There were fiery exchanges on Piers Morgan’s programme on Tuesday as Nigeria’s foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, and former Canadian MP Goldie Ghamari traded accusations over claims that Christians in Nigeria are being systematically persecuted.
Morgan had pressed Tuggar on figures from the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), which alleges that more than 50,000 Christians have been killed and 18,000 churches destroyed since 2009. Tuggar dismissed the claims as wildly inflated, insisting that Nigeria does not categorise deaths by religion and treats all victims “as Nigerians”.
When pushed for official data, the minister said that 177 Christians had been killed and 102 churches attacked in the last five years — a figure sharply at odds with the statistics Morgan cited.
The temperature rose further when Ghamari entered the conversation. She claimed the violence amounted to jihad and, in a provocative turn, linked it to the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.
“I don’t need to know the Nigerian constitution to recognise jihad when someone yells ‘Allahu Akbar’ before massacring 200 Christians,” she said. She went on to accuse the Nigerian government of having clandestine ties with Iran and questioned why schoolchildren were “holding pictures of the Ayatollah”.
Ghamari accused Tuggar of evasion and dishonesty. “I was a politician for seven years. I can tell when someone is lying. That’s exactly what this foreign minister is doing,” she said.
Tuggar shot back, branding her claims “baseless” and accusing her of reducing Nigerian lives to talking points. He said she fundamentally misunderstood the country’s political and ethnic dynamics, pointing out that Nigeria’s leadership reflects longstanding regional balancing, with the president from the south and the vice-president from the north.
Pressed by Morgan on whether he condemned extremist attacks on Christians, Tuggar said he did — and disclosed his own loss.
“I lost my father-in-law to Boko Haram,” he said. “I’ve lost Muslim family members too. But it doesn’t matter whether they’re Muslim or Christian. Boko Haram’s number one enemy is a Muslim who rejects their ideology.”
Ghamari countered that such facts did not negate what she described as “targeted ethnic cleansing of Christians”. Tuggar responded sharply, accusing her of “starting wars from afar” and drawing inappropriate parallels with Sudan. Critics like her, he said, “don’t care about freedoms” and are intent on destabilising Nigeria “because it is Africa’s biggest democracy”.
“It’s not going to happen. Move on to your next project. You’re a disgrace to the Canadian nation,” he said.
The fraught exchange comes weeks after US president Donald Trump redesignated Nigeria a “country of particular concern”, citing what he described as an existential threat to Christianity. “Thousands of Christians are being killed,” Trump said, urging Congress to investigate.
Nigeria’s federal government has rejected the designation, insisting there is no Christian genocide and accusing advocacy groups of misrepresenting the complex mix of insurgency, banditry and communal conflict across the country.
