17
Dec
2025
Watch
Mass kidnapping of children in Nigeria, including from St Mary's Catholic school in Papiri
Madam President, Dear Commissioner! Around 400 million Christians worldwide are persecuted. Christians are the most persecuted religious community in the world. This persecution is particularly brutal in Nigeria. Nowhere in the world are more Christians murdered than there, murdered for one reason – because they are Christians. One of them, Pastor Lawan Andimi, was beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam. Or the student Deborah Samuel, first beaten to death, then burned. Churches are systematically destroyed, looted or closed – on average more than three churches a day since the Boko Haram Uprising in 2009. That makes a total of nearly 20,000 churches. The U.S. envoy to the UN, Mike Waltz, is clear. He says this is not accidental violence, this is a genocide, a genocide of Christians. All these facts have been known for a long time. Why are we only discussing this now? Why has there been no outcry so far? Why was it kept silent for so long? Perhaps because Christians are often only second-class victims and perhaps because people are reluctant to talk about the perpetrators out of misunderstood cultural sensitivity. Let's be honest, for many it is the wrong victims and the wrong perpetrators. But we should call the perpetrators by name: Boko Haram, the West African offshoot of ‘Islamic State’, Fulani militias, in short Islamist terrorists. They murder, kidnap, rape, torture. We can no longer accept this. We can no longer look away there. We have to put pressure. Nigeria must protect its Christians. Nigeria must fight Islamist terror. To do this, Nigeria needs to strengthen its institutions – police, judiciary, security apparatus. If not, we can't send a penny to Nigeria.