By Austine Agbo Emmanuel, Kaduna
For the average Nigerian, Christmas should evoke images of worship, family reunions, and collective renewal. Yet, for over a decade, the season has increasingly become synonymous with fear, bloodshed, and forced displacement, particularly across the Northern and Middle Belt regions. What began years ago as episodic terror attacks has hardened into a recurring national emergency where religious observance, civilian vulnerability, and state fragility intersect with tragic predictability.
The trajectory of this violence suggests a calculated psychological warfare designed to turn a period of celebration into a season of mourning. The decisive rupture in the country’s festive history occurred with the 2010 Christmas Day twin bombings in Ungwan Rukuba and Gada Biyu in Jos, followed closely by the devastating 2011 attack on St. Theresa’s Catholic Church in Madalla, Niger State.
Since then, the Christmas window has repeatedly provided the backdrop for mass violence that decimates communities and fundamentally redraws Nigeria’s internal displacement landscape. These are not random acts of cruelty; they are a sustained pattern of seasonal atrocities that leave entire populations living in fear of the calendar.
The timeline of terror is relentless. On Christmas Eve in 2016, the Goska community in Jema’a Local Government Area of Southern Kaduna was overrun, leaving approximately 20 dead and hundreds fleeing into the bush. The pattern escalated significantly during the 2023 Christmas period, where coordinated assaults across Bokkos and Barkin Ladi in Plateau State claimed over 212 lives and displaced more than 10,000 residents in a matter of days. In 2024, the bloodshed moved to Benue State, where celebrations in Anwase, Gboko Local Government Area, ended in the slaughter of 46 worshippers and the displacement of another 6,800 people.
As the 2025 Christmas season approaches, the warning bells are already ringing. The recent kidnapping of 20 worshippers from an ECWA church in Ayetorokiri, Bunu-Kabba, Kogi State, serves as a grim precursor, reinforcing fears that the season remains a magnet for violence. This incident highlights a shift in tactics from bombings to invasion and abduction but the objective remains the same: the weaponisation of faith gatherings to spread terror.
In response to this grim predictability, a coalition of civil society organisations and human rights advocates has issued a joint statement titled “A Call for Protection and Safety of Displaced Persons and Communities at This Christmas and Beyond.” The coalition, which includes House of Justice, Global Rights, Atrocities Watch Africa, and The Kukah Centre, alongside prominent voices like Prof. Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, describes this trajectory as a grief-mapped pattern of displacement.
Their argument is damning, the recurring Christmas-season attacks are both foreseeable and preventable. They persist largely because early warning signals are consistently ignored, and the state’s protection measures remain woefully inadequate. The statement highlights that this violence is driven by the intersection of faith-based insecurity and domestic terrorism, creating a crisis that the government has failed to address structurally.
The cost of this systemic failure is borne most heavily by the victims who are forced into the abyss of displacement. For these communities, survival means losing not only their homes but their livelihoods, identity documents, and sense of belonging.
Protracted displacement has become normalised in Nigeria, while emergency responses are often delayed, under-resourced, or treated as temporary fixes to what is clearly a structural national crisis.
The result is a growing population of internally displaced persons (IDPs) who are effectively stateless within their own country, stripped of their dignity and economic agency.
Ending this cycle requires the Nigerian state to move beyond the ritual condemnation that typically follows these attacks. The coalition’s proposals offer a clear, actionable pathway. First, immediate security measures must be deployed to protect soft targets specifically churches, community centres, and travel routes during the Yuletide season. Intelligence gathering must be proactive, not reactive.
Second, the welfare of IDPs must be elevated to a matter of national urgency. Emergency agencies, specifically NEMA and state-level counterparts, must be mobilised to provide food, shelter, and water in anticipation of known risks, rather than waiting for the body count to rise.
Beyond emergency logistics, the government must pursue durable solutions. This includes economic empowerment for victims and enabling safe, dignified resettlement. Also, the government must strengthen collaboration between statutory security agencies and local vigilante structures to harness actionable intelligence. Central to this framework is the domestication of the African Union Kampala Convention, which would establish a coordinated, rights-based national approach to displacement and signal a genuine political commitment to addressing the crisis at its roots.
Christmas should not remain a seasonal test of Nigeria’s capacity to protect its citizens. Without decisive preventive action, the country risks entrenching a tragic norm where faith gatherings invite fear and festive seasons foreshadow displacement. The choice before the Nigerian state is stark: continue to manage the aftermath of predictable violence, or finally disrupt the cycle that has turned celebration into catastrophe for too many communities.