Benue State Governor Hyacinth Alia said on Wednesday that there is no religious genocide in the state, countering a narrative pushed by United States government officials to declare Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern.

“In my state of Benue, we don’t have any religious, any ethnic, any racial, any national or state genocide. We don’t have that.

“Do we have a number of insecurities in the state? Yes, we do. But it is not a genocide. Someone would need to… check the United Nations definitions for this,” the governor said.

Alia, a Catholic priest, said this during a consultative forum on the protection of the rights of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and Forcibly Displaced Persons (FDPs) organised by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in Abuja.

“We do not have any jihad in Nigeria,” Governor Alia added. “I’m speaking to you as a reverend father in the church. I’m speaking to you as a governor of a state. If there were any, particularly in my state or any part of Nigeria, I would have been the very number one person to make a noise.”

Alia’s remarks come at a time Donald Trump and his cohorts are falsely pushing claim of persecution and targeted killings of Christians.

The Benue State governor said he had visited the American embassy in Nigeria to counter the false claims by the US President.

“It’s on the record that I had an interface with the American ambassador to let him know that both in Nigeria, particularly in Benue State, there is no genocide, unless it’s my description, and the United Nations description of a genocide does not fit within the parameters,” he said.

The Nigerian government and many respected voices, including religious leaders, have denied the claim of genocide in Nigeria.

Christian and Muslim populations have been killed without discrimination in Nigeria’s widespread insecurity fuelled by weak governance, scramble for resources, banditry, among other factors.