Countering the False Narrative that Climate Change is Fueling the Wave of Violence in Nigeria
By Greg Cochran, Ph.D., ICC Fellow
The return of the El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean has been creating massive swells from north to south along the California coast. So powerful have been these waves that the Ocean Beach pier near San Diego is now irreparably damaged and must be abandoned or replaced.
Pacific Ocean waves are massive, impressive, powerful. Yet even these stout breakers eventually lose their force in their incessant feud with terra firma. The cliffs, rocks, and beaches of the earth take their beatings and sometimes yield small bits of ground to the sea-packed swells. Still, the earth wins. It remains firm, not fluid. The waves will dissipate and ultimately disintegrate into bubbly patterns of white foam before the steadfast stillness of the earth’s abiding firmness.
Like the earth, the truth is terra firma—solid ground. The truth simply abides, while wave after wave of falsehood, deception, and misunderstanding batter at its shore. Waves of interpretation powerfully come and go forming narratives which guide story lines. Narratives of news events are no exception. News reporting follows the pattern set by the narrative established. And stories—like ocean waves—follow the pattern, wave after wave.
In California, the narrative asserts that climate change is causing more severe swells in the Pacific Ocean. In Nigeria, wave after wave of violence is also attributed to climate change. The truth will abide these battering waves. Indeed, the recent wave of Christmas violence points to an abiding truth increasingly at odds with the climate change narrative.
In a December article, ICC exposed the trend of Christmas violence, dating back at least to 2011. For the past decade or more, the prevailing narrative has been that farmers and herders are squabbling for increasingly scarce land as a result of climate change. Yet the persistent presence of Christmas violence calls the climate change narrative into question. The question is not so much whether desertification might be happening—even contributing to conflict. The question is whether Nigeria and other countries will confront and condemn the extremist violence targeting Christians across the Sahel.
As Ebenezer Obadare writes for the Council for Foreign Relations,
“For some time now, the dominant and widely accepted framing of the conflict in the northeastern and middle parts of the country has been that it is an unfortunate collision between Fulani herdsmen pressed southward by changing climatic conditions in search of nourishment for their livestock, and agrarian communities objectively and understandably threatened by the sudden migration.”
Noting the narrative sea change, Obadare writes,
“While this framing remains plausible (for the moment, its place in the scholarly and policymaking imagination remains by and large secure), it has come under pressure by those who, pointing to the disparity in the attacks on Christian majority communities, churches and related places of worship and other ancillary targets, coupled with the documented abduction and killing of Christian religious leaders, contend that parallel to the seeming Act of God that is the undeniable change in climatic conditions is the orchestration of real agents with a nefarious political and religious agenda. That agenda, it is suggested, is the systematic displacement of Christian communities and their replacement by their Muslim compatriots.”
Although some limited truth may abide in it, the climate change narrative keeps crashing against the rocky cliffs of the truth: Christians are being targeted. As Obadare notes, this targeting includes “ancillary targets,” kidnappings, murders, and attacks against churches (during Christian holiday services). Land scarcity and climate conditions lack explanatory force in the face of such targeted violence.
The climate change narrative keeps crashing against the rock-solid truth that Christians are being targeted. Obadare notes that “at least 52,250 Nigerian Christians have been killed since the outbreak of the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency in 2009. Within the same period, 18,000 Christian churches and 2,200 Christian schools were set ablaze.” Such specific targeting is difficult to reconcile with the more nebulous concept of climate change.
Surprisingly, after pointing out clear evidence of Christians being targeted, Obadare dismisses the claim that Christians are being targeted for displacement specifically on account of their ethno-religious status. Linking to an article from the Association for Catholic Information in Africa, Obadare asserts the following premise:
“At any rate, for every Nigerian Christian killed, there seems to be a commensurate number of ‘moderate Muslims’ similarly murdered, an addendum which, if accepted, disqualifies the argument of selective discrimination against Christians.”
The question, then, for Christians in Nigeria—and for all concerned about religious freedom and human rights—is whether the “Christians are being targeted” narrative is viable, or whether, as Obadare asserts, it crashes against the rock-solid fact that moderate Muslims are targeted, too. Must this nascent wave of alternative interpretation crash like the climate change narrative against the rocks of truth?
Perhaps not.
Obadare’s thesis asserts that the targeting of moderate Muslims is a defeater for explaining the violence in ethno-religious terms. Obadare notes that the killing of moderate Muslims is commensurate with the killing of Christians. First, clarity is needed regarding the concept of commensurate. Clearly, Christians are killed more often and in higher numbers than moderate Muslims. Likewise, by the numbers cited and generally agreed upon, Christian entities (churches, hospitals, schools) are targeted more often, too.
For Obadare, commensurate must mean in smaller numbers, albeit not negligible numbers. This point is fairly made and should be recognized. Killing Muslims because they are Muslims is a crime against humanity and should alarm anyone who believes in religious freedom. But is the fact that Muslims are killed a defeater for the narrative that Christians are being targeted? No.
To demonstrate the weakness of this contention, one need only consider World War II. Few would hesitate or dither at the proposition that Hitler and Nazi Germany targeted Jews for extinction. Nazi Germany targeted Jews and killed Jews in their effort to exterminate the Jews. At the same time, Nazi Germany also specifically targeted homosexual persons, disabled persons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Holocaust Museum maintains a distinct category remembering other minorities targeted in the Holocaust. No one makes the argument that the targeting of additional groups thus nullifies the thesis that Nazis targeted Jews.
In fact, what the Nazi movement illustrates is that totalitarian lusts—whether national, regional, or religious—target all groups of people outside of the preferred group seizing power. What Obadare is noticing in his observations is that wave after wave of violence and killing in Nigeria is being produced by totalitarian impulses hoping to turn the tide of power completely to the side of the Muslim jihadists.
In fact, the article linked in Obadare’s paper reaches a similar conclusion. The article offers insight from a report by Intersociety which states clearly that Christians are targeted. From the article, “Intersociety has also investigated what it refers to as ‘anti-Christian butcheries in Nigeria’ and found the killings to be perpetrated mainly by Jihadist Fulani herdsmen and their hired external counterparts.” Jihadist Fulani herdsmen appear to be committing “anti-Christian butcheries.”
Almost shockingly, the article makes this declaration:
“The human rights entity [Intersociety] reports that owing to the rampant killings in Nigeria, the country qualifies as a place where people are hacked the most in the whole world because of their religious beliefs.”
If this conclusion is true, then little wonder that the narrative wave of climate change is waning. Moreover, it should not be surprising that more and more people are concluding that Christians are being targeted specifically with terror tactics. Christians may not be the only religious people being targeted, but they most certainly are being targeted. That truth is appearing more solid after the latest wave of Christmas violence.
