Former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, has again pushed back strongly against claims that Christians are the sole victims of violence and mass abductions in Northern Nigeria, describing such narratives as misleading and dangerous.
In a statement released on Sunday, Fani-Kayode argued that both Christians and Muslims face serious security threats in parts of Northern Nigeria, particularly from terrorist groups and criminal gangs responsible for widespread kidnappings.
“It is not true that only Christians are victims of genocide in Nigeria,” he said, stressing that Muslims are also being abducted and killed in large numbers. According to him, a more accurate assessment of the crisis would recognise that Nigerians of different faiths are unsafe in several northern regions due to mass abductions, rather than framing the violence as exclusively religious.
The former minister criticised what he described as attempts to distort the narrative by portraying the crisis as a one-sided campaign against Christians. He dismissed claims that only churches are attacked while mosques are spared, calling such assertions “nonsensical falsehoods.”
Fani-Kayode further accused some commentators and activists of selective outrage, alleging that the deaths of Muslims in the North often receive little or no attention, while attacks on Christians are amplified and, in some cases, exaggerated.
“When Christians are killed in the North, they feign outrage and celebrate and magnify it as evidence of Christian persecution and genocide,” he said, claiming that such narratives are used to influence right-wing political groups abroad and deepen religious divisions at home.
He warned that inflating casualty figures or fabricating attacks risks provoking sectarian conflict in an already fragile security environment. According to him, peddling divisive narratives could “plant the seeds of religious division and provoke a sectarian war.”
Nigeria has faced years of insecurity in  northern regions, with terrorist insurgency, banditry, and kidnappings affecting communities across religious and ethnic lines. Security analysts have repeatedly warned that framing the violence purely through a religious lens may oversimplify the crisis and undermine efforts to address its root causes.