World Council of Churches (WCC) acting general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Ioan Sauca expressed deep concern about the worsening security situation in Nigeria, and the impact on the people and churches of the country.
Members of the Christian Council of Nigeria have adopted “Out of the Shadows,” a resource designed to end all forms of sexual violence against children.
As children and women in Nigeria become targets of rising insecurity and violence, churches are moving to offer support to the victims, while amplifying their voice against the challenge, according to senior Christian women leaders in the West African nation.
For the people of Nigeria, 2020 was a gruelling year as they faced the COVID-19 pandemic, the continuing scourge of the extremist militant group Boko Haram, extrajudicial killings, and violent responses to popular protests against police brutality and other social and economic issues.
Two workshops in Nigeria and Tanzania organized by local church councils in collaboration with the World Council of Churches (WCC), All Africa Conference of Churches, and UNICEF consolidated the partnership on ending sexual violence against children.
Rev. Ikechukwu Anaga remembers when people didn’t know about “Thursdays in Black,” the global movement resisting attitudes and practices that permit rape and violence. But his community of Aba, in Abia State, Nigeria, was seeing firsthand an increase in gender-based violence and rape. When Anaga helped others in his community make a firm decision to do something about it, the zeal and passion for Thursdays in Black rose.
In many ways, the World Council of Churches (WCC) pilgrimage of justice and peace hinges on protecting, advocating, and educating people about human rights. In Nigeria, a series of workshops in November promoted human rights across a number of WCC programme areas, including the Churches’ Commitments to Children, preventing gender-based violence, and engaging with the United Nations human rights system.
“Statelessness renders people’s vulnerability to abuse and to denial of their rights invisible to national authorities. In this sense the right to a nationality is a threshold issue for access to protection of all other human rights - almost a 'right to have rights'”, said Peter Prove, director of the World Council of Churches (WCC) Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), following a regional training workshop on birth registration and gender discriminatory nationality laws in Africa, organized by the WCC in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 11–13 May.
“Children need to know their place in the church. And that is at the front, not the back”, said Bishop Raphael Opoko from the Methodist Church of Nigeria, speaking at a round table discussion on promoting the rights of children held on 19 November at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva.
The kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls in April 2014 is sadly symbolic of the suffering of children in Nigeria, says the pastor who heads the Council of Churches of Nigeria.
