A mother at the stove

Alhamdulillah, I still have both my parents alive and well. But the last two years have taught me to understand what it must feel like to be an orphan forsaken by the world. I do not begrudge those who  seem to have what the Hausa people call, “uwa a gindin murhu”, or a “mother tending […]

Alhamdulillah, I still have both my parents alive and well. But the last two years have taught me to understand what it must feel like to be an orphan forsaken by the world. I do not begrudge those who  seem to have what the Hausa people call, “uwa a gindin murhu”, or a “mother tending the stove”. You will never, ever go hungry if your own mother has access to the cooking pot. I only wish that mine were also in attendance at the pot.

As a Nigerian Muslim, I view with profound alarm President Trump’s threat of a “guns-blazing” invasion to stop an alleged “Christian genocide” in my country. This narrative is not just an oversimplification; it is a dangerous distortion that erases the suffering of millions of Nigerian Muslims and risks inflaming the very conflicts it claims to want to resolve. The violence tearing at our nation’s fabric is a complex web of terrorism, resource conflicts, and criminality, not a religious war. To frame it as a one-sided genocide is to ignore the blood of those who do not have a mother seated at the stove.

The dominant narrative suggests that Islamist insurgents are solely targeting Christians. The reality on the ground, which I and my community live daily, is starkly different. The violence is indiscriminate, and in many cases, Muslims have been the primary victims.

Groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have positioned themselves as enemies of the Nigerian state and all who oppose them, regardless of faith. They operate mainly in the predominantly Muslim northeast, where they have slaughtered thousands of fellow Muslims, assassinating clerics and village heads they deem apostates or opponents. To characterise their campaign as strictly anti-Christian is to ignore the countless Muslim families who have been torn apart by their bombs in mosques and markets.

Data from a crisis-monitoring group, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), covering January 2020 to September 2025, records over 20,400 civilian deaths in Nigeria. Of these, the incidents where religious identity was a clear factor resulted in 417 deaths of Muslims and 317 deaths of Christians… yet no one threatened to come into Nigeria “guns-ablaze” to save us. Because we have no mother at the stove.

While every single death is a tragedy, these figures definitively counter the myth of a one-sided slaughter. In the northwest, brutal violence is perpetrated by armed bandit groups. A security report notes that these groups terrorise “predominantly Muslim communities”. This violence often pits Fulani herders against Hausa communities, both of whom are predominantly Muslim, constituting a stark example of Muslim-on-Muslim violence that is entirely omitted from the genocide narrative.

Labeling Nigeria’s crisis a “Christian genocide” is not only factually wrong but also intellectually lazy, as it ignores the multifaceted drivers of our insecurity. As a Nigerian, I see these complexities play out in the daily news and in the stories of IDPs all over the North.

President Trump’s threat of a “guns-a-blazing” intervention is not a solution; it is a recipe for a catastrophic escalation. From my perspective, it would be the final blow to our fragile national cohesion and sovereignty.

A unilateral U.S. military operation would be a violation of our self-determination and would be predictably unwelcome, likely galvanizing anti-Western sentiment. Such an invasion would become a powerful recruitment tool for the very terrorist groups it aims to destroy, allowing them to frame their struggle as a defensive jihad against foreign crusaders .

By officially endorsing the “Christian genocide” narrative, the U.S. would be pouring salt into the wounds of Nigeria’s Muslim community. It would harden the perceived divisions between Christians and Muslims, undermining the tireless, local interfaith peacebuilding efforts that are our true path to stability. It tells Nigerian Muslims that their suffering is invisible to the world, because they do not have a mother at the stove, breeding resentment and mistrust.

The core of our problem is not a lack of American firepower, but a crisis of governance, development, and justice. As analysts have pointed out, the criticism from Washington “is a result of many years of failure” by the Nigerian state to protect all its citizens and address the root causes of conflict. An invasion would distract from the urgent need for the Nigerian government to strengthen its institutions, promote equitable development, and deliver justice, which are the only ways to achieve lasting peace.

The simplistic narrative of a “Christian genocide” is a destructive force. It has been pushed by American politicians and celebrities without evidence, and it demarkets Nigeria, portraying us as a nation perpetually at religious war. This is not our truth. In most parts of Nigeria, Christians and Muslims live peacefully side-by-side, as neighbors and friends.

What we need from the international community is not the threat of invasion, but the offer of constructive partnership. We need support for community-led peace initiatives, help in tackling the corruption that fuels instability, and cooperation in addressing the economic desperation that drives young men into crime and violence. The path forward must be paved with data and dialogue, not drones and distortion.

The lives of all Nigerians, Christian and Muslim alike, depend on the world seeing us not as a simple headline, but in all our complex, painful, and resilient reality.

Nigerian Christians have indeed been at the receiving end of violence, that is a given.  And I remember reading somewhere that Malcolm X once responded to a question on whether or not he was willing to accept Soviet help if it were offered, and he basically said yes, tongue in cheek to maintain plausible deniability since he could be summarily crucified if he hinted at accepting help from the Soviet bogeyman. His response was that if he were locked up in a dungeon, he wouldn’t care if it was a wolf that lets him out.

I am under no illusions that the Nigerian Christians scrambling to accept the offer of help from Trump very well know who he is, and also know that he’s playing mind games with their suffering. I mean, the last time Trump stepped up to actually help the people he truly “CHERISHED”. He didn’t threaten to go into South Africa “guns-a-blazing” to liberate the white South Africans he said were facing genocide. He offered them protective asylum in the US.

Nigerian Christians are simply tired, and ready to humour Trump, even if only to pressure the Nigerian government to wake up to its responsibilities of protecting Christian lives. It’s not like they do not care about Muslim lives but they must help themselves first before they’ll be able to help someone else. Flight attendants tell air passengers at the beginning of every flight to help themselves first in case of any emergency before trying to help anyone else.