According to the former top Catholic official of Nigeria’s capital city, the violence in the country is “getting out of hand.” It’s not only Christians paying the price, he said. None of the country’s 200 million people are safe. “There is great insecurity throughout the country, people are being killed every day; bandits and terrorists seem to have a free hand,” said Cardinal John Onaiyekan, archbishop emeritus of Abuja. “We don’t know where the security forces are.”
“No one is safe, not just Christians. It is as if the government has lost control.” The country has presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for February and March 2023.
According to the prelate, both Christians and Muslims are victims of violence, perpetrated by criminals who “go around illegally killing innocent people.”
Speaking on the occasion of the XIX Plenary Assembly of the Symposium of the Bishops’ Conference of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), which ended on July 31 in Accra, Ghana, Onaiyekan said his country has been experiencing “indiscriminate” violence since the rise of Boko Haram in 2009.
The insurgency group is one of the largest Islamic terrorist organizations, and their stated goal is to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state, much like ISIS tried to do in Iraq.