Lured Home to Die: Tinubu’s Lie That Exterminated Ngoshe
When PR Becomes Mass Murder
By Mike Arnold
Ngoshe is gone.
Boko Haram overran the community in Gwoza LGA, Borno State on the night of March 3rd. Houses burned. Hospital destroyed. Schools leveled. An elder shot through the mouth, bullet exiting through his nose. Another slaughtered. Soldiers captured alive. Civilians abducted. More Than Conquerors Christian Assembly — the church our team visited and adopted as a sister congregation just over a year ago — wiped out. The pastor isn’t answering his WhatsApp.
The death toll is unknown because there is no one left in Ngoshe to count.
I’ll admit I’ve struggled with numbness. The reports of slaughter don’t stop. But Ngoshe broke through. Most of the IDPs we serve at New Kuchingoro camp in Abuja are from there. Ms. Hanatu, who has taught the children there long before a school was built, fled Ngoshe in 2014. The children she teaches today were born in the camp because their parents couldn’t go home. When those kids dream of home, they dream of Ngoshe — a village they’ve never seen. This week, Boko Haram burned what was left of it.
What Was Lost — And Who’s Counting
Don’t take my word for it. The Gwoza Christian Community Association (GCCA) — indigenous Christians from Gwoza itself, not outside observers — has published their own signed testimony. What follows are their numbers, not mine.
Before the insurgency, Gwoza LGA had more than 176 large churches. Today, 148 are burned and in ruins. In Gava-West alone, 74 towns were sacked, 36,946 families displaced, 99 churches destroyed, and 292 people killed in September 2013. By August 2014, 2,203 Christian homes had been destroyed, 102 Christians killed — including three pastors. Today, roughly 107,000 Gwoza Christians are scattered across 27 IDP camps in seven Nigerian states, plus the Minawao refugee camp in Cameroon.
Of the thousands of resettlement houses built in the region since then, the GCCA reports knowing of only three that went to Christians.
At Gwoza General Hospital, the mosque was rehabilitated after Boko Haram damaged it. The church was bulldozed and replaced by a solar farm.
That is the community whose remnant was just attacked again. That is the community the Nigerian government declared safe to return to.
The Sequence That Killed Them
This did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a sequence. Every step is documented. Every actor is named.
2014. Boko Haram seizes Gwoza, declares a caliphate, massacres thousands. The survivors scatter — tens of thousands to IDP camps across Nigeria, thousands more across the border to the Minawao refugee camp in Cameroon’s Far North. The black flag goes up over Gwoza. It has not come down since.
2024. The U.S. government has been airlifting the most vulnerable Minawao refugees — vetted, approved, persecuted Christians — to America. Ninety-seven have made it. Then in May, President Tinubu’s government announces that Boko Haram has been defeated: “The federal government under President Tinubu’s leadership has defeated Boko Haram terrorists.” National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu is celebrated as the architect of that victory. Reno Omokri begs me to nominate him for the Nobel Prize for this “accomplishment.” (Of course I decline.) The black flag is still flying over Gwoza. The announcement is a lie. And they know it.
January 20, 2025. President Trump signs Executive Order 14163 suspending the entire U.S. refugee admissions program. Flights canceled overnight. The Gwoza Christians waiting at Minawao — vetted, approved, with nowhere else to go — are stranded. The airlift is over.
July 2025. The World Food Programme ends food assistance entirely for the 26,000 Nigerian refugees at Minawao. No food. No airlift. No path forward.
December 2025. Attorney Emmanuel Ogebe sends a written warning to a U.S. Congressional delegation: do not allow repatriation to Borno. Gwoza is still occupied. Sending them back is a death sentence. Neither the House Nigeria Accountability Bill 7457 nor Representative Riley Moore’s presidential report address the stranded refugees.
Meanwhile, Borno Governor Zulum arrives at Minawao offering cash to those who return — N500,000, roughly $310 — and Tinubu’s declaration of victory in his pocket. Come home. The war is over.
Some went. They had nothing left to wait for.
March 3, 2026. Boko Haram was waiting.
How the Lie Traveled
Nigeria is supposedly an American strategic partner. If Nigeria’s own president says the war is won and his people can go home, why maintain an airlift? The logic writes itself — and it did.
I believe the Trump administration suspended the refugee program without knowing that Tinubu’s victory declaration was fiction. That is the most charitable explanation for what happened — and it is the most urgent reason for Washington to look again, right now.
A contact on the ground wrote to me this week: “The community was attacked at 10pm… so many natives were killed. No one is in the community right now, as I write this…. The church we met has been destroyed.”
More than 58,000 Gwoza refugees remain stranded at Minawao today. A pregnant Christian woman was killed there in the days before this attack.
The GCCA put it plainly in their signed testimony: “The time for denial and silence is over. Please talk about it until the world knows.”
This is the fruit of believing the charlatans in Abuja.
The Demands Are Simple
The Tinubu government manufactured a fiction. That fiction shaped American policy. That policy left people with no option but to accept cash and walk home into a kill zone.
The Nigerian government’s propaganda, PR and lobbying is directly responsible for a growing body count.
The United States must reopen and complete the airlift of the remaining Gwoza refugees at Minawao — people already vetted, already approved, already waiting. What happened in Ngoshe this week is the evidence file. It doesn’t get clearer than this. They must also realize this is a drop in the bucket: the denial and slow deaths — and resulting radicalization — of Nigeria’s displaced generation is the world’s biggest ongoing crime against humanity, and must be stopped.
The Borno government must stop paying people to return to occupied territory. Use the money and energy instead to wipe every Boko Haram member from the face of the earth.
Representative Riley Moore’s report and the House Nigeria Accountability Bill 7457 must be amended to address the stranded refugees directly. Their omission is not a footnote. It is a policy failure with a body count attached.
And President Tinubu, NSJ Ribadu and Shambassador Omokri must be called to account: if Boko Haram was defeated in May 2024, what just happened in Ngoshe?
The children in our camps were born without a homeland because of what Boko Haram did in 2014. They deserve better than to watch the place their parents came from get burned to the ground a second time — while the men responsible collect diplomatic postings and pay millions of dollars to lobbyists in Washington to twist the truth.
This cannot continue. The world must know the truth. People of conscience must stand together and demand it end.
Rise.
#EarthShaker
Mike Arnold is the author of EPICENTER: Nigeria, Radical Islam, and the War for Global Order (#1 Amazon Bestseller) and founder of Africa Arise International. He has made sixteen trips to Nigeria, including multiple under Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisories, and has operated schools for displaced children in IDP camps since 2019.