(Daily Signal)—Persecution of Christians in Nigeria is not driven solely by religion, according to Pastor Brad Brandon.
While religion plays a direct role, socio-economic issues are a significant factor contributing to the bloodshed, says Brandon, founder and CEO of Across Nigeria, a Christian organization with the mission of bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the people of Nigeria and supporting persecuted Christians in the African nation.
It is estimated that more than 50,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria since 2009, and about 7,000 in the first half of 2025 alone.
A Missionary Calling
A decade ago, Brandon was pastoring a church in Connecticut when he realized his relationship with God “had become very stale.”
“I cried out to Him and just said, ‘God, I don’t want this anymore. I want to be back close with you and have that side-by-side walk with you again,’” Brandon tells The Daily Signal he recalls praying.
Shortly thereafter, Brandon got involved with Christian missions work in Nigeria. When he traveled to the African nation in 2016, he gave God the credit for leading him to a Fulani Muslim village, which became the start of Across Nigeria.
Brandon has dedicated much of the past 10 years of his life to serving Christians in Nigeria and building relationships with Fulani Muslims, giving him unique insight into current tensions between Christians and Fulani Muslims.
Why Fulani Muslims Are Attacking Christians
While Boko Haram and the Islamic State—West Africa are driven by their radical Islamic ideology to persecute Christians in Nigeria, many Fulani Muslims are in conflict with Christians over issues of farming and ranching.
“Although there are some militarized radical Fulani Muslims who are ideological in their beliefs and in their actions, I would say many of the Fulani Muslims are in conflict with the Christians … [because of a] lack of good grazing ground for their cattle,” he said.
Boko Haram and the Islamic State are terrorist groups, both of which have a strong presence in Nigeria, but the Fulani Muslims are an ethnic group in Northern Nigeria and are responsible for a great deal of the current violence being carried out against Christians.
“They raise cattle,” Brandon said of the Nigerian Fulani Muslims. “The Christians do farming [and] especially during the dry season, you’ll see an increase in the violence. When the cattle are looking for food, they’ll wander onto a farmer’s crops [and] destroy the crops. The farmer comes out, chases the cattle away, the Fulani come back and retaliate, and before you know it, hundreds of Christians are killed.”
Stopping the Fulani Violence
While the socio-economic issues do not justify the violence from the Fulani Muslims “it gives us an insight into how we can solve the problem,” the Christian missionary said.
“We’re helping those communities with wells, with medical care, with schools, because we want to increase their socio-economic position so that their young people aren’t drawn into radical ideologies and terrorism,” he explained.
To date, Across Nigeria has built eight schools serving over 4,000 students primarily in Fulani Muslims communities. Violence has dropped by 60% to 70% in every area where a school has been built, Brandon said.
One of the solutions to the tensions in Nigeria between Christians and Fulani Muslim is a ranching system that would include fences for cattle, which Brandon says is not a perfect plan, but does have “some good points to it.”
‘Christian Lives Are Expendable’
Brandon also places responsibility at the feet of the Nigerian government for allowing the persecution to continue.
About 25 years ago, Christians and Fulani Muslims lived peacefully side-by-side, Brandon explained. But because the “Nigerian government has been silent on the issue of Christians being killed,” Brandon says, the message to “the Fulani is that when we have a problem, Christian lives are expendable, and we’re not going to get in trouble for killing them.”
Additionally, Brandon say he believes that the instability in northern Nigeria is viewed as a benefit to and by the Nigerian government.
“It allows them to retain power,” he said the government. “It allows them to be able to do things in the north that they couldn’t do if it was stabilized.”
Trump in Action
The persecution of Christians in Nigeria has gained international attention, including from President Donald Trump, who at the end of October announced he was designating Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern.
Trump has also directed members of Congress to look into the issue of Christian persecution in Nigeria and report back to him.
“I’m appreciative of President Trump for drawing attention to this,” Brandon said, adding that “there hasn’t been a president in recent history that has done anything about this.”
When President Joe Biden entered the White House, he removed Nigeria from the Country of Particular Concern list despite the fact that persecution of Christians was taking place at the time.
Trump put Nigeria on the list of countries of Particular Concern during his first term, “so he’s always had his finger on the pulse of what’s happening in Nigeria,” the missionary said.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.