Nigerian Bishop Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe of Makurdi is pictured during an interview in Washington June 7, 2023. Bishop Anagbe is seeking funding for a mobile clinic, which would serve the estimated 1.5-2 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in camps. (OSV News photo/courtesy Aid to the Church in Need-US)
By Kimberley Heatherington
OSV News
WASHINGTON — “Death does not announce any day,” cautions a Nigerian proverb. It’s advice the Catholic faithful of the Diocese of Makurdi — in Nigeria’s Benue state — are grimly familiar with as they and their Christian neighbors endure a sustained campaign of terrorism now stretching into a second decade.
OSV News recently interviewed Bishop Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe of Makurdi, a Claretian, during a U.S. visit hosted by Aid to the Church in Need, a Catholic charity under the guidance of the Holy Father.
Bishop Anagbe has an urgent message for Catholic Americans: Please hear us, and please help us.
“In January 2018, we lost about 72 people in one night,” recalled Bishop Anagbe. “They came in the night, in an unprovoked attack. In April 2018, two of my priests and 17 worshippers were killed in a church during morning Mass. Gunned down. They died in cold blood; we gave them a mass burial. And so it has continued like that.”
According to the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) in Sydney, Nigeria ranks eighth on IEP’s 2023 “10 Countries Most Impacted by Terrorism” index. The 2023 Watch List released by the interdenominational foundation Open Doors indicates that Nigeria accounts for 89% of Christians martyred worldwide. Nigeria has the largest Christian population of any country in Africa — an estimated 49.3%, or more than 80 million, 21 million of whom are Catholic.
According to an April 10 report “Martyred Christians in Nigeria” issued by Intersociety, over the past 14 years at least 52,250 Nigerian Christians have been brutally murdered by Islamist militants.
In the same period 18,000 Christian churches and 2,200 Christian schools were set ablaze. Approximately 34,000 moderate Muslims also died in Islamist attacks.” With headquarters in Nigeria, Intersociety is a research and investigative rights group that has monitored the country’s religious persecution and violence since 2010.
In June 2022, more than 50 people were killed during a Pentecost Sunday Mass at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Owo in Ondo state. Pope Francis offered his prayers after the devastating attack, denouncing “this act of unspeakable violence.”
“Within the year 2022 and May 2023, you have had about 140 attacks in Benue, and about 591 persons killed,” Bishop Anagbe said. “Just on the eighth of April — the eve of Easter Sunday — these terrorists attacked. And the people took refuge in a classroom in a school. They killed about 40 people that night. This is what I live with every day.”
The specific threat faced by Bishop Anagbe’s diocese has its roots in friction between the predominantly — almost 70% — Christian and Catholic farming communities in Nigeria’s agriculturally abundant “breadbasket,” and the changed migration patterns of the mostly Muslim and nomadic Fulani herdsmen.
With the desertification of former grazing lands, the Fulani sought other pastures and water sources for their cattle, goats and sheep — but regional agricultural growth cultivated much of the area the Fulani once could access. Farmers were angered by herdsmen repeatedly trespassing of their lands, and livestock trampling and eating valuable crops.
What might have remained a contentious territorial dispute between settled and nomadic populations acquired a murderous dimension when radical Islamic militants began to arm the Fulani herdsmen.
“These are invaders — who come and kill the people, and send them away, and occupy their territory. It’s a clear occupation of territory,” explained Bishop Anagbe. “They are conquering and destabilizing the Indigenous communities, and conquering their territories.”
Farmers have been pushed into cities, uprooted from both their land and their livelihood. Agriculture has been so disrupted that Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper reported in September 2021, “Because of the insecurity in Benue state, Nigeria can no longer produce enough food to feed its own population.”
As the Washington-based Hudson Institute think tank observed in 2021, “Many Nigerians no longer distinguish between Fulani herders and Boko Haram, seeing both as a singular terrorist front whose sole aim is to Islamize Nigeria.”
In September 2022, Gov. Samuel Ortom of Benue state told the Sahara Reporters news website that “Fulani herdsmen militia and other Islamic terrorist groups have been collaborating to sustain their attacks on the state and other parts of the country.”
And yet, there’s been no pursuit by law enforcement authorities. “Nobody has been arrested,” Bishop Anagbe noted. “There’s no action by the government.”
“As a diocese, between 2014 and 2023, I’ve lost 13 parishes,” reflected Bishop Anagbe. A parish, however, isn’t just one church; the bishop explained that, in Benue state, a parish can represent several village churches in a 10-15 kilometer radius. The threat of ambushes has made pastoral visits literally impossible.
