By O’tega Ogra
Following renewed claims from certain Western voices, including United States Senator Ted Cruz and television host Bill Maher, alleging “Christian persecution” in Nigeria, O’tega Ogra, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Digital Engagement and Strategy, offers this measured response. It reflects the growing insistence within Africa’s largest democracy that its story will be told by its own citizens, not rewritten from abroad._
It is remarkable how quickly concern for Nigeria resurfaces whenever some in the West need a new stage for their moral theatre. This time a senator with a well-kept beard and a television comedian have found new applause lines in our pain. Different microphones, same script, same ignorance dressed as concern.
I begin where truth stands unshaken. There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria. There is terrorism, the same plague that tore through Iraq, Syria and Libya, and now creeps through the very West that once exported it. Yet Nigeria confronts it daily, in a few regions, without foreign sympathy or selective outrage.
Our soldiers, Muslim and Christian alike, fall side by side defending one Republic under one flag. Nigeria will not be lectured by those who confuse our struggle for security with a struggle of faith.
Before preaching righteousness they might read a little history. Islam flourished on our northern plains centuries before America existed. Christianity found harbour on our southern shores before the American Republic was conceived. Both have lived within this geographic expression now called Nigeria longer than that Republic itself, often side by side, rarely apart.
Our constitution forbids any state religion. Our streets echo with both the imam’s call to prayer and the Sunday choir. In many homes Christians and Muslims share one table, one grief, one dream. That is the Nigeria they never see, because unity does not trend.
When a United States senator whose own colleagues have admitted that Washington’s interventions helped arm groups like Boko Haram now accuses Nigeria of religious persecution, the irony borders on self-parody. You cannot set a region on fire and then accuse the victims of arson.
Now the same senator, Ted Cruz, seeks to legislate Nigeria’s faith from Washington.
That is not religious freedom. That is old colonial arrogance dressed in modern language. Nigeria does not legislate for Texas, and Texas will not legislate for Nigeria.
You cannot wrap interference in scripture and call it compassion. Concern is easy when it costs nothing. Facts are harder when they expose convenience. Nigeria does not seek validation, only accuracy.
And to the comedian crawling for propaganda dollars, faith in Nigeria is not a punchline. It feeds the hungry, shelters the displaced, and gives hope to the weary.
Mocking belief may earn applause abroad. Here it earns silence, the kind that comes from people too busy rebuilding to laugh.
Nigeria’s challenge is not faith. It is terror and the exploitation of pain for profit. Those who frame our fight as sectarian warfare only serve the very extremists they claim to condemn.
We recognise the choreography and the dance of shamelessness. This is a coordinated narrative designed to divide, to paint Africa’s most complex democracy as chaos, and to drain our story of dignity.
But Nigeria does not perform for foreign theatre. We stand, we rebuild, and we believe with partners, not patrons.
As President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said, “Nigeria may bend, but we do not break.” If persecution is what they seek to find, they might begin by examining how many wars were fought in the name of their own exceptionalism. In our culture, when a visitor sets fire to your roof and returns with a bucket, we do not call him a hero.
The real story of Nigeria is not persecution but perseverance, a nation of more than two hundred million who rise each dawn determined to live together, to fight together, and to build together. We are not perfect, but we are not pawns.
Nigeria is not a victim to be pitied. It is a nation to be respected. The cross, the crescent and the ancestral spirit stand here, not in conflict but in covenant, and this is our simple truth. We will defend it calmly, firmly and without apology.
History has taught us that nations built on conviction outlast those built on condescension. Nigeria will outlast both their pity and their prejudice.
O’tega Ogra is Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on Digital Engagement and Strategy. He writes on governance, digital diplomacy and Africa’s evolving voice in global affairs.
