Charity Must Begin at Home: Nigerian Clerics Must Confront Our Own Humanitarian Crisis
By Mike Odeh
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Earlier this week, prominent Islamic scholars gathered in Ibadan to demand global action against what they called genocide and systemic violations of Palestinian rights in Gaza. Led by the Executive Director of the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC), Professor Ishaq Akintola, and Sheikh Dhikrullah Shafi’i, they condemned Israel’s siege of Gaza and urged international intervention.
Their concern for Palestinians is admirable. But here in Nigeria, a much larger humanitarian disaster unfolds daily — and our clerics remain disturbingly silent.
According to the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), more than 7,000 Christians and other civilians were killed between January and July 2025 by Fulani ethno-supremacist militias, Boko Haram, ISWAP, and Ansaru. In many rural areas of the Middle Belt and northern Nigeria, survivors speak of villages wiped out overnight, farmlands torched, women raped, and children abducted.
The violence is metastasizing. No longer confined to the Middle Belt and North, fresh attacks have been recorded in Ondo and Osun States in the Southwest, while several communities in the Southeast have also been targeted.
Two grim scenarios now hang over Nigeria like a sword. First, Christians — abandoned by the state — may eventually take up arms in self-defense. This could invite a harsh Federal Government crackdown, plunging Nigeria into a brutal civil war. The second is the prospect of jihadist groups turning Nigeria into another Lebanon, Somalia, or Yemen — a failed state defined by sectarian bloodletting, lawlessness, and permanent instability.
For clerics to weep over Gaza while ignoring the rivers of blood at home is not just hypocrisy; it is negligence that endangers our very survival. True solidarity with oppressed peoples abroad must begin with confronting oppression in one’s own backyard.
The warning is stark: unless Nigeria’s leaders — religious and political — act with courage, this nation is edging toward disaster.
Charity, indeed, must begin at home.
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