas than in finding a path to peace.
Let’s be honest about the messiness of what is actually happening. The evidence that has been documented from Plateau is overwhelming—but it does not point in one convenient direction. There are attacks, yes. Killings, yes. Burned homes, stolen cattle, displaced families, and traumatized communities. But the attacks are not all coming from one side. The killings are not all committed by one group. In some villages, a community is hit first and retaliates in anger. In others, the retaliation is the opening act, and the “retaliation” narrative is used to justify what follows. Cattle rustling happens across ethnic lines. Farm destruction happens across religious lines. There have been cases where Fulani herders paid compensation to Christian farmers whose fields were destroyed, and cases where farmers paid compensation to Fulani herders who lost livestock. Just recently, a Fulani man paid one million naira to repair a farm he had damaged. Now ask yourself: does that sound like a man carrying out a genocide? Or does it sound like a human being caught in a cycle of communal violence that is both brutal and deeply complicated? The problem is that stories like these never make the headlines. They don’t fit the script. They don’t produce dramatic footage of burning churches or grieving widows. They are quiet, awkward, and inconvenient. And so they are ignored.
Instead, we get the carefully manufactured narrative of innocent Christian communities being slaughtered by Muslim herdsmen, backed by international advocacy organizations that choose their victims with surgical precision. If the victim belongs to the “right” category, the world hears about it. If the victim is Fulani, or if the victim is a Muslim, or if the victim happens to be a herder whose cattle were stolen and whose family was killed, the story suddenly becomes complicated. The first attack disappears into the footnotes, while the retaliation becomes the headline. A Christian who loses his farm is a victim of “ethnic cleansing.” A Fulani who loses his cattle is dismissed as a casualty of a “resource conflict.” A church burned to the ground is international news. A mosque attacked in retaliation is barely mentioned. This selective empathy is not accidental. It is a choice. And it is a choice made by people who understand that nuance does not raise funds, that complexity does not generate outrage, and that a conflict described as a “farmer-herder dispute” does not attract the same attention as a conflict described as “genocide.” So they stretch the truth. They amplify the worst cases. They hide the rest. And in doing so, they do a profound disservice to the very victims they claim to represent.
But there is another battlefield in this war—one that is fought not with bullets but with narratives. Nigeria’s security crisis is increasingly being fought on two fronts. On the physical battlefield, armed groups attack communities, kidnap children, steal livestock, and destroy homes. On the information battlefield, competing groups fight to control the story: what happened, who is responsible, and why. And the second battlefield often determines what happens on the first. Because if you can convince the world that your community is the only victim, you can secure arms, funding, and political support. If you can convince your own people that the other side is irredeemably evil, you can prevent reconciliation and ensure that the cycle of violence continues. The conflict entrepreneurs understand this perfectly. They thrive on outrage. They thrive on division. They need the violence to continue because their power, their relevance, and sometimes their income depends on it. For them, peace is inconvenient. A peaceful Plateau produces no dramatic videos, no sensational headlines, no fundraising campaigns. A farmer and herder settling a dispute over grazing land produces no international attention. A compensation agreement produces no genocide narrative. What produces attention is a dead body and an angry speech at a funeral. What produces clicks is fear. What produces money is pain. And so the tragedy continues, not because ordinary people want it to, but because too many powerful people benefit from it.
The good news is that the world is beginning to wake up. One of the most important turning points came recently with a BBC Africa Eye documentary titled Nigeria: Faith, Fear and Fake News. It did something rare and profoundly important: it separated the reality of suffering from the narratives built around that suffering. It showed that there is a massive gap between what is being broadcast to the international community and what is actually happening on the ground. It asked the difficult questions that too many advocates have been avoiding. If this is really a genocide against Christians, why are Muslims also being killed? If this is really about eradicating Christianity, why are churches not the only targets? Why are farms destroyed? Why are cattle stolen? Why are villages attacked in areas where people of different faiths have lived together peacefully for generations? The documentary did not deny that Christians have suffered. They have. It did not dismiss the pain of families who have lost loved ones. That pain is real. But it insisted that the whole truth is more complex than the slogan “Christian persecution.” It reminded us that you cannot understand the crisis if you only listen to one side. And it delivered the most important lesson of all: do not confuse a community with the criminals who operate within or around it. A Fulani pastoralist is not automatically a terrorist because an armed criminal happens to be Fulani. A Christian farmer is not automatically part of a militia because a Christian militia member commits a crime. A Muslim is not responsible for Boko Haram. A Christian is not responsible for the actions of a Christian militia. An entire ethnic group cannot be prosecuted for the crimes of individuals.
In the end, this is not about choosing sides. It is about choosing truth. And truth is not always comfortable. It means acknowledging that there are criminals among the Fulani, but also among the Berom and the Mwaghavul. It means recognizing that there are armed actors, cattle rustlers, kidnappers, and militia members from every community. It means admitting that a criminal does not become a saint because he belongs to our ethnic group, and a victim does not become less deserving of justice because he belongs to the “wrong” community. It means resisting the urge to turn every tragedy into a weapon. It means mourning every life lost, regardless of religion. It means standing with all victims, not just the ones who make good headlines. Nigerians are watching. Nigerians are documenting. Nigerians are comparing the stories with what actually happened on the ground, and they are no longer accepting the missing half of the evidence. The international community should do the same. The old narrative is falling apart, not because people are less willing to believe, but because the truth is finally being told—in all its painful, complicated, and human fullness. The path to peace will not be found in more hate, more division, or more lies. It will be found in the difficult, necessary work of seeing each other as human beings, and refusing to let the criminals on any side define us all. That is the real battle. And it is one we can still win.