The Invisible Victims of Woro: How Media Spin is Turning Muslim Massacres into "Christian Genocide" Narratives


-By Ruben Mario Brodrick 

​In a blistering critique of Nigeria’s media landscape, Farooq Kperogi has sounded the alarm on what he describes as the "Christian genocidization" of the Kaiama massacre, where a tragic mass murder in Woro, Kwara State, is being strategically reframed to fit a narrow religious narrative. The heart of the issue lies in the recent slaughter and abduction of Woro residents by extremists—victims who were, in fact, Muslims. According to Governor Abdulrazaq Abdulrahman, these villagers were murdered specifically because they resisted the radical, extremist version of Islam that the terrorists sought to impose. However, the subsequent media coverage has painted a far different picture.

​Kperogi points to headlines from outlets like BarristerNG, which reported that villagers were killed for "refusing to change their faith." He argues that such phrasing is a "sinister rhetorical maneuver" designed to exploit the general public's association of the word "terrorist" with Muslim extremists, thereby leading readers to assume the victims were Christians being martyred for their religion. This trend, he claims, is part of a "well-oiled and carefully choreographed" effort to amplify a "Christian genocide" narrative that suggests only Christians are being targeted in Nigeria, while Muslims are either spared or complicit.

​This pattern of selective reporting is not new; Kperogi highlights how the bombing of a Maiduguri mosque on Christmas Eve 2025 was framed by major news outlets like Channels TV and various Lagos-based newspapers as a "Christmas Eve tragedy," conspicuously omitting the fact that the victims were Muslim worshipers in a mosque. This "identity erasure" ensures that those who only scan headlines walk away with the impression that Christians were the primary targets. Kperogi warns that this monomaniacal obsession with "Christianizing" every tragedy is not only factually impoverished but dangerously divisive, as it strips away the basic humanity of Muslim victims and suggests their deaths are only worthy of empathy if they can be co-opted into a specific political or religious agenda. Ultimately, he argues, every death in Nigeria’s wave of mass violence should distress us as humans first, regardless of the faith or ethnicity of the fallen.

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