Nigeria’s Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah has a reputation as a fearless truth-teller.
Since 2011, he has led the Diocese of Sokoto, in the extreme northwest of Nigeria, a staunchly Muslim area. He has emerged as a leading critic of the Nigerian government’s failure to protect the country’s Christians from relentless massacres and kidnappings.
So when Kukah was billed to speak in Rome at the Oct. 21 launch of Aid to the Church in Need’s Religious Freedom in the World Report 2025, many expected another blazing denunciation of the treatment of Nigeria’s Christians.
But his address took a different turn. Far from highlighting the suffering of Christians, the bishop argued that all Nigerians faced insecurity due to a weak state.
Instead of welcoming calls for the U.S. to re-designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern due to grave violations of religious freedom, he said this would only harm interreligious ties and relations with the government.
Rather than criticizing Nigeria’s political class, he praised the country’s President Bola Tinubu, noting that, although Tinubu is a Muslim, his wife is a Pentecostal pastor. Nigerians, he suggested, finally had a government that seemed “willing to listen.”
Nigerian Catholics reacted critically to Kukah’s speech. Had the bishop, they asked, just performed a dramatic about-face, abandoning his former convictions?
To better understand what’s happening, let’s take a closer look at Kukah’s speech, what his critics are saying, and what’s at stake.
The bishop’s Oct. 21 address responded to the Aid to the Church in Need report’s observations about Nigeria. The pontifical foundation reported that anti-Christian persecution was increasing in the country, driven by Islamist extremism and authoritarian government.
Kukah acknowledged that jihadist groups had wreaked havoc for more than 15 years, while “a culture of uncontrolled banditry” flourished. But he noted that the language used to describe the conflict has evolved.
Initially, he said, observers spoke of clashes between farmers and herdsmen, driven south by climate change. Following the rise of the Boko Haram terror group, which attacked the Church, the language shifted to that of “religious persecution targeted at Christians.” But Kukah suggested another language change was needed after Sunni Muslim jihadists expanded their targets to include Shia Muslims.
Kukah noted that his diocese is in the heartland of the 19th-century Sokoto Caliphate, an area known today as a center of Islamic learning.
“If we were dealing with outright persecution of Christians on grounds of identity, both myself and my small flock would not exist,” he said, observing that he travels freely in episcopal regalia and Masses are celebrated without disruption.
But Kukah also stressed that Nigeria continues to face serious problems.
“The inability of the federal government and its security agencies to end these killings has created the condition for the genocide that has taken over many communities today,” he said.
“By whatever names we choose, the fact is that Nigerians are dying unacceptable deaths across the country. In many cases, they are targeted because of their beliefs but also because of their ethnicity. We are in the cusp of a weak state with clear lack of capacity to arrest the descent into anarchy.”
The bishop described the years 2015 to 2023 — the period in which Muhammadu Buhari served as president — as the “worst phase in the history of interfaith relations in Nigeria.” He accused Buhari of overtly favoring Islam and predominantly Musim northern Nigeria, excluding Christians from positions of influence.
But Kukah said that Buhari’s successor, Bola Tinubu, was more open to Christians in senior leadership. He praised Tinubu for visiting victims of a June atrocity against Christians in the village of Yelwata, Benue State, and promising financial assistance.
“Such actions are different from the Buhari period, where the president largely simply looked the other way without empathy,” he argued.
Kukah acknowledged that the Aid to the Church in Need report documented “innumerable attacks” in Nigeria based on religion.
“Religious freedom in Nigeria is under grave threat, principally due to legal measures that support discrimination against Christians in the northern states, as well as severe and relentless atrocities committed throughout the country,” he said.
But rather than apportioning blame to the Tinubu administration, Kukah expressed hopes that the government would act to defend all its citizens from violence and challenge the adoption of Sharia law by Nigeria’s 12 northern states.
The bishop recalled that he had encouraged the designation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern in 2020. (The country was controversially removed from the list in 2021, with no sign of improvement in conditions.) But he said Nigeria’s redesignation would harm the Church’s efforts to assist the government in addressing the persecution of Christians and wider insecurity.
“Designating my country, Nigeria, a Country of Concern will only make our work in the area of dialogue among religious leaders in our country and elsewhere with the Nigerian state even harder. It will only increase tensions, sow doubt, open windows of suspicion and fear, and simply allow the criminals and perpetrators of violence to exploit,” he said.
He concluded that Nigerians should be “supported and encouraged” in their efforts to end the violence, rather than “punished.”
Fr. Kelvin Ugwu, a member of the Missionary Society of St. Paul of Nigeria serving in Gambia, professed admiration for Kukah, but suggested the bishop had undergone a political transformation.
While Kukah was a staunch critic of Muhammadu Buhari, he seemed sympathetic toward Bola Tinubu, the priest suggested.
“All the things he criticised the previous government for, we are experiencing the worst of them under the present administration,” Ugwu argued in an Oct. 25 Facebook post, suggesting that Tinubu came to power in 2023 through “one of the most rigged elections in Nigeria.”
Fr. Stan Chu Ilo, a priest of Nigeria’s Awgu diocese who is a professor at DePaul University in Chicago, contrasted Kukah’s remarks with those of Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of Makurdi, who forthrightly criticized the persecution of Nigeria’s Christians in a March 12 address before a U.S. congressional committee.
Anagbe, whose diocese is in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, between the predominantly Muslim north and Christian south, told the committee: “The experience of the Nigerian Christians today can be summed up as that of a Church under Islamist extermination.”
Ilo commented: “The two bishops’ differing perspectives — one prophetic and denunciatory, the other diplomatic and conciliatory — have laid bare the painful tension within the Nigerian Church over how to speak truth to power in a time of blood and national anxiety and anger.”
He added: “In essence, Bishop Kukah’s speech sought to balance truth-telling with bridge-building. He acknowledged Christian suffering but placed it within a wider national tragedy affecting all Nigerians. Yet in doing so, he missed the deep anguish of believers living under the shadow of violence and fear.”
“His words, intended as a pastoral appeal for dialogue and national harmony, have instead exposed the fractures within the Nigerian Church — between shepherds who prefer diplomacy with the powers that be and those who speak from the crucible of suffering of the poor of the land who inhabit the existential peripheries of life.”
Meanwhile, the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, a Nigerian human rights organization, accused Kukah of a “misrepresentation of facts,” underplaying the extent of jihadist violence against Christians.
