In a remote corner of Plateau State, where the hills of Barkin Ladi hold stories steeped in both faith and fire, lives a man whose courage still echoes through Nigeria’s conscience. Imam Abdullahi Abubakar — now 90 years old — once stood before armed assailants and declared they would have to kill him first before harming the Christians he had hidden in his mosque. On that fateful day in June 2018, he saved 262 lives in Nghar village. Here is 14 point summary on visit to Abdullahi Abubakar by Journalist, Rev. Fr Omokugbo Ojeifo.
1. Not many people recall that it was U.S. President Donald J. Trump who first recognized Imam Abdullahi Abubakar for his courageous act of risking his own life to save 262 Christians in Nghar village, Barkin Ladi LGA of Plateau State. In 2019, Trump bestowed the first ever Presidential Medal for International Religious Freedom on the Imam.
2. The attack in the village took place in June 2018.
The U.S. Embassy in Abuja was the first major institution to flag the news of the Imam’s heroism, making it widely known. It was in 2022, four years after the incident, that President Buhari bestowed the M.O.N. national honor on the Imam.
3. In December 2022, I travelled to Ngar village where I met Imam Abubakar, his deputy imam, and two other Christian leaders in the village.
4. They narrated all that happened – the same story of how the village was attacked by assailants on Friday, June 22, 2018, just about the time that the Juma’at prayers ended. Nghar is a predominantly Christian village. Christians were running for their dear life, and the Imam ushered many of them into the mosque, and some into his home; and then went out to confront the attackers. He told them that they’d have to kill him first before they can gain access to the mosque.
5. During the attack in the village, 86 Christians were slaughtered. One Muslim was a victim. He had gone to visit his Christian friends when the attack took place; the attackers didn’t know he was a Muslim, and that was how he was killed. The 86 Christians included infants, all of whom were buried in a mass grave. I visited the gravesite. I visited the mosque. I entered the Imam’s house.
6. One of the Christian leaders told me that many Christians in the village have said that they will relocate from their ancestral land whenever the Imam dies because they fear for their safety in his absence. The Imam is now 90 years old.
7. The irony is that the land on which the mosque was built was donated by the Christian villagers to Imam Abdullahi’s father who migrated to Nghar village from Bauchi in the mid-1950s.
8. When I asked who the attackers were, one of the Christian leaders who lost family members told me that, from the language they were speaking, they were Fulani militia. He said this in the presence of the Imam who did not deny it.
9. When we started heading toward the village from the main road, where a military checkpoint with three soldiers were, my friend John, a former seminarian (now a lawyer), who helped me arrange the visit, blurted out: “This is the most dangerous place to live in the world.”
10. It didn’t take much to understand what he meant. These Christian villages are in the interior hilly heartland of Plateau, without motorable roads, and are so isolated. If an attack was taking place, it would take the security forces hours to arrive, during which time the attackers would have successfully raided, maimed, and slaughtered their victims, and fled.
11. Even if you were to station 100 policemen there, they would still not be enough to protect those villages. In any case, there was not a single policeman in the village as at the time when I visited. That explains why it’s so easy for these incessant attacks to occur without the resistance of security forces.
12. Nigeria is an “archipelago of ungoverned spaces.” How can a country of 923,000 sq km and 237 million citizens be secure with less than 1 million security personnel? Don’t forget that more than 30% of our security personnel are private guards to politicians, the business elite, security chiefs, religious leaders, traditional rulers, and wealthy private citizens. The rest of the citizens are at the mercy of ill-equipped, low morale, poorly remunerated security personnel. Or at the mercy of God!
13. As at today, Nigeria needs to recruit at least 1 million policemen and 1 million soldiers to even start thinking of making a little difference in the country’s security situation. After that, we need to unbundle the security architecture. In 2025, why should helpless villagers in Nghar wait for security and rescue orders to come from hundreds of kilometres away when they are being attacked?
14. Lest I forget, Nghar village has no good roads, school, or clinic. The only source of water supply, a borehole, was donated by the Sir Ahmadu Bello Foundation. The school building is dilapidated.
Imam Abubakar told me that in 2018, a senior Christian politician in Buhari’s government (you can guess!) visited him from Abuja and promised that government will bring some development relief to the village. As at 2022 when I visited, the Imam said he was still waiting. He begged me to lend a voice to their plight. I am sure the politician left government in 2023 without fulfilling his promises!
