“I have never denied the killings of Christians in Nigeria. I don’t know where, maybe I shouldn’t say I don’t know where it came from that I denied it,
And if you read a text that I have on what my response to this problem, which is the result of a lecture I delivered in Rome, when they were receiving a report, a global report of 1,270 global persecution of Christians around the world, I raised the issue. And I said, we may be victims of language. When there is persecution, when there is genocide, by God, this thing ought not to have happened.
Now, I don’t want to go into the details of the mischaracterisation of what I said, but it shocked me that Christians were going around saying that I said there is no persecution of Christians in Nigeria. Well, those who are about to appreciate that this has been my life, you know, my only clarification I can give is that I’ve never denied the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.
I would like you to call out one single Nigerian, whether it’s a religious leader or whatever, that has spoken, that has written as extensively about this topic as I have,
Wherever we can get help from, Trump, whatever, we should get it; these killings ought not to have happened in the first place. But the point that we must never miss is that today we lose who we are as citizens of Nigeria.
The day our grief or our concern is only for ourselves, that day we cease to be Christians. So, for me, it’s not about anything, my argument has always been that Nigerians are dying, our country is broken, we need to fix our country and fix it very quickly. And as I’ve said, Nigeria as it is today, whether you’re a military officer, whether you’re a policeman, whether you’re a male, whether you’re a female, whether you’re black or white, this country’s capacity to protect its citizens has been severely constrained.
And it’s not because we are Christians or we are Muslims, it is that we are citizens of Nigeria. And the challenge is for him to very quickly fix our country so that no enemy can return to us,”