The New York Times of January 18, 2026, published an explosive story showing how unverified and methodologically questionable data produced by a little-known Onitsha screwdriver seller who moonlights as an NGO activist, Emeka Umeagbalasi of Intersociety, traveled upward into US Republican politics and helped shape a narrative of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria, culminating in Trump-ordered airstrikes in Sokoto State.
Umeagbalasi, who runs Intersociety from his home and relies largely on secondary sources, assumptions, presumptions and Google searches, admitted that he rarely verifies deaths, often imputes victims’ religious identities based on his understanding of what I like to call Nigeria’s emotional geography, and inflates figures that conflict researchers and even church leaders dispute.
Despite these flaws, his claims were cited by Fox News, Senator Ted Cruz, Rep. Riley Moore and other Republicans, and echoed by the White House. It illustrates how fraudulent data, ideological advocacy and US culture-war politics converged to misframe Nigeria’s complex violence as a one-sided religious slaughter rather than a crisis of state failure affecting Christians, Muslims, traditional religious worshipers and nonreligious people.
But a certain class of Nigerians have chosen to either not read the New York Times story (instantiating my recent Facebook post about Nigerians’ fixation with forming opinions based only on headlines) or to read it but allow their preconceived biases to befog their comprehension.
Some low-information, high-ignorance Nigerians even claim that the New York Times report was bought with the reported $9 million the Bola Tinubu government paid to a conservative lobbying firm in Washington, DC. I will return to this point shortly.
Interestingly, a December 26, 2025, investigation by the BBC’s Global Disinformation Unit reached strikingly similar conclusions to those of the New York Times. The BBC investigation, which surprisingly did not gain traction in Nigeria when it was first published, also showed that the figures underpinning the “Christian genocide” narrative are unverifiable, internally inconsistent and sharply at odds with independent conflict-monitoring data.
It noted that groups such as ACLED document widespread killings across Nigeria but find no credible evidence of a coordinated campaign targeting Christians alone. Violence in Nigeria, the BBC observed, is better explained by state weakness, banditry, insurgency and impunity, dynamics that endanger Muslims and Christians alike.
Crucially, the BBC report situates the persistence of the genocide framing within southeastern Nigeria’s political history. It highlights how some of the loudest voices amplifying the narrative are rooted in Igbo political grievances and are entangled with pro-Biafra networks that have long sought international sympathy by portraying the Nigerian state as genocidal. Recasting Nigeria’s complex security crisis as a religious extermination campaign provides a morally powerful export narrative, particularly when targeted at US evangelical and conservative audiences.
The report quoted a Biafran separatist group as admitting to playing a major role in promoting the “Christian genocide” narrative in the US Congress. “The Biafra Republic Government in Exile, BRGIE, described it as a ‘highly orchestrated effort,’ saying it had hired lobbying firms and met US officials, including Cruz.”
That framing found fertile ground in Washington. Lobbying firms and advocacy networks tailored the message for American culture-war politics, where persecution of Christians abroad resonates strongly. Republican lawmakers, often unfamiliar with Nigeria’s internal dynamics, repeated the claims with little scrutiny.
In that sense, the genocide story was less the product of rigorous evidence than of ideological alignment, diaspora activism and a lobbying ecosystem eager for simple moral binaries.
This does not, by any stretch of the imagination, suggest that Christians are not being killed in large numbers in northern Nigeria or that victims are unjustified in framing their suffering in religious terms simply because many of the perpetrators identify as Muslims. My first column on this issue acknowledged this fact.
But the pushback is warranted because the narrative is built on false data and amplified to US lobby groups by people whose agenda is not primarily about Christian genocide. It is also warranted because Muslims are being murdered in large numbers by the same actors who are killing Christians.
On the surface, it may seem defensible to argue that since the people killing Muslims are also Muslims, only the killings of Christians matter. But that position is both morally and sociologically problematic. First, every unjustified death should concern us. Second, human beings inhabit a multiplicity of identities. Being Muslim is not the sum total of the lives of people murdered by bandits and terrorists.
To suggest that the murder of Hausa and sedentary Fulani by bandits and terrorists does not matter as much as the murder of Christians simply because the villains and victims share the same faith betrays a lack of humanity.
In my part of Nigeria, broadly speaking Borgu, which stretches across parts of Kebbi, Niger and Kwara States, scores of our people are murdered regularly. To imply that those deaths do not matter because most people there are Muslims cuts deeply. And that is where the “Christian genocide” narrative has led.
The internationalization of this narrative in the service of separatist advocacy makes it particularly jarring. That is why independent international media have been drawn to interrogate it, and why the story is now crumbling under sustained scrutiny.
Now, back to the conspiracy theory that the New York Times story was spurred by the Nigerian government.
There is no relationship between the Nigerian government’s reported payment to a conservative lobbying firm in Washington and the New York Times investigation that dismantled the Christian genocide narrative. None. The two events merely occurred in the same news cycle, and coincidence is being mistaken for causation.
To begin with the basics, there is no credible historical record of the New York Times ever accepting monetary inducement to write or slant a story. Not from governments, not from corporations, not from foreign lobbies. In more than a century of operation, the paper has been sued, criticized, corrected, embarrassed and sometimes wrong, but it has never been shown to have sold its news judgment for cash.
The Times is not a fragile outfit scrambling for influence money. It is a multibillion-dollar publicly traded company whose value runs into the low tens of billions of dollars, whose brand is widely regarded as America’s newspaper of record and whose reporters earn, on average, six-figure salaries.
Its institutional power flows from credibility, not access fees. Destroying that credibility for a $9 million foreign lobbying contract, money that would not even pass through its books, would be commercial and reputational suicide.
Just as importantly, the lobbying payment itself is being misunderstood. Lobbyists in Washington influence government policy, not news coverage. They target lawmakers, executive agencies and regulatory processes.
They do not buy front-page investigations at elite newspapers, especially not papers that routinely antagonize conservative politicians and administrations. The idea that a conservative lobby would bribe a liberal newspaper to undermine a conservative narrative is internally incoherent.
The contrast with Nigerian media practices is uncomfortable but unavoidable. In the United States, mainstream news organizations do not accept bribes to write stories. Paying journalists to publish or suppress coverage is a career-ending offense. Newsrooms are legally exposed, aggressively scrutinized and professionally policed in ways that make such conduct extraordinarily risky.
That does not mean American journalism is perfect or bias-free. It means its failures are not transactional in the crude cash-for-coverage sense that some Nigerians assume or know.
So why does the bribery explanation feel plausible to some Nigerians? The answer lies not in evidence but in cognition and experience.
People rely on the availability heuristic, drawing on what they know best. If influence at home is often bought with money, money becomes the default explanation everywhere else. This is reinforced by analogical overreach, that is, the assumption that foreign institutions must function like local ones despite radically different incentive structures and accountability systems.
There is also institutional opacity. When people lack procedural knowledge of how elite Western media operate, they substitute a simpler question for a harder one. Instead of asking how a newspaper verifies sources or decides newsworthiness, they ask who paid whom. Add correlation-as-causation bias, the temptation to connect two adjacent events, and a narrative writes itself.
Layered onto this is monocausal populism, the belief that complex outcomes must have a single villain, usually money, and epistemic provincialism, the assumption that local moral failures are universal features of power. In low-trust environments like Nigeria, conspiracy rationality becomes an ordinary mode of explanation rather than a fringe pathology. It supplies coherence where institutional trust is absent.
Finally, there is what in media studies we call narrative closure bias. The bribery story feels complete. Institutional independence feels abstract and unsatisfying. Closure beats accuracy.
Put plainly, the claim that a conservative lobby bribed a liberal American newspaper to publish an investigation that undercut conservative politicians tells us far more about how Nigerians make sense of distant power than about how American journalism actually works.
The New York Times story stands or falls on its evidence and methods. So far, critics have attacked neither. They have simply imagined a transaction that never happened.
Credit: Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D
