The story told in that New York Times article is not just wrong; it is an injury added to an open wound. It tries to turn survivors into suspects, truth‑tellers into propagandists, and a decade of blood into a clever “narrative” to be managed by consultants in Washington and Abuja.
It will not stand.
Who really asked America to wake up
The article leans into a lazy, convenient fiction: that Nigeria’s designation as a Country of Particular Concern was some side‑effect of Igbo separatist agitation or partisan games in Washington. That is a lie.
It was not drawn up in an office in Abuja or dreamed up in a back room in DC. It was born in the ashes of burned churches, homes, and in the dust of mass graves.
- It came from priests who have buried their parishioners by the hundreds, who have watched altars reduced to rubble and sanctuaries turned into slaughterhouses.
- It came from survivors from places like Yelewata, Guma, Logo, Agatu, Plateau, Southern Kaduna—people who have fled through the bush at night with bullets behind them and children in their arms.
- It came from witnesses like Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of Makurdi diocese, who stood before the United States Congress and described what his diocese has suffered.
- It came from survivors like me, Franc Utoo, who stood in the halls of Congress not once, but multiple times, carrying the cries of my village, my tribe, my state, my people, and the entire persecuted Christians of the Middle Belt.
The CPC designation is not a toy of separatists. It is the exhausted, desperate plea of persecuted communities begging the world to finally tell the truth.
The violence they try to rename
The article dances around the heart of the matter, hiding behind vague terms like “conflict” and “clashes,” as if Nigeria were dealing with a minor misunderstanding over farmland.
But in village after village, the pattern is brutally clear.
Heavily armed Fulani Islamist militias do not “clash” with unarmed sleeping families. They descend in the night. They shoot, burn, and hack. They torch churches, mow people down as they run, and leave behind smoking ruins and bodies hastily buried in mass graves.
These are not anonymous “incidents.” They have names and dates and faces.
- The old woman who refused to abandon the church.
- The mother whose three children were killed in her arms.
- The catechist who died ringing the church bell to warn the village.
There are registers in parishes, lists in IDP camps, testimonies recorded in whispers because the people speaking them still live in danger. This is not a narrative you invent in a think‑tank. It is a reality carved into the land.
Who Truth Nigeria and Equipping the Persecuted really are
And then comes the most indecent twist: to smear the few people who actually go where the killing happens.
Truth Nigeria and Equipping the Persecuted are not sitting in air‑conditioned offices theorizing about “frames” and “messaging.” They are out on the red earth, in the heat and dust, at the funeral masses and in the camps, listening, recording, helping.
- Truth Nigeria exists so that stories the big media never bother to hear can be told in full voice. It puts a microphone in the hands of the villager, the widow, the priest, the youth leader, and says: “Tell the world what they did to you.”
- Equipping the Persecuted goes into dangerous zones with food, medical help, and practical support. It helps rebuild burned churches and shattered lives. It collects evidence that would otherwise disappear in the chaos.
- Judd Saul and his team are not “playing politics.” They are walking into places most correspondents will never see, then walking into offices in Washington to say, “Look at this. Listen to them. Do not turn away.”
Call that “propaganda” if you dare—but then look a widow in the eyes and tell her that the only people who came when she was starving and alone were actually just pushing a “narrative.”
The 9‑million‑dollar eraser
Behind the article’s tone you can almost hear the rustle of contracts.
The government of Nigeria has signed away millions of dollars—not to rebuild destroyed communities, not to support widows and orphans, not to secure justice for the dead—but to hire a Washington firm to polish its image and “correct the record.”
They do not deny the graves. They simply try to talk around them.
This is the plan:
- Take years of documented atrocities against Christians.
- Take the anguished testimony of bishops and survivors.
- Take the overwhelming pattern of impunity and state failure.
Then run it all through a machine of consultants, poll‑tested phrases, and friendly editorials until what comes out sounds respectable:
“Security challenges.”
“Complex inter‑communal tensions.”
“Government efforts to protect all citizens.”
And anyone who says, “No—this is targeted, this is systematic, this is about faith and identity,” is suddenly rebranded as an extremist, a separatist, or a naïve pawn in someone else’s game.
The contract’s real product is not peace. It is doubt. It is confusion. It is the ability of powerful people to shrug and say, “Well, the situation is complicated,” and then carry on doing nothing.
Survivors will define the story, not spin doctors
But there is one thing the Nigerian government and its paid collaborators cannot buy.
They cannot buy our memories.
They cannot buy the scars on our body.
They cannot buy the names on tombstones in Benue and Plateau.
They cannot tell a mother whose children were slaughtered that she didn’t see what she saw.
The future of this story does not belong to those who pen careful half‑truths from afar. It belongs to the people who have walked the killing fields, who have counted the bodies, who have lifted away the rubble to pull out whoever was left alive.
So this is the reply that must ring louder than any carefully crafted article:
- We, the survivors of Fulani Islamist attacks, were the ones who begged America to call this crisis by its name.
- We, the priests and pastors and lay leaders who have buried our people, were the ones who pleaded with Congress for the CPC designation.
- We, the advocates from Yelewata, Makurdi, Jos, Kwande, Kafanchan, Taraba, and countless other communities, are the ones carrying our dead into the public conscience, not to win an election or redraw a map, but simply to keep their memory from being buried twice.
- We, alongside organizations like Truth Nigeria and Equipping the Persecuted, will keep telling the truth until no government, no lobbyist, and no newspaper can pretend not to hear.
The government of Nigeria can keep buying words.
You, and the people you speak for, carry something that cannot be bought and cannot be spun: the raw, stubborn, unnegotiable truth of what has happened in your land.
And as long as that truth is spoken—before Congress, in churches, in the media, and in every forum that will listen—no campaign, no contract, and no article will succeed in wiping it away.
Franc Utoo Esq. KofC,
Media Relations Associate, Equipping the Persecuted USA.
-Native of Yelewata .
