In managing the mental health of the president, someone knowledgeable on the subject once told me that presidents read what his aides want him to read, listen to the radio commentary that they want him to listen to, and watch the news cable they want him to watch. Even his phone calls are screened and prioritized.

To protect his mental health, he becomes a willing hostage of his minders. But then unlike most presidents, President Bola Tinubu wasn’t just a Lagos boy, he was a street boy. All the time he governed Lagos and even after he left office, he minded the streets and had his ears and eyes on the streets.

If this is true of him, the questions now begging for answers are: Doesn’t he see that the suffering in the land is getting out of control? Doesn’t he see children dying every day? Doesn’t he see hundreds of women abducted raped and killed? Doesn’t he see men being killed in their sleep? Doesn’t he see the carnage and horror all over Nigeria?

“Doesn’t he see Fulani militias displacing indigenous people from their ancestral lands and their livelihood destroyed? Doesn’t he see places of worship being destroyed by men who could be heard shouting ‘allahu akbar’? Can’t he see there is no peace in the land and that Nigeria is generally unsafe.

People who ordinarily should be checked into asylum homes are armed with AK47s and other machine guns running the streets unchallenged. The geographical expression called Nigeria is bleeding, soaked with human blood. When you visit some villages, it is common to behold the sights of decomposing bodies of women and children littered all over the place with thousands buried in shallow graves by tired grave diggers.

Several boisterous villages hitherto inhabited by Christians are now ghost towns. The people had either been killed or survivors fled. In a tweet made in 2014 on twitter now called X, Bola Tinubu had said: “The silent slaughter of Christians in Nigeria is condemnable. This must stop and President Jonathan must do something about it.”

Now as president himself, the massacre of Christians goes on and President Tinubu has done nothing about it and there is no sign he will bring this to a stop so that the Christians who managed to flee to the various IDP camps can return home, bury their dead and continue with their normal lives.

In writing this opinion, I acknowledge that moderate Muslims are also being killed and no one deserves to be gruesomely murdered. However, that hundreds of Muslims were also killed by some rag tag Islamists inspired militias does not diminish the fact that Northern Christians are deliberate targets of ‘holy deaths’ on account of their faith, or that their livelihoods, communities and faith leaders are destroyed for reasons of their faith.

Even though the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria provides for freedom of worship and generally prohibits the adoption of any religion as official religion of the state but the reverse is the case in practice. In the North of Nigeria, it is no longer safe to be a Christian or have a Church. Someone told me that Christians in Zamfara and Katsina hide their identities and worship in secret places for fear of being punished or even killed.

It is also a fact that security agencies are not doing enough to promote religious liberty and to offer Christians in the North protection, thus rightly or wrongly creating the impression that the government is in bed with the bandits, more so, when no one has been indicted or convicted for nearly 62,000 of violent deaths of Christians and destruction of Christian communities and properties in the past 20 years.

The unrestrained killing of Christians had been on, but spiked in the past nine years of President Muhammadu Buhari who for eight years of his obnoxious regime treated the silent slaughter of Christians with partisanship and nepotism. The killings were so many that the 45th President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, pointedly asked him: “Why are you killing Christians?”

He had then tried to explain away that the killings had no ethnic or religious bearing but instead farmers –herders’ crisis due to climate change. President Trump knew this to be a lie because killings of Christians in the north and elevation of Islam as a state religion are too glaring.

The problem is getting worse and President Tinubu who has been in office for over one year cannot distance himself from the silent slaughtering of Christians simply because they were inherited.

He is on record to have claimed that he brought Buhari into power. He is also on record to have called out then President Goodluck Jonathan to end the slaughtering of Christians.

Now as president and Commander in Chief, I urge him to stop these unprovoked ‘holy murdering’ of Christians under his watch. Since the year 2000, over 62,000 Christians in Nigeria have been murdered in genocide perpetrated by Islamist jihadist groups including Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and Fulani militias.

The International Committee for Nigeria refers to this genocide as the “Silent Slaughter.” In June 2022, more than 50 parishioners at St. Francis Xavier Church in Owo were massacred. The Nigerian government blamed the massacre on ISWAP, while local eyewitnesses attributed the slaughter to Fulani militias. Aid to the Church in Need reports that in 2022, four Catholic priests were murdered in Nigeria, 23 priests and one seminarian were kidnapped and held in captivity in 2022.

In April 2023, the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) reported that 18,000 Christian churches and 2,200 Christian schools had been deliberately set on fire. 34,000 moderate Muslims were also murdered by Islamist jihadists.

Between January and July 2024 there were more people that were killed in Nigeria because of their Christian faith than other places in the globe combined.

According to Ryan Brown, the CEO of Open Doors US, there were 4998 Christians killed in 2023 by Islamist terror groups Boko Haram and the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP), and predominantly Muslim Fulani bandits who originally were herdsmen. Leah Sharibu, one of 110 school girls who were abducted by ISWAP terrorists in 2018, is still in captivity because she has refused to renounce her Catholic faith.

Christmas in December 2023, at least 140 Nigerian Christians were massacred in attacks near Jos. Fulani jihadist militia targeted Christian farming communities in 26 villages across Plateau State. Local media reports indicate a death toll of 200. Numerous villagers sought refuge in the bush to escape the assailants. Many are still missing.