US Congressman Bill Huizenga has accused President Bola Tinubu’s administration of “sitting back” and failing to address worsening insecurity in Nigeria.
Huizenga said this on Thursday while testifying before the US House Subcommittee on Africa reviewing Nigeria’s redesignation as a country of particular concern (CPC).
The congressman directly faulted the Tinubu administration’s response, accusing Nigeria’s delegation of downplaying the crisis in Washington.
“It ought to be outrageous that it is Christians, moderate Muslims, and anyone being terrorised by these radicalised Islamists in Nigeria, and we’ve got the Tinubu government sitting back and not doing enough. I was recently interviewed by Nigerian television, and that was really their question. Is the Tinubu government doing enough? And I had to answer, ‘No, they are not.’
“And I do not understand how a delegation can come here to the United States and downplay and come up with all of these other excuses as to why this is allowed to happen. It should be rejected, and should be called out for what it is,” the lawmaker said.
Huizenga criticised the media and some members of Congress for “denying” or “de-emphasising” the scale of the killings.
“I went to school with kids from Nigeria. We’ve got neighbours who’ve been missionaries there, who have family there, who have friends there, who know this is going on. Yet, we’ve got not just the mass media, we’ve got people within the Congress denying that this is happening, or certainly de-emphasising it,” he said.
Huizenga recalled a Christmas Eve 2023 attack that killed 200 people and said the incident showed that security conditions had not improved.
Questioning the pattern of religious attacks in the country, he asked, “Do we see Christians killing Muslims the way radicalised Islamists kill Christians in Muslim areas?”
The committee will also hear from senior US State Department officials and Nigerian religious leaders.
Thursday’s hearing came after US President Donald Trump reinstated Nigeria on the CPC list on 31 October 2025.
Trump alleged systematic persecution of Christians and confirmed that military options were being reviewed.
The Nigerian Government, howevr, rejected the allegations. President Tinubu said, “Nigeria stands firmly as a democracy governed by constitutional guarantees of religious liberty. The characterisation of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our reality”.
Nigeria was first designated a CPC in 2020 under Trump. Former President Joe Biden removed the country from that list shortly after assuming office.
