Last week in this column, I examined how Christian genocide deniers in our country deploy the rhetoric of land grabbing to advance a new semantics of violence, one that renames atrocities, persecution, and dispossession in order to evade responsibility. I argued that this linguistic manoeuvre serves a single purpose: to stifle moral outrage. For these deniers, semantics has become a shield, the continuation of obfuscation through the instruments of power and language. This week, I extend that inquiry and turn to the politics of exclusion and erasure. 

There is a context to every silence, and our country’s silence on the slaughter of Christians is one that exposes more than it conceals. A country that proclaims unity with fanfare has also perfected the habit of erasing the sufferings of those who do not fit its preferred narrative of dubious national cohesion. The killings of Christians across the Middle Belt and the North East do not vanish because they are unclear or distant. They vanish because an entire political culture is committed to erasing them. 

What is forgotten is never accidental. What is erased is always shaped by power. 

Our country’s political elites often speak the language of inclusion, yet their actions reveal political elites who are comfortable with selective recognition. Their political speeches celebrate diversity, but national mourning of Christians who are slaughtered excludes those whose deaths unsettle fragile alliances. If they are not excluded outright from our country’s carefully choreographed rituals of mourning, their remains appear only as blurred figures wrapped in torn clothes, images that draw nothing more than polite shrugs from the watching elites. Nothing startles the elites anymore. Nothing pierces their consciences. The slaughter of whole communities has either  become a familiar backdrop to our national life or has become something absorbed into the country’s routines, like the evening news or the daily traffic. What should provoke outrage now passes without a bang.  What should halt our country in its tracks barely earns a footnote. 

In this numb landscape, mass killings no longer shock. They are merely recast as the ordinary, the regrettable yet acceptable, the tragedy that our country lives with. But, there is a peculiar kind of remembering in our country: Christians who have been the victims of sustained violence are summoned as numbers when our country needs to inflate its population, yet they vanish when it is called to confront its conscience. In the arithmetic of power, their bodies matter only for census figures, never for moral reckoning. They are invoked when statistics strengthen the hands of our country, but forgotten when justice demands a name, a story, a face. It is remembrance without responsibility, an official memory that counts the dead but refuses to account for them.

The renowned South Sudanese scholar, Francis Deng, once observed that exclusion is not only the denial of belonging but also the denial of identity. His insight describes our country’s contradiction with painful clarity. The Christian communities that bear the brunt of killings are included in political arithmetic but excluded when truth must be told. Worse still, they are erased through exclusion.

The politics of erasure begins with language. When Christian villages are attacked at dawn, leaving dozens dead, our country describes the incident as a clash. When worshippers are murdered in sanctuaries, the event is framed as a reprisal. Euphemism becomes a strategy. The word genocide is avoided because acknowledging it would demand moral and political reckoning. Yet the refusal to name atrocities truthfully weakens the very unity our country claims to defend. The violence becomes lost in the haze of ambiguous terminology used to shield the powerful rather than protect the vulnerable. 

The media participates in this quiet erasure. Newsrooms operate under partisan and political pressures. Atrocities that should command national outrage are reported in small paragraphs that offer no context. Official statements are repeated without scrutiny. Balance is performed even when the facts do not require it. The result is the public that has become inured to the daily reports of brutality. 

When killings become routine news items, the country loses the moral memory that binds communities together. Media silence becomes the partner in political erasure. Elite silence lies at the heart of the machinery of erasure. When governors refuse to speak honestly about the motives behind the attacks, when some religious leaders prize proximity to power over fidelity to truth, and when influential voices with regional or national reach avoid naming genocide for fear of unsettling the patronage networks that sustain them, silence becomes the currency with which alliances are bought and preserved. It is through this silence that impunity is nurtured and the suffering of the victims is pushed further into the shadows. But silence has consequences. It creates a world in which perpetrators move freely while victims are buried quietly.

The politics of erasure does not only operate between the state and citizens. It operates within communities themselves. Nigeria’s pluralism has always carried within it the seeds of small and large exclusions. Francis Deng’s warning that identity is often weaponised against vulnerable groups applies not only to national politics but also to the smaller enclaves of ethnic rivalry. Across the Middle Belt, ethnic minorities jostle for recognition within a federation that privileges some identities over others. These internal fractures reveal how exclusion multiplies itself even among those who are marginalised by national power. Consider Taraba State where the Jukun, one of the dominant minority groups, have long engaged in political and territorial disputes with smaller groups such as the Kutep. 

The conflict between the Jukun and the Kutep, renewed every few years, is not simply about land. It is about recognition, hierarchy and the fear of being overshadowed. The Jukun insist on claiming political precedence, while the Kutep resist erasure within their ancestral spaces. The same pattern appears in the long and often violent rivalry between the Jukun and the Tiv. Although both communities are minorities within Nigeria, each competes for local advantage and fears domination by the other. In these battles, the victim and the oppressor become fluid categories. Groups that suffer exclusion at the national level reproduce the same exclusion against groups even smaller than themselves.

This structure of marginalisation is essential to understanding why Christian genocide in Nigeria is so easily erased. When a country is adept at fragmenting identity into competing hierarchies, national empathy becomes impossible. The Christian communities of the Middle Belt are not only victims of attacks from armed groups. They are victims of a federal structure that encourages rival minorities to view one another with suspicion. Their sufferings are diminished by national elites but also complicated by local politics in which neighbours dispute boundaries, chieftaincy rights and political representation. Erasure becomes easier when victims are already divided among themselves.

The human cost of this multilayered exclusion is immense. Families are wiped out in a single night and their names vanish from public memory. Farmers who once cultivated fertile land now live in displacement camps. Children who should be in school spend their days recounting the sounds of gunfire. Women disappear into forests and are never found. Communities that used to hold vibrant Sunday services now recite their prayers in whispers. This is not only physical destruction. It is a cultural erasure. 

It is the systematic removal of a people’s presence from the national imagination. Naming this reality truthfully is the first act of resistance. The struggle to use the word genocide is about more than terminology. It is about affirming that the victims’ lives mattered. It is about refusing to allow politics to dictate the vocabulary of human suffering. Journalists, activists and faith communities who insist on naming the violence do so because they recognise that what is not named will inevitably be erased. Truth-telling becomes the foundation of moral survival.

History offers painful reminders. The Armenians were erased from the conscience of the world until the evidence became too large to ignore. Rwanda was dismissed as ancient tribal hatred until the scale of the massacres confronted the world with an undeniable truth. Bosnia was treated as a regional dispute until the graves of Srebrenica revealed the horror of systematic extermination. Our country stands at a familiar threshold. The signs are clear. The testimonies are abundant. The mass graves are growing. Still, our country continues to practice a politics of erasure that pushes Christian suffering into the shadows. 

A country is measured by the lives it acknowledges and the ones it chooses to forget. Our country cannot claim inclusion while erasing the pain of its Christian communities. Inclusion without truth is an illusion. It asks victims to maintain a unity that does not protect them. It transforms national cohesion into a ritual of forgetting. It turns citizenship into a fragile bargain in which belonging is offered without safety, and recognition is granted without justice. The path forward requires honesty. It requires naming the violence for what it is. It requires confronting the internal exclusions that weaken solidarity among minorities. It requires abandoning the euphemisms that serve political interests. It requires acknowledging that erasure protects perpetrators while abandoning victims.

Our country must recover the courage to face its truth. It must recognise that every erased life diminishes it. To restore those who have been forgotten is to reclaim a moral centre without which no society can endure. Only by confronting its politics of exclusion and erasure can our country begin to build a future rooted not in silence but in justice.

Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette