Some people claim that the killings of Christian communities in Nigeria’s north central and north east are not genocide because they are caused by “land grabbing” and not religion. This argument makes no sense. It misunderstands what genocide really means. Genocide is not about what people lose, whether land, property, or wealth, but about why they are attacked. When people are killed because they belong to a group that someone wants to destroy, that is genocide.
The 1948 United Nations Convention defines genocide as the intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The motive, whether land, money, or power, does not matter. What matters is the intent to destroy a group of people because of who they are. The Nazis took Jewish homes and businesses, yet no one says the Holocaust was about property. In Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, people were wiped out because of their identity, even though land and power were also at stake. Genocide usually has mixed motives, but its heart is always the same: erasing a people from the map.
Scholars have long explained that land and wealth can be tools of genocide, not excuses for it. Charles Anderton and Jurgen Brauer, in their work, Economic Aspects of Genocides, show that taking land or property often goes hand in hand with the killing of a people. Ned Blackhawk, in The Cambridge World History of Genocide, also shows that in settler colonial societies, genocide and land grabbing are two sides of the same coin. The land is taken only after the people who live on it are destroyed.
This is what is happening in parts of Nigeria. In Benue, Taraba, and Plateau states, entire Christian villages have been attacked and burnt. Churches are destroyed, priests killed, farmlands seized, and survivors forced into camps. The attackers, often identified as Fulani militias, move with a clear purpose. They attack, kill, burn, and then occupy the land. This is not about competition over land. It is about removing people and replacing them. The land is taken only after Christians are killed or driven away.
To call this ‘land grabbing” is to cover up evil. It turns murder into a harmless-sounding issue. The South Africa-based Nigerian scholar, Adeoye Akinola, in his essay, Farm Attacks or White Genocide?, warns that describing identity-based killings as land conflict hides the truth and protects the killers. It changes questions of justice and identity into technical arguments about property. When that happens, no one is held accountable. We hear similar excuses in Nigeria today. People talk about “herder-farmer clashes” and “resource competition” as if both sides have equal power. But this is false. On one side, the militias are armed and often shielded by the state. The other side, the Christian farmers, is defenceless and abandoned. This imbalance shows the real motive, not to share land, but to wipe out communities.
When I travelled recently through Benue, Taraba, and Plateau, I saw terrible destruction. Entire villages were reduced to ashes. Churches were burnt to the ground. Graves were dug up. Families disappeared. Survivors, who were shoved into unkept IDP camps, told me their attackers said, “This is our land now”. Those four words reveal the truth. They are taking over by destroying a people. The killings come first, the land taking follows. If this violence were about land, why burn churches? Why kill priests? Why rename villages to erase Christian memory? Why are Christian communities always the ones destroyed while nearby Muslim communities remain untouched?
These questions expose the lie.
Chris Huggins, in his book Losing Your Land: Dispossession in Africa, explains that land is often both a cause and a result of genocide. After wiping out a group, the killers take their land to erase their memory and change the identity of the place. The land becomes proof of victory and a tool for rewriting history. That is what we see in Nigeria today. Christian villages are renamed, their lands occupied by new settlers, their memories wiped away. The denial of genocide follows a familiar script. In Rwanda, Hutu leaders said they were fighting over scarce land. In Bosnia, Serb forces said they were reclaiming ancestral land. In Darfur, the Sudanese government called its genocide “counterinsurgency”. The same pattern repeats here, mass killing hidden behind neutral words. Calling genocide “land conflict” allows politicians to look away and avoid responsibility. It lets killers walk free because “farmers and herders” sounds less shocking than “victims and perpetrators”.
But words matter. Identity matters.
Genocide begins not only with bullets but also with language. It starts when we rename victims and hide the truth. It grows when we call extermination “conflict”. It succeeds when silence replaces outrage. In Nigeria’s Middle Belt today, Christians are being wiped out not because of the soil they farm but because of the faith they hold. The violence bears the marks of a campaign against identity itself. Churches are burned, not by accident but by design; pastors are hunted, not for what they possess but for what they profess. Crosses are torn down, Bibles reduced to ash, and whole congregations slaughtered in their places of worship. These are not random acts of banditry; they are acts meant to erase a people’s spiritual presence from the land.
There are growing threats to the life of the outspoken Jos-based cleric, Rev. Ezekiel Dachomo. Yet, while genocide deniers insist that the killings are not about faith but merely about land, they cannot explain why the Army now shields the same man it once accused of inciting violence against the state. How do they not see that men are being killed for the name they bear, that prayer has become a crime, and that faith itself is treated as trespass? The intention has long crossed from war into annihilation. This is how genocide announces itself, not only in the destruction of bodies, but in the deliberate effort to erase belief, memory, and belonging.
Each unpunished massacre sends one message: Christian lives do not matter. To keep calling this “land grabbing” is to repeat the lie of the killers. It is to help erase the truth. Our duty as citizens, activists, journalists, scholars, and leaders is to name the crime for what it is. When people are targeted for who they are, not what they own, that is genocide. History warns us that denial is the final stage of genocide. It ensures that the perpetrators go free, the victims are forgotten, and the violence returns. Nigeria stands dangerously close to that point. Whether we choose to speak the truth and call it genocide or hide behind soft words like “land conflict” will decide whether we are remembered as witnesses or accomplices.
This is not about land. It is about life, faith, and the right of a people to exist. And when that right is destroyed, even the land itself bears witness.
The land bears witness in silence, but it remembers everything. It remembers the footsteps of those who fled into the bush at night, the cries that echoed through the hills, the smoke that rose from burning churches. It keeps the ashes, the bones, the charred fragments of homes and altars that once stood as signs of faith and community. Beneath its quiet surface, it carries the memory of violence that words, governments and paid columnists try to bury.
The killers may return to till the soil, to build upon it, to rename it, but the ground remembers the blood that consecrated it. In time, the land itself becomes a record, a living archive of what was done and what was denied. The fields that once yielded cash crops now yield silence; the paths once walked by children now open into emptiness. Even the rivers change their colour and course, as though trying to wash away the shame. And yet, they cannot. Nature does not forget the injustices committed against those who once tended it. Every dry well, every ford, every abandoned farm, every ruined church stands as testimony to the broken covenant between Nigerian humanity and the earth.
To heal this land, we must begin by telling the truth. Naming the crime is the first act of restoration. Justice is not only for the living, it is also for the soil that groans under the weight of unburied truth. Until we confront what happened, the land will continue to bear its silent witness against us. And long after we are gone, it will still whisper the names of those who were denied life, reminding future generations that the earth remembers what men try to forget. What fifth columnists tried to spin. As the prophet Jeremiah lamented: “How long will the land mourn and the grass of every field wither? For the wickedness of those who dwell in it, the beasts and the birds are swept away”. And as Amos thundered in reply through the ages: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”.
Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja
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