00:00We're going to try to cross back now to our top story and go to Lagos.
00:05Najim Anima-Shawn joins us.
00:07Najim, thanks for being with us here on France 24.
00:10Can you hear us?
00:12I can hear you.
00:13We can hear you loud and clear.
00:14Thank you for having me on France.
00:15The gremlins have been cleared from the system.
00:18Let me ask you, first of all, were you surprised by Donald Trump's remarks?
00:24Yes and no.
00:25We've been expecting something of this nature for the last couple of weeks.
00:30But we didn't realize it would be so dramatic.
00:33And Trump never misses, skips a beat to make something very dramatic.
00:37And he made it very dramatic.
00:39The rhetoric was harsher than we had expected.
00:42You heard that report at the outset.
00:45A lot of Nigerians are a bit surprised.
00:49First of all, can you fact check what he said?
00:54Yes, we can actually fact check a lot of what he said.
00:56And I will start by trying to make a correction on the trope that Nigeria is mainly Muslim North and then mainly Christian South.
01:06But the problems are that Nigeria is actually quite mixed across a lot of the country.
01:12The Middle Belt, which is the Middle Belt states, the states between the North and the South, often have mixed communities of both Muslims and Christians.
01:22And in the Southwest, where I am from, we are essentially mixed Muslims and Christians.
01:27So a large swath of the country is this mix of different ethnicities and different religions.
01:34So it's kind of inaccurate to say mainly Muslim North and mainly Christian South, largely because even though it is easy, it isn't exactly accurate.
01:44So there are parts of the country where there are predominantly Christians, like in the Southeast, and predominantly Muslims, like in the Northwest and some parts of the Northeast.
01:55But it is incorrect to say that it's mainly Muslim North and mainly Christian South.
02:01Who's been whispering in the U.S. president's ear?
02:04Well, this is the question.
02:09This has been a longstanding issue.
02:11There have been a lot of agitation from certain Christian groups to designate Nigeria as a country of particular concern.
02:22You might remember several years ago, there was a bombing in a place called Undo of a church.
02:27And I came onto your program to discuss that.
02:30And that was particularly unusual because it was in the Southwest, where we're from, where this doesn't usually occur.
02:39So there's been a lot of activity.
02:43And I believe one archbishop, particularly of Benway State, which is where, which is the epicenter of where many of the killings of Christians has occurred,
02:51did make a plea in America for Nigeria to be so designated as a country of particular concern.
03:00The French news agency AFP reporting U.S.-based lobbying firm Moran Global Strategies has been lobbying on behalf of separatists this year.
03:13I presume they're referring to the southeast of Nigeria, not the southwest.
03:19Advising congressional staff on what it said was Christian persecution.
03:23Could that have played a factor?
03:25There's a lot of suspicion that there is agitation from separatists in the southeast that this has happened.
03:35We don't have I mean, we are aware of many of those rumors and we believe that some of them are credible.
03:41But we actually don't think that that is alone.
03:45That is the only factor that is at play here.
03:48If there are separatists at work in the southeast, it does make a lot of sense because the southeast is largely Christian.
03:57And it is if you want to look at the southeast in terms of population and demography, the entire southeast as a voting bloc is less than that's five states, is less than two states in the northwest.
04:12So, yeah, that gives it that gives an idea then the reaction of Nigeria's president through his spokesperson offering to travel to Washington and meets Donald Trump.
04:26Is that the right way to go about it?
04:28I don't advise the president, but if I were advising the president, I think that a visit to Donald Trump is a request to be a supplicant.
04:43And I think making efforts at home in Nigeria to address the problem would probably be more more appreciated.
04:51I do think, if I may just digress a little, I do think it's a little bit of, how can I say, chickens coming home to roost.
05:02You may recall a couple of years ago when our president threatened to invade Niger if democracy wasn't restored.
05:10And now we are being threatened with invasion if we do not address the killings of Christians.
05:16And I think this, it's focused everybody's mind in Nigeria.
05:21And I think that's probably one of the reasons why the president has said he's willing to go to Washington to meet with the president.
05:28Yeah, because there's also those that say that this is retribution for Nigeria, refusing to take in migrants the way other African countries like Giswatini and Uganda have done.
05:42It's always difficult reading the tea leaves of the Trump administration, but it wouldn't be beyond the realm of plausibility that that was the case.
05:54I understand that a number of Nigerian migrants that were deported from the United States were actually flown to Ghana and then subsequently repatriated to Nigeria.
06:05Of course, once a Nigerian enters Ghana, it's a bit like the United, the European Union.
06:12We have the ECOWAS region, which means that any Nigerian citizen can land anywhere in ECOWAS and he doesn't need a visa.
06:17It's kind of a Schengen, visa-free area like Schengen.
06:20And so the Americans could conveniently deport Nigerians to any state in West Africa, and then it'll be for the West African state to deport them back to Nigeria.
06:29One quick final question for you, Najima Nimeshoun.
06:32We've been seeing among the reactions Christian leaders defending Muslims today, Muslim leaders defending Christians.
06:39How is interfaith dialogue these days in Nigeria?
06:46We're all suffering from insecurity.
06:48And the southeast, where some of these agitators are from, is not free of the insecurities that are at stake.
06:55In fact, the governor of Anambra state, which is one of the leading states, which is one of the leading states in the southeast, has made a very clear statement.
07:07Oh, shit.
07:11We can still hear you, Najim.
07:13Can you hear us?
07:15My apologies.
07:16The southeastern governor, Governor Soludo, has made a very clear statement saying that the insecurity in the southeast and the killings in the southeast are committed by people from the southeast on people from the southeast.
07:30There are some quite vicious pogroms between communities in certain parts of the southeast, for example, in Eboni state, which is a border state.
07:41There have been some communal clashes that have raised whole villages to the ground.
07:47They have nothing to do with religion.
07:50And this has been a problem with some of the separatists and some of the crimes that have been committed on quite an industrial scale.
08:02The problem for the Nigerian state is that the military have been deployed to, in many different parts of the country, to deal with insecurity, counterterrorism in parts of the northeast, banditry in parts of the northwest, communal clashes in southeast, separatists in the southeast.
08:24In the Niger Delta, we have oil theft and insurgencies in the oil-producing regions.
08:32We have a multiplicity of security challenges in Nigeria, of which the killings of Christians in the Middle Belt is one and one of the most pressing ones.
08:42Najim, many, many thanks for joining us from Lagos.
Be the first to comment