A System of Captivity Based on Faith and Ethnicity
In the face of persistent insecurity, particularly in the northern part of Nigeria, investigative journalist and senior research analyst Steven Kefas has urged governments at all levels to confront the challenges head-on and restore peace and security in communities across the nation. His call comes from a detailed analysis of religious persecution, terrorism, and forced displacement in Nigeria, titled “Captivity by Creed: The Religious Sorting System Nobody Talks About.”
Kefas, who serves as the Lead Investigative Expert and Senior Research Analyst at the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, and is also the Publisher of Middle Belt Times, highlights the plight of Christians held hostage in the North. His work draws on the testimony of Sunday Cletus, a victim who was abducted and later released after enduring prolonged torture.
According to Cletus, the captors had a clear rule: Fulani individuals would not be taken because they were considered brothers. However, Christians and non-Fulani Muslims were seen as fair game. What followed depended entirely on which category the captives fell into.
Cletus was abducted on 28 February 2026 while traveling through Kachia Local Government Area in Kaduna State. His experience, along with extensive field research conducted over multiple states and years, reveals a system that is deliberate, consistent, and organized around two variables: religion and ethnicity.
The differential treatment of Muslim and Christian abductees by Fulani Ethnic Militias (FEM) is one of the most under-documented aspects of the security crisis. While public attention has focused on the frequency and geography of attacks, survivor testimonies reveal that what happens after capture is equally telling and horrifying.
The Sorting Mechanism of Captivity
The classification begins at the point of abduction. Cletus reported that his captors were explicit: Fulani individuals were not to be targeted because of ethnic solidarity. This instruction was not whispered or implied; it was declared. From this moment, a sorting mechanism was set in motion that governed every subsequent hour of captivity.
Field interviews conducted across multiple states over several years return the same account with remarkable consistency. From the moment of capture, Muslim abductees and Christian abductees enter different realities. For a Christian in Southern Kaduna, the danger of being kidnapped is compounded by the near certainty of harsher treatment, higher ransom demands, and a greater risk of death—not because of anything they have done, but because of their faith.
Survivor testimonies describe a captivity environment divided into two parallel experiences. Muslim abductees are generally treated with a degree of restraint. They are not subjected to the physical and sexual violence that Christian captives endure as a matter of routine. They receive adequate food, are permitted relative freedom of movement within the camp, and in documented cases, are allowed to observe religious obligations.
The logic, as captors have articulated it in the presence of Muslim detainees, is one of communal solidarity. A fellow Muslim, however different in ethnicity or background, is assigned a different moral status.
The Harsh Reality for Christian Abductees
For Christian abductees, the experience is of another order entirely. Men are beaten systematically not as punishment for specific behavior, but as a baseline condition of captivity. Women face the additional horror of sexual violence. Cletus described an environment where abuse was pervasive, and captives were entirely at their captors’ mercy. Psychological torment was deployed as deliberately as physical violence.
Christian abductees are subjected to prolonged uncertainty, repeated threats of execution, and in documented cases, forced to witness violence against fellow captives as a mechanism of coercion and terror. Exceptions exist, but the pattern holds across the data: faith is the dominant variable.
Across field interviews with survivors and families in the north central region and parts of the northwest, a consistent pattern emerges. Muslim abductees are released on comparatively lower ransoms, negotiations are shorter, and in several documented cases, Fulani community intermediaries have facilitated release with minimal negotiation.
However, for Christian families, the process is an ordeal of a different kind. Demands are higher, timelines stretch for weeks, and the threat of lethal consequences for delay or non-compliance is more frequently and more credibly invoked. Field interviews document cases where families paid the full ransom demand only to receive no release, followed by escalating demands.
In some cases, Christian abductees were killed even after their families complied. Kefas lamented the execution of a teenage boy because his family did not initiate negotiations quickly enough, as disclosed by Cletus.
A System of Religious Hierarchy
What emerges from years of field testimony is not a picture of chaotic, opportunistic violence. It is a picture of a system—one with internal rules, consistent practices, and an embedded hierarchy. Religion functions as a determinant of fate at every stage of the abduction experience: who gets taken, how they are treated in captivity, on what terms they may be released, and whether they survive.
This pattern is consistent across multiple states, multiple armed groups, and multiple years of survivor testimony. It is not incidental variation between individual captors. It is, as the evidence compels us to describe it, a religious hierarchy of human worth embedded in the operational logic of Fulani Ethnic Militias.
The implications reach beyond security analysis. The same sorting mechanism documented in community attacks where Muslim members of mixed villages are spared while their Christian neighbors are killed is replicated and deepened inside the captivity system itself. Faith does not merely determine who is attacked. It determines what they endure, how much their life is worth in negotiation, and whether they return.
Kefas notes that while Cletus came home, many do not. His testimony, set against the accumulated weight of survivor accounts gathered across the region over years, forces a confrontation with a dimension of Northern Nigeria’s security crisis that policy discussions have consistently failed to address with adequate seriousness.
The violence is not indiscriminate. The suffering is not evenly distributed. The religious character of the crisis does not begin and end with the moment of attack. It permeates the entire machinery—raids, abductions, camps, negotiations, releases, or executions.
Until that reality is named plainly and confronted directly, the communities living under it will continue to bear its weight largely alone.
