Nobody Cares About Dad

Every day, somewhere in Nigeria, history whispers that we are complicit in a silence that kills. The cries are muted, the bodies uncounted, the children uncelebrated. There is something profoundly wrong with our global conscience and with our journalism.

Imagine: babies, toddlers, entire families hacked to pieces with machetes. Not in a war zone televised by drones, but in villages in Nigeria’s so-called “Middle Belt,” Southern Kaduna, southern Plateau, and other contested zones. These are places where ethnic, religious, and land disputes intersect, where the strongest win and where the most vulnerable are slaughtered in darkened fields.

Some advocacy groups and commentators argue that what is happening is not random violence or generalised insurgency but systematic ethnic cleansing, creeping genocide. In Southern Kaduna alone, hundreds of villages have been razed, thousands displaced or killed, and entire lineages threatened with erasure. The term “silent genocide” has been used by observers because the scale of destruction is hidden, minimised, or euphemised in official and media discourse. Some analysts claim that Christian communities, especially ethnic minorities, are disproportionately targeted.

The numbers are staggering. In 2024, seven out of ten Christians killed worldwide were killed in Nigeria. That fact alone should shake the world awake, but it barely registers a whisper in the mainstream press.

And here lies the uncomfortable truth: we don’t talk about it because the victims are Black and they are Christian. If they were white children in Europe, the world would burn with outrage. If they were Jewish, Muslim, or part of another group more visible in Western media narratives, there would be global protests, international interventions, emergency sessions at the UN. But these are Black children in Africa, and they are Christian — so their lives are deemed expendable. Their suffering is normalised, their extermination tolerated, their humanity ignored.

People try to play down the religious element, insisting these are just clashes over land or resources. But that narrative collapses under the weight of reality. It is hard to ignore religion when it is Boko Haram and the Nigerian affiliates of ISIS doing the killing — burning churches, targeting Christian villages, kidnapping women, and beheading men who refuse to renounce their faith. This is not just a land dispute. It is not simply tribal violence. It is an ideological war against Christians.

This is not speculation: human rights groups, church organisations, and survivors have told stories of bodies in shallow graves, children missing, women kidnapped, homes bulldozed. But these stories rarely break into the headlines of Western media.

Why is this largely absent from the global spotlight?

In an age of instant crises, our attention is fragmented. Wars in Ukraine or the Middle East seize headlines, natural disasters, pandemics, and election drama dominate cycle after cycle. A remote conflict in rural Nigeria doesn’t fit the media templates used by many newsrooms.

Media tend to focus on stories where there is strategic interest, large-scale geopolitical stakes, or powerful actors. Nigeria, particularly its interior, lacks the geopolitical leverage, big-money backers, or dramatic visuals that compel global networks. Many observers argue that stories of African Christian suffering receive less attention because they don’t fit Western media’s preferred framing.

Within Nigeria itself, media often downplay the ethnic or religious identities of perpetrators, referring instead to “herdsmen,” “bandits,” or “gunmen.” This ambiguity shields political actors and undermines accountability. Journalists and commentators also face intimidation, arrest, or worse when reporting on the perpetrators, especially if they name them or call it genocide.

Some reputable voices, including commentators and analysts in Nigeria, push back against sweeping claims of “Christian genocide.” They argue that many conflicts are rooted in resource scarcity, land use, climate change, population pressures, and herder farmer dynamics, not pure religious hatred. But that argument falls flat when bodies are left with notes pinned to them quoting scripture twisted into justifications for murder. It collapses when beheadings are filmed and uploaded by Islamist extremists who proudly declare they are killing “infidels.”

Even when someone like Bill Maher talks about it, the full video is hard to find on YouTube or other mainstream platforms. Why? It may be down to copyright takedowns, algorithmic suppression, or de-amplification of narratives outside the mainstream. The result: even when someone breaks the silence, the echo is muffled.

It’s telling that a political comedian, not a foreign policy expert or major news anchor, has openly spoken about this issue. In a recent episode, Maher claimed that Christians in Nigeria are being systematically killed, referencing more than 100,000 killed and 18,000 churches burned. He provocatively asked: “Where are the kids protesting this?” His contention: the media ignores it because “the Jews aren’t involved.” That line was intended to sting, to force a confrontation with what he sees as media indifference to Black suffering that doesn’t align with existing narratives.

But the reality is even harsher. They are ignored not only because they are Black, but because they are Christian. Black deaths are too often background noise in Western coverage of Africa. Christian deaths do not fit the fashionable narrative of Christians as “oppressors.” The result: silence.

We must confront a painful possibility: systemic racism and selective empathy run through our global awareness. When Black Christian bodies are hacked to death in Africa, they often remain invisible to a broader public.

In Gaza, Syria, Ukraine, images of destruction dominate global headlines. But in Nigeria’s countryside, the tools of killing are low-tech: machetes, fire, abduction. The lack of “cinematic” visuals may hamper news virality. Empathy is selective and shaped by media framing. The absence of mass protests in major Western cities for Nigeria is not evidence of no crime, it may reflect a media-created vacuum. The centuries-old legacy of dehumanisation means many assume violence in Africa is “normal,” so they don’t pay attention, even when the violence escalates into genocide.

But moral consistency demands a different posture. Every child, every mother, every small village in Nigeria deserves the same spotlight as tragedies elsewhere if we claim to be a global community.

We must amplify survivor voices and give space to Nigerians on the ground, villagers, pastors, journalists, human rights defenders, to tell their story in their own words. Let their suffering be the witness we cannot ignore.

We must demand investigative journalism, encourage news outlets to send correspondents into these conflict zones, dig into records, expose complicity, track arms flows, and name the perpetrators.

We must support local press freedom, invest in press institutions, legal aid for threatened journalists, and digital security for those reporting.

We must push platforms for transparency and hold YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and others accountable. If videos about Nigerian genocide are removed or hidden, demand explanations. Public pressure can force change.

We must advocate policy responses, lobby governments, international bodies, and NGOs to define and recognize the violence as genocide or ethnic cleansing, and to impose consequences including sanctions, humanitarian intervention, or accountability measures.

The absence of noise does not equal the absence of tragedy. When a Black Christian child in Nigeria is hacked to death, there is no explosion to punctuate it, no headline to memorialise it. That silence is a weapon too.

If the world will not speak, we must. If the media will not look, we must shine the light. Because the true crime is not just the killing of children, it is our collective permission to ignore them.

Let this be our refusal. Let this be our voice.