There are times when ideas become prisons. When ideology blinds those who hold it. When conviction turns into a wall that shuts out reality. This is what has happened to some of the comrades on the Nigerian Left. They have chosen to see the world only through the prism of anti-imperialism. So much so that they can no longer see the blood that stains the Nigerian earth in Benue, Plateau, and Taraba. Two Comrades stand as examples of this blindness. Femi Falana, a lawyer and long-time human rights advocate. Owei Lakemfa, a trade unionist and columnist. Both men have done admirable work in the past. Both have fought the military. Both have defended the weak. But, on the question of the slaughter of Christians in northern Nigeria, they have become prisoners of old dogmas. Falana says Donald Trump’s claim that Christians are being exterminated in Nigeria is false. Lakemfa goes further. He says the killings are not genocide but the outcome of land grabbing. Both Comrades take comfort in argument. They seek refuge in needless semantics. They forget that while they debate definitions, human beings are being wiped out in their ancestral homes. Perhaps not referring to both, Tunde Aremu, a respected member of the Nigerian Left who has devoted much of his adult life to development work, captures what is essentially a cry of moral frustration at the intellectual dishonesty of denial. Hear him: “You understand now, my brother, why some of us grow infuriated when people paid to deny the reality of our people sit behind their computers, in air-conditioned comfort, spreading falsehoods”.
There is a difference between skepticism and denial. The Left generally thrives on skepticism. It questions power. It exposes imperial propaganda. But when skepticism becomes denial, it becomes cruel. When Falana dismisses the idea of genocide, he denies the testimony of survivors. He denies the bones of the dead. He denies the evidence that lies scattered across the valleys of the Middle Belt. Lakemfa too misreads the tragedy. He sees it as a struggle for land. As though land, not faith, is the reason villages have been emptied out and churches burned. As though northern Christians are being violently turned on without the ideological poison of jihadism. To call it land grabbing is to flatten reality. It is to erase the religious hatred that fuels the violence.
The Nigerian Left once prided itself on standing with the oppressed. But some of its comrades now stand not with the people but with rhetoric that is ideologically dishonest, slogans that serve dogma rather than truth. Everything America says must be wrong. Everything the West condemns must be exaggerated. So, when Trump or Western observers describe the killings of Christians as genocide, the instinct of some members of the Left is to dismiss it outright. They would rather defend their ideology and be wrong than confront the enemies of the people and be right. This is not new. A few scholars of the Left have long called out this intellectual arrogance. The late Polish philosopher, Leszek KoĊakowski, wrote that the tragedy of Marxism was not only political but moral. He argued that the Left had become so fixated on its struggle against capitalism that it lost the ability to see evil elsewhere. Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, later warned that the Left’s obsession with imperialism made it blind to new forms of domination, whether religious, cultural, or ethnic. In the same way, Falana and Lakemfa display what the prominent US political theorist and philosopher, Michael Walzer, once described as “the moral blindness of the sectarian Left”. They see imperialism everywhere except where it is absent. They read northern Nigeria as a chessboard where America moves pieces and fabricates narratives. They cannot accept that local actors masquerading as ethnic militias, religious fundamentalists, and entrepreneurs of religious conflicts can produce violence on their own.
But they are wrong. The massacres in Benue, Taraba, Plateau, and southern Kaduna are not Western fiction. They are not stories written by the CIA. They are realities witnessed by those who bury their dead in mass graves. Reporters, missionaries, aid workers, and local NGOs have documented the killings. Satellite images have shown razed villages. Survivors tell of attacks that begin with chants of Allahu Akbar and end with burning crosses. These massacres are not mere accidents of land disputes. They are the result of deep-seated religious hatred fueled by a violent ideology.
To call the massacres anything less than genocide is to play with words. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, defined it as the destruction of a group in whole or in part. He did not say that the group must be annihilated completely. Nor did he say the motive must be purely political. He said it is enough if the intention is to destroy the group’s existence, culture, or faith. By that standard, the targeted killings of Christians in northern Nigeria fit the definition. The Marxist suspicion of religion adds another layer to the blindness. For many on the Left, religion has always been the opium of the masses. A distraction from material struggle. So, when Christians are killed, they see not believers but pawns. They reduce faith to false consciousness. They cannot imagine that people might die for belief, not for land. They forget that even Marx, in his later writings, softened his stance on religion as he observed the social sufferings of real people. There is also an element of moral cowardice. To acknowledge genocide would require confronting the failure of the Nigerian state. It would mean admitting that ideology cannot explain away every atrocity. It would mean standing with victims who may not share the Left’s worldview.
The Nigerian Left has not always lacked empathy. It has long combined careful analysis with genuine compassion, dissecting suffering while identifying with those who endure it. So what has gone wrong? Some of its leading cadres seem to have ignored Mark Lilla, who, in The Reckless Mind, warned that intellectuals who subordinate morality to ideology become servants of abstraction. These intellectuals defend ideas at the expense of real people. That is where Falana and Lakemfa now stand. They frame every argument through the lens of anti-imperialism, even when the subject at hand does not warrant such a perspective. They cling to a narrative that has become disconnected from the immediate suffering it ought to address.
But, one must ask: what does it profit some cadres of the Nigerian Left to win an argument against Trump but lose its moral compass? Trump may be cynical. He may exploit Christian persecution for political gain. But his cynicism does not erase the truth of the persecution. To reject his statement simply because it came from him is to mistake the messenger for the message. It is to allow hatred of the West to become hatred of truth. The violence in northern Nigeria has roots in history, religion, and state failure. Colonial boundaries, demographic pressures, desertification, and elite manipulation all play their part. But to deny the religious dimension is to deny the essence of the conflict. When priests are beheaded at the altar, when worshippers are burned inside churches, when attackers shout Islamic slogans, the motive speaks for itself. Some Comrades on the Left must learn to see, and learn to glimpse realities. They must learn that reality is not what ideology permits it to see. The poor and oppressed they claim to defend are not abstractions. They have names. They have graves. Falana and Lakemfa have misread this reality. In their zeal to challenge imperial narratives, they have joined the list of Comrades who confuse skepticism with denial. The result is a moral failure. It is time for them, and others like them, to lay down the old dogmas and face the facts. The truth is simple. People are being killed for their faith in northern Nigeria. That is not a Western script. It is a Nigerian horror. The Nigerian Left once called on society to speak truth to power. Today, it must speak truth to its own ideology.