Peace in Nigeria: Moving from Fragility to Stability - An Analysis Supporting the Statement by the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria

By the Hon. William Wagner (Ret.)

Executive summary

Nigeria stands at a crossroads between social collapse and constitutional renewal. The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria (CBCN), in its statement “Peace in Nigeria: Moving from Fragility to Stability,” offers an urgent, morally lucid, and legally grounded diagnosis of Nigeria’s spiraling insecurity and repression. The instant Issue Brief amplifies this warning and calls the international community to attend to it.

This brief supports the CBCN on three core findings. First, the mass violence in Nigeria is not random criminality; it has a discernible religious and ethnic pattern that falls with particular weight upon predominantly Christian communities, even as it also ravages many Muslims and other innocents. Second, the government’s failure—whether from incapacity, corruption, or implied collusion—has become systemic and constitutes a direct betrayal of Nigeria’s constitutional duty to secure life and property for all citizens. Third, legal repression in northern states, especially the overreach of Sharia courts and the enforcement of blasphemy regimes, undermines Nigeria’s secular constitutional order and reduces religious minorities to a condition of second-class citizenship. The bishops are correct that stability will not arise from silence, appeasement, or mere rhetoric; it requires justice under law, equal protection for all faiths, and decisive state action against both terrorist and criminal networks.

What the Bishops are Saying—and why it matters

The CBCN statement is notable for its balance and precision. It states plainly that predominantly Christian communities in the Northern and Middle Belt regions are under repeated and brutal attack, producing heavy casualties and displacement; that non-state Islamist actors, including Boko Haram/ISWAP and militant Fulani networks, are principal perpetrators; that ordinary banditry and kidnapping now intertwine with ideological violence; that government response is chronically delayed or absent, fostering credible public perception of complicity or an alarming lack of will; and that Muslims and other Nigerians also suffer, a fact the bishops acknowledge explicitly as they reject sectarian retaliation and insist the crisis desecrates Nigeria’s common humanity. Independent monitoring aligns with this sober account, documenting a persistent pattern of religiously based violence against Christian villages and clergy while also recognizing that militants exploit wider pressures (e.g., resource conflict, desertification, and ethnic rivalry) to intensify the assault. Stating so is not advocacy by exaggeration; it is an insistence that a true peace process must begin by naming realities that polite diplomacy too often avoids. Moral clarity is not a luxury. It is the first condition of political healing.

Nigeria’s Constitutional Duty and the Scandal of State Failure

The bishops cite Section 14(2)(b) of Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution: the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government. Their appeal is not only pastoral; it is a constitutional indictment. A government may be imperfect without forfeiting legitimacy, but a government that cannot or will not restrain organized violence against its citizens forfeits moral authority and risks functional collapse. The bishops’ reference to delayed or withheld security responses is especially grave, for in any constitutional order perceived selective enforcement corrodes legitimacy faster than open lawlessness. When protection appears dependent on tribe or creed, citizens conclude, logically and tragically, that the state is no longer a neutral guarantor of rights but a faction among factions, and that perception itself becomes fuel for vengeance cycles, separatist movements, and the privatization of security through militias.

The Religious Freedom Dimension: not a side issue, but the fault line

Some international commentary treats Nigeria’s crisis as merely criminal or economic. In my view, that is willful blindness. The bishops correctly point to a sustained pattern of repression that includes the denial of land for churches, the destruction of Christian worship sites, and the overreach of Sharia courts into the lives of non-Muslims. These are not incidental grievances. They signal a deeper constitutional erosion. Nigeria’s secular character is not hostility to Islam or Christianity; it is the framework that makes peaceful pluralism possible. When any court system becomes an instrument of religious dominance, stability dies by degrees. Recent reporting confirms that multiple states enforce Sharia-based blasphemy prohibitions and that religious minorities experience diminished protection and unequal standing before the law. In constitutional terms, equality is not negotiable; it is the oxygen of the republic.

The United States’ National Interest in Nigeria’s Stability

Because Nigeria is so large, so connected to its neighbors, and so tied into U.S. security and economic systems, instability there rarely remains local. It spills outward into West Africa and the Sahel, and in due course reaches American interests. The strategic logic is neither complicated nor speculative; it is written into the geography, demography, and political economy of the region.

Nigeria functions as a regional keystone. It is Africa’s most populous country and its largest economy, the anchor state of ECOWAS, and often the decisive voice in West African diplomacy and collective security. When Nigeria is stable it helps contain coups, civil conflict, and cross-border crime; when Nigeria shakes, West Africa shakes with it, and fragile neighbors bear the shock. U.S. policy has long treated Nigeria’s size and influence as central to the stability of the wider region. The United States therefore has a direct interest in preventing regional breakdown that would create ungoverned spaces—spaces that are invariably harder and costlier to address later than they are to prevent now.

Counterterrorism concerns intensify this interest. Nigeria faces multiple insurgencies: Boko Haram and ISWAP in the northeast, violent banditry and kidnapping networks in the northwest, and expanding extremist pressure throughout the Lake Chad Basin. Recent analyses describe a measurable jihadist resurgence and growing operational sophistication, including attacks on military facilities and regional coordination. The United States has invested in security cooperation with Nigeria for decades precisely because violence there can strengthen ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates, enable trafficking in weapons, people, and narcotics, and create training and logistics hubs for attacks beyond Nigeria’s borders. Put plainly, helping Nigeria stay stable is cheaper—and more humane—than allowing a major terrorist ecosystem to grow and then trying to uproot it at far greater cost.

Nigeria’s energy role gives the matter global economic weight. Nigeria remains a major oil producer and a leading LNG exporter; U.S. government energy assessments note that its output and gas exports are significant to global supply and price stability. When Nigeria is unstable, oil theft, pipeline sabotage, and investment flight reduce production and tighten global markets. Reuters reporting in November 2025 again underscores how theft and insecurity keep output below capacity and targets. The United States may not import the largest share of Nigerian crude directly, but it cannot be indifferent to global price shocks or to allied energy security, especially in a world already strained by geopolitical supply disruptions.

Humanitarian collapse in Nigeria would likewise not stay local. In a nation of over 200 million people, intensified insecurity means displacement, hunger, and disease on a scale that destabilizes entire subregions. The U.N. World Food Programme and major news outlets warn that northern Nigeria is entering unprecedented food insecurity, driven in substantial part by militant violence that makes farming and markets impossible.  Such crises generate refugee flows into fragile neighbors, put pressure on international relief systems that the United States routinely funds, and increase the risk of resource-driven regional conflict. Here the American interest is both moral and practical: preventing catastrophe now averts vastly larger emergency interventions later.

The economic and human ties between Nigeria and the United States are already deep. Nigeria is one of America’s most important trade partners in sub-Saharan Africa and a leading destination for U.S. foreign direct investment on the continent, with bilateral goods and services trade measured in the tens of billions of dollars annually. Nigerians also comprise the largest African diaspora group in the United States, creating dense family, professional, educational, and financial links between the countries. Instability therefore disrupts trade and investment returns, fractures supply chains and business climate, and endangers diaspora families and remittances—effects that reach not only Lagos and Abuja but also Houston, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

Finally, Nigeria’s trajectory carries outsized normative significance. Nigeria remains one of Africa’s most important democracies, even amid serious governance failures. If it slides toward state failure or authoritarian consolidation, democratic norms across West Africa weaken, military-rule trends in nearby states gain momentum, and U.S. goals of supporting constitutional governance suffer a major blow. Nigeria is, in this sense, a bellwether: what happens there influences political trajectories across the continent.

Taken together, Nigeria’s stability sits at the intersection of counterterrorism, global energy, regional order, humanitarian risk, trade, diaspora ties, and democratic influence. That is why successive U.S. administrations—regardless of party—have treated Nigeria not as a peripheral concern but as a core national-interest country in Africa.

Why the Bishops’ Call for “Lasting Peace” is the Right Standard

The CBCN rejects cosmetic responses. Their insistence that peace requires “justice, courage, and a firm commitment to the sanctity of human life” reflects a hard truth learned in every nation’s history: peace without justice is only a ceasefire between future wars. The bishops are not trading in sentiment; they are prescribing a path consistent with constitutional governance. Lasting peace in Nigeria requires several concrete conditions to be met together. First, protection must be equal so that security does not arrive faster for one community than another. Second, prosecution must be real because impunity is an open invitation to further bloodshed. Third, courts must be constitutionally bounded so that Sharia jurisdiction does not swallow the civil order. Fourth, victims must be publicly honored rather than quietly managed. Sixth, religious leaders must be free to speak the truth without fear. Finally, international partners must condition cooperation on measurable improvements rather than on assurances and communiqués. The bishops’ appeal thus stands as a blueprint for renewal, not a plea for pity.

Recommendations

For the Government of Nigeria

Nigeria’s leaders should establish rapid-response security corridors for the Middle Belt and other vulnerable northern communities, Christian and Muslim alike, so that protection is timely and visibly impartial. They should create independent investigatory units to review allegations of security-force delay or collusion and require public reporting, because accountability is indispensable to restoring trust. They must reaffirm constitutional supremacy by limiting Sharia courts strictly to voluntary personal-status matters among Muslims, and they should repeal or suspend blasphemy statutes that conflict with Nigeria’s constitutional guarantees and with international commitments to freedom of religion and belief.

For Nigerian Religious Leaders

Religious leaders across Nigeria should sustain united interfaith condemnation of violence; the bishops’ explicit concern for Muslim victims models the only moral posture capable of preventing sectarian implosion. They should also document incidents carefully, with dates, locations, names, and evidentiary detail, so that domestic and international legal accountability mechanisms have the record they require.

For the United States and Other International Partners

The United States recently re-designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern. That is a good start. The United States and other partners should treat Nigeria as a top-tier religious-freedom and atrocity-prevention priority, rather than a peripheral concern folded into generic security cooperation. They should use targeted sanctions and visa restrictions against officials credibly linked to tolerance or facilitation of persecution. We should also support local civil-society and faith-based peace-building tied to measurable protection of vulnerable communities. Finally we should press consistently for constitutional and policing reforms as conditions of security assistance. Friendship without truth is not diplomacy; it is complicity.

Concluding Thoughts

The Nigerian bishops have done what shepherds and citizens must do in an hour of unraveling: tell the truth in love, without fear, and with a summons to repentance and reform. Their statement is compatible with the finest traditions of constitutional order because it recognizes that human dignity is not granted by government; government exists to secure it. It is right that Christians around the world should elevate it,

as the world should hear it -- and Nigeria’s leaders should heed it. A nation cannot be stable while large portions of its people live in terror for their faith. The path from fragility to stability runs through equal protection, lawful restraint of violence, and a renewed commitment to Nigeria’s secular constitutional promise. Silence is no longer an option. Justice is the only durable peace.

Read the full CBCN statement here:

MOVING-FROM-FRAGILITY-TO-STABILITY.pdf

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The author gratefully acknowledges the use of AI-assisted drafting tools (specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT) in the preparation of this Issue Brief. All ideas, structural decisions, analysis, and final edits are solely the author’s own, and the author bears full responsibility for the content.