TOBIAS Yahaya woke in the middle of an April night in 2023 to hear men breaking into his home in Sokoto, a city in the extreme north west of Nigeria.
Three individuals had scaled a high fence surrounding the compound of the house where he lived with his wife and four children aged between eight and three years and cut through coils of barbed wire. He saw them approaching.
‘It was 3am. I knew they had come for something,’ recalls Tobias, 27, when we met in London. ‘I have young children, and I knew if the men came inside it was going to be bad for the family, so I decided to go outside.’
There, a nearby neighbour, a Muslim called Ibrahim of about the same age, attacked him with a knife.
‘There wasn’t any conversation between me and him,’ says Tobias. ‘He brought out this knife and – bam! – he stuck it in my chest.
‘I fell to the ground bleeding really seriously. Ibrahim’s accomplices fled but he was still standing with the knife. I stood up and Ibrahim brought the knife for a second time but I managed to hold the blade. He screwed it and I had to let go but I dragged him close to my body and held him so he couldn’t stab me.
‘We were struggling, standing up, and my wife came outside. She was screaming for help from neighbours who came to our house and Ibrahim was apprehended.
‘It was a difficult moment for me but thanks to God and the doctors I was fine.’
If Tobias had been stabbed on the left side of his chest rather than the right the knife would have pierced his heart. The wound was so deep, he said, that a doctor was able to insert a finger up to the knuckle. Luckily, the knife missed major arteries.
When Tobias awoke in hospital after surgery he was horrified to see Ibrahim in a bed next to him. His attacker had been admitted for treatment to head injuries inflicted by neighbours who had come to the rescue.
Alone but for a police officer standing guard, the two men faced each other for a second time and Tobias said: ‘Why did you want to kill me?’
It was a largely rhetorical question because Tobias surely already knew the answer. Ibrahim was a Muslim whereas Tobias was not only a well-known local Catholic, but also a catechist, a lay man who holds a valuable teaching, pastoral and support role at the Cathedral of Holy Family in Sokoto.
‘He didn’t talk to me,’ says Tobias. ‘He looked at me and he was shedding tears.’
The next time they met was in court three months later when Ibrahim was sent to jail for just a year for the attempted murder.
There, Ibrahim confessed before a Muslim judge that he had intended to kill Tobias because he was a Christian and a threat especially because of his ministry. What happened next shocked the court.
‘I asked for permission to hold Ibrahim in court before he was sent away to start his sentence,’ said Tobias.
‘There were reactions on the faces of the people in the court – disappointment, disbelief, I don’t know. Some of the Muslims were asking why I would do that and the judge asked me what exactly I wanted to do. I said, “I want to hug him”.
‘The judge said, “go ahead and hug him” and I shook Ibrahim’s hand and told him I forgave him. He looked at me and he was in tears again.’
Tobias explained: ‘As a human being forgiveness is difficult – it’s not my fault I was attacked. But we are also Christians. We have the teachings of Christianity and we have to follow them.
‘First of all, I consider Ibrahim to be a human being and a human being who deserves love and forgiveness no matter what crimes he has committed against me. I may also need forgiveness from somebody someday.
‘Especially because of the remorse on his face, it made it easier to think of forgiveness. I have forgiven him because he is a human being and I have forgiven him because Jesus asked us to forgive. I have forgiven him because I want to free myself from hate.
‘He actually hugged me and I could see from his reaction and his non-verbal communication and tears that it was an expression of remorse.
‘It pushed me to visit his mother twice while he was in jail but I was told that I could not see Ibrahim in prison.’
By then, Tobias was having to care for his family. His wife was terrified of further attacks on their home and his eldest daughter, who had seen her father bleeding heavily, was deeply traumatised by the experience.
His response was to take them 300 miles to a safer part of Nigeria to recuperate from their ordeal.
But in conversations with his wife and his mother, Tobias reached the conclusion that it was God’s will that he should return to his ministry in Sokoto, where Muslims outnumber Christians by nine to one.
The family went home and Tobias went back to work, conscious that he must always ‘be ready’ for violence while striving to establish good relations with his Muslim neighbours, whose children mix with his own.
There is a daily risk to his life. Trouble can come out of the blue. In 2022, for instance, Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a second-year Christian college student in Sokoto, praised Jesus for her good exam results. She was overheard by Muslims and was stoned and burned with tires placed around her body.
Just two Muslims were charged in connection with the murder and only with the very minor offence of ‘criminal conspiracy and creating a public disturbance’, of which they were later acquitted.
In view of such evident danger to himself and other Christians in Sokoto, it is understandable that Tobias declined to comment on the political situation in Nigeria or discuss whether a persecution is under way.
For observers in the comparative safety of the West, however, there are compelling grounds to conclude that there is.
