Language carries power. It can reveal the truth. It can also bury it. In Nigeria today, the violence against Christians has entered a dangerous season of burial by language. Some on the Left call the killings land grabbing. Others call them competition for resources. A few call them communal clashes. Each phrase sounds mild. Each phrase softens the horror. Each phrase creates distance between the listener and the dead. This distance protects the conscience of a country that has refused to confront mass murders and the perpetrators of mass murders. It protects the state. It protects those who benefit from silence.

To study this is to study semantics. Scholars have long warned that language is never neutral. Noam Chomsky, in particular, insists that power uses language to frame reality. He argues that those who shape public language shape public thought. 

When the powerful rename violence, they do so to excuse themselves. When they rename atrocities, they do so to evade responsibility. When they rename persecution, they do so to silence moral outrage. Semantics becomes a shield. The shield becomes an alibi. The alibi becomes policy. Policy becomes death. There’s no reprieve, only the continuation of obfuscation using the instruments of power and language. In Nigeria, the killings of Christian communities have followed predictable patterns. 

Villages are surrounded. Homes are burnt. Worshippers are murdered at dawn. Children are taken. Women are violated. Farms are destroyed. Survivors run. They run into camps. They run into silence. They run into the language that denies their sufferings. The language has many defenders. They insist the conflict is about land. They insist the killers are only claiming ancestral routes. 

They insist the Christians are in the way. They insist the violence is complex, as did the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, recently. But ‘complexity’ is a word that masks moral clarity. Complexity obscures the truth. Complexity asks the public to doubt the victims.

This is not a new tactic. History is full of moments when semantics carried the weight of cruelty. The project of Nazism depended on the engineering of language. The architects of that era understood that people resisted horror when it was named honestly. 

So they contrived a project to rename things dishonestly. They created a system of euphemisms. Extermination became a final solution. Mass killing became cleansing. Theft became Aryanisation. Each word lowered the temperature of outrage. Each word disguised the brutality of extermination. Adolf Eichmann spoke in bureaucratic sentences that drained the moral life out of genocide. It was a technique. It was a strategy. It was the triumph of semantics over truth.

Eugenics operated in the same fashion. The scholars of eugenics wrapped their racism in scientific language. They used phrases like racial hygiene. They used terms like improvement. They used words like fitness. These words sounded clean. They sounded progressive. They sounded scientific. They covered the crimes that followed: Forced sterilisation. Internment. Elimination. This was the power of semantics. It made people accept violence. It made them believe it served a purpose. It led them to believe it protected society, which, in turn, accepted it because language made the unacceptable seem reasonable.

This is what is now happening in Nigeria today. The killings of Christians are being placed under a banner that sanitises violence. Land grabbing sounds like a fight over a property. It sounds like “two-fighting”, to put it in the familiar Nigerian street lingo. It sounds like something a committee can resolve. It does not sound like mass murder. It does not sound like targeted violence.

It does not sound like the slow cleansing of communities that mark the Middle Belt. The phrase removes the religious character of the killings. It removes the ideological intent. It removes the pain of those who bury their dead every week. It removes the responsibility of the state. It removes the urgency that the international community would show if the word genocide were used.

Scholars of political language also warn that words can tilt public sentiment. They argue that language can either awaken conscience or deaden it. George Lakoff insists that devious political actors choose words that frame moral responses. Once the frame is set, reality bends. People see through the frame. They hear through the frame. They interpret facts through the frame. If the frame says land grabbing, the public imagines a fight over territory. They do not imagine churches being burnt. They do not imagine pastors slaughtered. They do not imagine children hacked to death as they sleep. They do not imagine villages emptied by terror. They imagine land.

To imagine land is to ignore people.

This is the danger.

The phrase also protects the international community. It allows foreign governments to treat the killings as internal disputes. It allows them to avoid invoking the international convention on the prevention of genocide. It allows them to continue their strategic partnerships with the Nigerian state. It allows them to issue mild statements. It allows them to avoid sanctions. It allows them to remain comfortable. Comfort matters to governments. Words help them stay comfortable.

In Nigeria, the language of land grabbing also feeds a false balance. Those who use it claim that both sides kill. They claim that both sides want land. They claim that both sides are guilty. This is the old technique of semantic equivalence. It creates a false symmetry between attackers and victims. It presents murder as a misunderstanding. It presents massacre as mutual aggression. It presents the displacement of Christians as a regrettable outcome of land pressure. This technique wipes away the truth of targeted violence. It wipes away the long history of attacks on Christian communities. It wipes away the testimonies of survivors. It wipes away the graves.

Language is not innocent. It shapes the moral imagination of a people. It decides who deserves empathy. It decides who deserves protection. It decides who deserves justice. When the language denies genocide, society becomes comfortable with atrocity. Comfort becomes complicity. To respond to this, one must confront semantics as a battlefield. It is not a literary game. It is not academic theory. It is political. It is moral. It is the ground on which truth fights for its life. When words distort sufferings, the victims suffer twice. They suffer in their bodies. They suffer in the story told about their bodies. They die in silence. They die in the sentences of others.

The response is simple. Name the killings honestly. Name the pattern. Name the intent. Name the victims. Name the communities erased. Name the churches burnt. Name the women widowed. Name the children orphaned. Name the horror. Do not hide behind semantics. Do not allow others to hide behind semantics. 

Honesty is the first step toward justice.

The erasure happening today mirrors the erasure that history remembers from other times. When genocide was disguised as hygiene. When extermination was disguised as purification. When racism was disguised as science. When mass murder was disguised as policy. Today, murder is disguised as land grabbing. It is a phrase that masks the purpose of violence. It is a phrase that protects the perpetrators. It is a phrase that comforts the state. It is a phrase that misleads journalists. It is a phrase that discourages intervention. It is a phrase that buries the dead without naming how they died. The victims deserve better. They deserve a language that honours their truth. They deserve a country that mourns them honestly. They deserve a government that refuses to escape responsibility. They deserve a world that does not hide behind semantics. They deserve recognition.

Recognition begins with words. And words record history. They shape memory. They shape the future. If the nation adopts the language of land grabbing, it will record a lie. The lie will grow. The lie will shape textbooks. The lie will shape court judgments. The lie will shape conversations. The lie will shape how this period is understood in decades to come. The dead will disappear from the story. The living will be forced to explain what happened in terms that insult their sufferings. This is not only immoral. It is dangerous.

Once a country learns to rename violence, it soon learns to accept it. Once it accepts it, it becomes incapable of stopping it. The stakes are high. They involve the survival of communities that have lived on their land for centuries. They involve the sanctity of worship. They involve the right to life. They involve the identity of a country that struggles to protect its most vulnerable citizens.

Semantics must not triumph over truth. Truth must rise above semantics.

When people say the conflict is about land, they do not describe reality. They describe their refusal to confront reality. When they say both sides kill, they flatten a complex story into a shield for inaction. When they say Christians are not targeted, they reject the pattern that has repeated itself across states. When they say it is not genocide, they deny the evidence. They deny the testimonies. They deny the graves. They deny the future that will be lost if the violence continues. To break this cycle, one must dismantle the language that sustains it. One must strip away the euphemisms. One must expose the alibis. One must refuse the comfort of false terms. One must speak plainly.

Plain speech is not only about clarity. It is justice.

Across the world, people have written about the danger of euphemisms. Scholars of genocide warn that denial often begins with language. It begins with reframing. It begins with renaming. It begins with the softening of words. The softening becomes silence. Silence becomes complicity. Complicity becomes catastrophe. Nigeria stands at that boundary.

The cost of euphemism is measured in lives. The cost of clarity is measured in truth.

Truth is the only path left.

The killings must be named for what they are. The victims must be named for who they are. The violence must be confronted as a crime against a people. Anything less is surrender. Anything less is participation in the erasure that begins with semantics. So does resistance, which begins with naming or calling the thorn by its real name.

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