Nigeria’s first lady, Remi Tinubu met with US members of Congress and Trump administration officials last week to press her case that Abuja is protecting Christians, a source familiar with the meetings told AFP on Monday.
The talks came as Remi Tinubu was in Washington for the National Prayer Breakfast, a yearly gathering of political, business and religious leaders in Washington.
Nigeria is under pressure from the United States over violence in the country that President Donald Trump has said amounts to the “persecution” of Christians — a framing long used by the US religious and political right wing.
Trump called Tinubu “a very respected woman” during his address to the gathering Thursday.
The first lady, a Christian pastor married to Muslim President Bola Tinubu, met with US lawmakers from both parties on Nigeria’s security situation, the source said.
Abuja and independent analysts reject Washington’s framing of the complex, overlapping security crises in the country, noting that armed groups kill both Muslims and Christians, often without distinction.
Nigeria is battling a long-running jihadist insurgency concentrated in its northeast, while non-ideological “bandit” gangs conduct kidnappings for ransom, loot villages and impose taxes on farmers and miners in the northwest.
Across the center of the country, violence erupts among mostly Christian farmers and Muslim Fulani herders — though researchers say the main cause is access to dwindling land and resources.
Nigeria appears to have weathered the worst of Trump’s ire and come out on the other side with increased security cooperation with Washington.
A US strike in December targeted jihadist militants in a joint American-Nigerian operation, officials from both countries said.
The US military has said it will supply intelligence for Nigerian air strikes and work to expedite arms purchases.
Diplomatic tensions remain, however. Speaking at a US-Nigeria security meeting in Abuja last month, a top State Department official said Nigeria “must do more to protect Christians” in a speech that did not mention Muslim victims of violence.
Speaking to The Hill, a US political outlet, Remi Tinubu said she was in Washington to “build relationships.”
She added that she saw a “divine intervention” Trump’s focus on Christians in Nigeria, even if it has ruffled feathers diplomatically.
“Divine in the sense that, who would have even noticed Nigeria?” Tinubu said. “Or to really understand what we are grappling with and trying to build the country?”
