The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

US congressional hearing exposes Nigeria

Last week’s United States congressional hearing on Nigeria has exposed the African country’s nakedness. Testimony after testimony showed a country that has for more than a decade become paralysingly impotent to tackle its existential crisis. What came out of the testimonies is a Nigeria at war with itself, a war ventilated through cracks such as climate pressures, ethnic disharmony, constitutional failures, religious intolerance, and selective law enforcement, among other reasons. It was a relief that at the end, the congress was split over what to do with Nigeria. The threat of bombing Nigeria may have temporarily receded, and even the shrill congressman Riley Moore may have begun to entertain doubts about his own conclusions, but the nakedness of Nigeria was evident for everyone to see, and the picture was truly unflattering.

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Nigeria was painted as inept, averse to tolerance and justice, and its security services polluted by collaborators and corrupt personnel. Apart from the open congressional hearing, only Mr Moore has disclosed what he discussed with Nigerian officials. No details have been published yet of the meeting with the Defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, or other top officials of the US State Department. In due course, the details or sketches will be known. From all indications, however, and despite Mr Trump’s continuing fierce rhetoric, the storm looks like it is over in terms of the US levying war on Nigeria. But the image painted before the global community of Nigeria allowing the killings to last for more than a decade is truly depressing and tragic. Much worse, by its inability to combat and defeat the extremists, the country has now found itself besieged, with dozens of schools shut indefinitely in many states, despite knowing where the extremists hibernate, and who their sponsors are.

Yet, some Nigerian interest groups and officials remain defensive, unwisely and unproductively quibbling about the definition of genocide. US intervention was never a solution, and US boots on the ground would have been disastrous. But if the Nigerian authorities get a reprieve and yet fail to rein in entrenched religious, ethnic and political extremists, including closet fanatics in high places, the problem will persist, and one day, an outsider will intervene and possible trigger Nigeria’s disintegration. The congressional hearing and Mr Trump’s threats, particularly the repeated mention of rampaging Fulani militias, should encourage Nigerian leaders to tell themselves a few home truths and get to work to forge an equitable and just society. But given their defensiveness, prevarications, name-calling, and blame game, it is unclear the elite have learnt any lessons. It is either they are too incompetent to appreciate the dynamics of their existential crisis or they are too self-absorbed and parochial to care.

November 23, 2025
Alarmingly, PDP goes for broke

Fifth-rate politicians have taken over the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The party is now so fractured that no one is sure how many factions exist anymore. It began casually with three discernible factions before the 2023 elections, then grew to four some two years after, and is now feared to be about five or six factions, some of them so furtive that mutual suspicion is rife in the party. Those who converged on Ibadan on November 15 and reveled till the next day orchestrating what they freeheartedly described as an elective convention affirmed Kabiru Turaki as their chairman. Every other party position appears sinecure and surplus to requirement. Party chieftain Bode George, angry and opinionated as ever, and Oyo State governor Seyi Makinde inspired the revolt that produced Mr Turaki, a former Special Duties minister and senior advocate. Tired of pussyfooting over who were the legitimate leaders of the party, and exasperated by the knot that had shackled the party for years, they simply looked for a judicial sword and cut the restraints.

Weeks before the convention, party chieftains were hopping from one court to another, until they had had enough. Now, in spite of themselves, their legal nightmares have just begun. It is feared that the party is irretrievably fractured. Perhaps. But there are many hardy perennials in the party who will not give up easily; and others who will go down fighting; and yet others who will make sheep’s eyes at the ruling party, hoping for a personal financial and political breakthrough. Admittedly the party was in a very bad spot, constrained by the chicaneries, or more accurately the intransigence, of former Rivers governor Nyesom Wike and his loyalists. For a party unwisely accustomed to breaking its own rules and hopping into bed with sundry political suitors, some of them dressed garishly in hideous robes, it was sadly not difficult to organise the kind of convention they put up in Ibadan two Fridays ago. Some of those who helped them organise the jamboree, including Plateau State governor Caleb Mutfwang and Adamawa State governor Umaru Fintiri, were appalled by the brazenness with which they sacked Mr Wike’s loyalists and enthroned the dour Mr Turaki.

By the time they carried out the assault on the PDP Headquarters in Abuja days later, the apostasy in the party, not to say more factionalisation, was complete. The Wike amputation and the forcible coronation of Mr Turaki mean that mending the party fabric will now be more difficult than before. Not only will they become hopelessly mired in court cases, their depleted ranks will sap their spirit and send survivors scurrying for shelter wherever they can find it. Their only straw which they desperately clutch is the tenuous legitimacy the Ibadan convention conferred on Mr Turaki. But Mr Makinde, who almost singlehandedly inspired the convention and probably underwrote a significant portion of its budget, is not as charismatic as he pretends. Had he possessed the wit and élan, had he brought panache to his fights like the hated Mr Wike, had he acquired the fecundity for dissembling like Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), he would have come out of the convention talced with leadership lavendar of the most exquisite composition.

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It is not clear why the Makinde faction of the PDP settled for Mr Turaki; but they did, at great expense and at the risk of destroying the party. On the day their charge of the Wadata Plaza headquarters of the party came to nought, when their cavalry were stopped by violence and tear gas, Mr Makinde and Bauchi State governor Bala Mohammed stood grimly by as Mr Turaki made an ass of himself since his coronation barely a week earlier. Both governors winced as their new chairman made a plaintive appeal to the United States president Donald Trump to save Nigerian democracy. It was a momentous occasion, one which no one in this generation should ever miss. There he stood like a military officer who had just led his troops into an ambush and barely escaped with his life, asking the world’s most narcissistic, dictatorial and uncouth president to come rescue Nigeria from the grip of one-party rule. Was it a slip of tongue? Or had the tear gas still wafting in the air addled his brain and diminished his judgement? No one in the world, except this regular Rip van Winkle, goes to the American president seeking anything properly describable as democracy. No one, not Russia’s Vladimir Putin, nor the corpulent North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, would dare such antics even as a joke. But Mr Turaki, exhumed from some Neolithic crevices, dared.

But someone exceeded all of them in political travesty: the hard talking Chief George. Given the role he played in the mass sacking of Mr Wike’s loyalists and the fracturing of the party, it is no wonder that he appeared drained thereafter, and has barely spoken a word since. Until enterprising reporters give us an account of how the decision was taken among the party’s panjandrums to do the mass sacking in the party leadership without recourse to either their own rules or the law, it can only be conjectured that Chief George was fully convinced that the Gordian knot restraining the party had to be brusquely cut. He was tasked with moving the motion for the decapitation, and he relished the assignment, especially being a former military officer. The job not only suited his unforgiving and tempestuous politics, it accorded with his frigid personality. He failed in Lagos PDP politics to stamp his authority and personality, and has never been known to keep an oath or his word. Fond of shooting first and asking questions later, and surrounded by obsequious party leaders, he led the troops to Golgotha without bothering about the consequences.

It is hard for any Nigerian patriot to reconcile with the diminution of the PDP. The party never really had strategists, not even ones with half the talent of a failed coup plotter. Now they are proving to also lack thinkers, as Mr Tukur is showing so disapprovingly. At their rate of decline, they may soon discover that they will lack the men to help prosecute any electoral war. Hemmed in on all sides by incompetent and querulous men and women, and unable to free themselves from their straitjacket, they will soon join forces with those scheming by propaganda, abductions and subversion to undermine the APC administration.

November 23, 2025
Kanu: Southeast’s troubling view

It took about 10 riveting years and incompetent legal defence to earn the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader Nnamdi Kanu a life sentence. A Federal High Court in Abuja presided over by Justice James Omotosho handed down the sentence last week, ending years of legal rigmarole begun since his arrest in October 2015. IPOB itself was founded in 2012. While delivering his judgement, the judge said of Mr Kanu that “He remained arrogant, cocky, and full of himself without realising the magnitude of his crime and the effect of what he has done against his people in the south-east.” But moments after the sentencing, many notable members of the Southeast elite groaned that they were disappointed and had expected his crimes to be expiated by his freedom fight justifications. A day or so before the sentence was handed down, some 44 members of the House of Representatives acting under the aegis of Concerned Federal Lawmakers, mostly south-easterners, incomprehensibly asked the federal government to discontinue the case in favour of a political solution.

Former senate president Adolphus Wabara decried the life sentence as unjust and tantamount to jailing the whole Igbo race, especially when some Boko Haram commanders had in contrast received lenient sentences. Foreign Affairs minister of state Bianca Ojukwu surprisingly groaned that the judgement was not the outcome they expected, indicating that she was saddened by how the whole affair ended. A political solution would be found, she whined. Some other south-eastern political elites and commentators have threatened electoral backlash should Mr Kanu remain in jail by the next elections. Former Anambra State governor Peter Obi ignored the juridical part of the Kanu affair and adopted sophistry suggesting that the arrest and trial should not have happened in the first instance. In sum, the dominant and vocal Southeast elite are behind Mr Kanu to a man and are unalterably opposed to his jailing. Those in favour of the outcome of the case, including the thousands of victims who suffered untold losses, are not only in the minority, their voices are muted. Given the prevalent mood in the Southeast, their voices will likely not be heard, going forward. Worse, they may even suffer some backlash.

The resentment manifesting in the Southeast is a reflection of the curious logic expounded by their elite. They ignore the deaths and destructions, the economic losses, the trauma suffered by the region, and the dislocations. Instead, they focus on Mr Kanu himself, his charisma, his apparently disarming imperiousness, his legal and radio histrionics, and his boldness and claims of being a freedom fighter. Does the region really believe his story, especially his cartographic fantasies of including parts of Kogi, Benue and the entire South-South in Biafra? Having spread all over Nigeria transacting businesses of all kinds, thus transcending their spatial limitation, do the Igbo political and business elites really support self determination? The truth may never be known. But what is known at the moment is that Mr Kanu’s supporters compare the jailing of their freedom fighter, particularly what they describe as the harshness of his jail term, to how the so-called repentant and captured Boko Haram fighters have been treated. Sen. Wabara even persuaded himself to believe that Mr Kanu never projected violence. Indeed, those who have taken umbrage at his jailing appear to think that the collateral damage suffered by thousands of Igbo in the heat of IPOB campaigns makes the victims expendable and their blood desirable to be shed ‘to water the tree of liberty’.

It is unclear why those who have bawled at alleged serial miscarriage of justice expected the judgement to favour Mr Kanu. In the strictest consideration of the law, and in every material particular, there was no way, even with the best defence, the IPOB leader would have been exculpated. But never one to let bad enough alone, he worsened his own case by repeatedly sacking his legal teams, and finally taking over his defence and botching it. Secondly, despite his personal failings, the weakness of his political cause, his promotion of indiscriminate violence, and his megalomaniacal inclination, it is shocking that someone as abusive and narcissistic like US president Donald Trump could be the darling of the Southeast elite. Has the region not suffered enough? Or do they think the cause of Biafra Mr Kanu claimed to be fighting could be divorced from his personality? Looking at the Southeast, the tragedy is not just the foibles of Mr Kanu but the irresponsibility of the regional elite. Had they sensibly read through Mr Kanu’s motives, and had they courageously defied him and his methods, the Southeast would have escaped the atavism he promoted and the tragic losses many Igbo families endured while Igbo-on-Igbo violence bled the region.

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While nothing could exculpate Mr Kanu, given the weight of evidence before the court, the Southeast elite were justified to compare the treatment meted out to Mr Kanu with the mild treatment meted out to terrorists and bandits in the North. Since the outbreak of Boko Haram and later banditry, a powerful section of the northern elite has been supportive and even protective of their terrorists. They inspired an ill-conceived and ill-advised programme of deradicalisation and rehabilitation of so-called repentant Boko Haram fighters, while victims of insurgency enjoy incommensurate attention. And ultimately, they have seemed reluctant to promote or back measures that would lead to the extermination of the insurgents and bandits. Without saying so openly, the ham-handed manner the insurgents and bandits have been treated has given rise to the suspicion that the region sees the militants as a potential standing army for political purposes or projection of power in the event of a fight ensuing between warring ethnic groups for the soul and body of Nigeria. It is not unlikely that the Southeast reasons the same way. If there is any question or confusion about the ineffectiveness of the fight against banditry, insurgency and IPOB, the answer may be located in the special relationships the regional elites have formed with their militant groups.

President Bola Tinubu has the unenviable job of presiding over a government whose members are still torn between the nation’s interest and ethnic, religious and primordial affinities. The case is so bad that some cabinet members’ loyalties cannot be assumed at a time the country is at war with itself. There are some powerful interests in the North sponsoring terrorism, sometimes due to economic/mineral resources interests. And there are also now clearly many powerful interests supporting Mr Kanu and what he represents, and who resent and defy the special treatment they believe the northern militants have received from powerful interests in and out of the federal government. These influential regional interests have given indications that their militants can be deployed during national elections for social, religious, political and territorial objectives. The Southwest remains a comparatively peaceful region today partly because its elite, after some initial hesitations, finally ensured that their incubating militants did not hatch. Time will tell whether they did right, or whether they have not become too complacent and liberal for their own existential good.

Whether other regions outside the Southeast show outrage or not, the campaign to free Mr Kanu will acquire impetus in the coming weeks and months, especially as conjured stories of his treatment in jail get disseminated. Expect passions to be inflamed, as disgruntled regions synergise their efforts to render the Tinubu administration impotent. Abductions will become rife, rescue efforts will be stymied by sabotage, and great national distress will be fomented. But the Kanu affair will be nothing more than a symptom of a great underlying disease gnawing at the body politic. The main will thus disease require brilliant and radical measures to extirpate, assuming that the powerful and embedded interests in the country can be neutralised first.

November 23, 2025
Soludo’s triumph, Obi’s humiliation

As this column predicted before the November 8, 2025 governorship election, Chukwuma Soludo, an economics professor, won with a healthy margin. He did better than that; he won with a landslide – all the local governments and nearly all the wards. The performance was so commanding and clearly so one-sided that it left no one in doubt who was the winner and who were the losers. The media looked out for how both the Labour Party (LP), often associated with former Anambra governor Peter Obi, and the African Democratic Congress (ADC), now inextricably linked with former vice president Atiku Abubakar, would perform. Both did very poorly, the LP more shockingly so. The ADC, which took only 8,208 votes out of 595,298 votes cast, was a non-starter, and is likely to remain a non-starter in every election nationally henceforth. But Mr Obi, down to his polling unit which his candidate lost to the All Progressives Congress (APC), proved surrealistically inexistent. The LP candidate, George Moghalu, secured a meager 10,576 votes.

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Overall, Prof. Soludo took 422,664 or 71 percent of the votes, a ringing endorsement of his style, capacity, and campaign. He and many of his supporters interpret the unalloyed endorsement as also a total repudiation of Mr Obi, the Teflon politician and former LP presidential candidate. With coruscating wit, the victorious governor dismissed Mr Obi’s politics, adding that even though LP leader was not on the ballot, he lost his polling unit in Agulu Ward 11. Hundreds of kilometers away in Lagos, some busybody APC politicians sarcastically counselled Mr Obi to abjure his presidential ambition and go home and rest because his time was over and had lost his so-called Midas touch. Mr Obi may have become irrelevant in Anambra for obvious reasons, but nationally, especially as he embarks on cobbling together a sizable political platform on which to run for president, his dismissal may be premature. Those who support him are not discerning or discriminating. They love him, down to his flaws which they find masochistically endearing. Should he eventually get a platform on which to run for office, no matter how flimsy or tenuous it is, they will flock to his side and give his campaign fresh oomph. He will of course not win, and indeed cannot conceivably win, but his obsession has never been about winning. To him, politics is an inscrutable game, and only he can disentangle it.

November 16, 2025
Defections: Why APC should be worried

At the last count, following a series of defections, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) now unassailably dominates the Nigerian polity with 25 state governments out of 36, 76 senators out of 109, and 231 House of Representatives members out of 360. Instead of that domination being weakened or overthrown before 2027, the party may even get more entrenched. The reason is not far-fetched. Firstly, the party has remained cohesive, disciplined and not averse to extraordinary and heroic policy risks that have benefited the states. Secondly, and in contrast, the opposition parties have lacked cohesion and charismatic leadership. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) convulses with internal dissension, almost completely destitute of discernible leadership. The Labour Party (LP) has lost the only defective compass its former presidential candidate, Peter Obi, lent it. And the African Democratic Congress (ADC) of former vice president Atiku Abubakar hangs precariously on the horns of a dilemma, its main financier unsure whether the mule he is riding is not in fact lame of feet.

It may be convenient for the opposition, singly or combined, to denigrate the APC and accuse it of cajoling defectors into the ruling party, but the truth is far simpler than that. The defectors are making rational choices for political survival. Events of the last few months in the LP and ADC, not to say the past two weeks in the PDP, suggest that the defections were rationally instigated even if not morally justified. The defections may, therefore, continue apace if the opposition parties continue their dithering. With or without further defections, the APC already commands and rules the roost. But often, unassailability breeds complacency. Yet, that is not the APC’s worst fears. The danger lurks within the darkened recesses of the souls of a beaten opposition that sees no hope for the future. They will go for broke. They fear that in 2027, even if the APC does not make a clean sweep of its 25 states, and its overwhelming lawmakers do not stamp their authority on their constituencies, the party would still win with a healthy margin, the election metaphorically completed months before the first ballot is cast.

He that is down needs fear no fall, John Bunyan says in The Pilgrim’s Progress. The opposition will, therefore, embrace any tactic, any plot, any underhand dealing to destroy the whole building, not caring whose ox is gored. Going by the animosity the defections have already stirred, and the abuse and the agitations, worse should be expected than just mere propaganda damage to the APC, its candidate, or the nation itself in the months ahead. There are too many powerful interests in the polity, among traditional institutions and security agencies, being systematically dismantled by the ongoing reforms. Those who find themselves holding the short end of the stick will lash out furiously using any means possible – street action, defamatory propaganda, economic sabotage, and even domestic and international religious agitations. The opposition will not be neatly delineated, and may defy regional and faith boundaries, but they will manifest with similar and remorseless intensity. Four years after 2027 would seem to the opposition like a century away, a time lag they are not prepared to tolerate.

The 2027 presidential election primary will be conducted in some six or seven months. The LP is unlikely to get its act together before then. Mr Obi has given up on the party and is fishing for a collegiate of parties upon whose scrawny necks he hopes to find political fulfillment. He will be lucky to cobble that collegiate, and even luckier to get the inspiration and the acumen to run a hydra-headed party looking in different directions at the same time. Carrying out that task is certainly beyond his ken. Last week, in defiance of the law and the courts, PDP leaders tried to force a consensus on their party in order to forge ahead. It was left stranded, apoplectic and defiant by a few court judgements that interrupted its efforts. The party must now race against time after having dug its heels in by conducting a convention barred by the courts and following it up by sacking more than a dozen key factional leaders. It’s a cul de sac, and worse, in a few months, it must conjure magic to organise a primary. But with no outstanding leader with the heft and money to walk his talk, it is beginning to look like the party will need a miracle to transcend its abysmal limitations and self-destructive predilections.

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Until Alhaji Atiku finalises his membership of the ADC and brings all speculations and insinuations to an end, the special purpose vehicle he and his cohorts have acquired for his presidential ambition will work in fits and starts. His men are tired of his vacillations, not to say his obduracy, and have begun to wonder whether it would not be wise of him to back a younger, more enterprising, and perhaps more charismatic southerner. But the former vice president has not exorcised his messianic bent nor acquired the visionary depth needed to plan his political future. For now, he will stick to his guns and tower above the party.

With no party capable of overthrowing the APC, and no aspirant in sight gifted enough to outmuscle the APC candidate and sitting president, the only choice left to the opposition will be to go incredibly nasty. In the months ahead, and shortly before the next polls, they will exude such nastiness that the country has never before experienced. And as the APC continues to win off-cycle elections to the consternation of the leading choristers of the opposition who had confidently predicted otherwise, the stage might be set for truly desperate measures, some of which may skirt dangerously on the margins of treason. That is what the APC must worry about, not about whether it can win or lose the next elections. The defections have all but assured a great outcome in 2027. But the defections have not guaranteed that the turmoil the opposition will engineer will not push Nigeria to the edge of disaster.

November 16, 2025
Genocide: NSCIA misses the point

The Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) did not receive sound advice on how to respond to the Christian genocide charge raised by United States president Donald Trump against Nigeria. As many commentators have noted, and as condescending as the US president’s warnings and language were, in no part of his cryptic messages thundered a little over two weeks ago on social media and press conferences did he give the impression he would fight Muslims, let alone Nigerian Muslims. The Council, however, assumed that judging from Mr Trump’s bellicosity and his decidedly pro-Christian stance, the message could in fact signal a subterranean war against Muslims. The Council’s fear is exaggerated and sadly revelatory. Paragraphs after paragraph unintentionally peeled away layers of obfuscations and hidden affiliations in the NSCIA statement. In one breath, the Council debunked the Islamic identity of the jihadist groups laying Nigeria waste, and in another breath, the statement virtually but inadvertently owned the militants. Yet, as demeaning as Mr Trump’s message was, his warning was about coming to Nigeria to deal with Islamic terrorists, a group the Council correctly admitted had killed nearly as many Muslims as it had murdered Christians.

In their very first paragraph, the Council unfeelingly tries to controvert Nigerian Christians’ belief that they are victims of genocide. Couched disingenuously, the statement insists there is no religious war, insisting that Muslims have on their own been silent over the killings of their brothers. There are, however, better and non-combative ways of scripting their conviction without seeming to lack empathy for Christians in the North and Middle Belt who are being displaced from their ancestral lands by groups of insurgents deceptively or conveniently fighting under the banner of Islam. The statement appeals to the emotions of patriots in paragraph two and attempts a definition of genocide in paragraph three, both striving to debunk the claims of genocide. Paragraph four is even more justificatory of the NSCIA position, while paragraph five seals the tonal deafness of the Council’s argument. Both paragraphs unfortunately show that the Council’s premises undergirding its responses to Mr Trump’s provocation are irredeemably defective.

Paragraphs six and seven, which reference the background of the terrorists wreaking havoc on Nigeria, are nugatory. The NSCIA says the terrorists are deviants who do not represent Muslims, adding that they are also the ‘mortal enemies’ of Muslims. If someone promises to help get rid of the vermin, why be up in arms against the helper then? And in paragraphs eight and nine, the Council attempts a dispassionate analysis of what it terms the ‘drivers’ of terrorism in Nigeria, to wit, the economy, climate change, and alienation caused by poverty, mining corruption and all kinds of criminality. The Council is right; but why go the extra length of arguing over a threat Mr Trump has directed not at Muslims generally, but at terrorists?

The next 10 paragraphs or so are devoted to exploring the arguments regarding the domestic and international dimensions and beneficiaries of the Trumpian view of terrorism in Nigeria and the best approach to dealing with the crisis. Apart from being tedious in absolving mainstream Islam and putting all the blame on deviant Islam, the NSCIA also embarks on selective laudation of Christians who have taken the pains to debunk the regnant opinion in the US about Christian genocide in Nigeria. It is completely unnecessary. It is also not clear why the Council should delve into the geopolitics of Mr Trump’s campaign or his domestic political agenda, not to talk of trying to make sense of the international economic dimension, particularly what kind of economic alliances and arrangements Nigeria is deemed free to enter into.

But when in paragraph 23 the Council casually and carelessly declares that there is no religious intolerance in Nigeria, it takes dishonest analysis to its acme. The facts on the ground in many northern states is that there is palpable religious intolerance, and it is probably this intolerance, not to say the initial apathy to the depredations wrought by Boko Haram against Christians in the North, that formed the basis for the Christian genocide conclusion. Many Nigerians have observed that some states in the North, probably as a result of the myopia or populism of their political elite, have become a vast tapestry of religious intolerance. Why the NSCIA fails to at least acknowledge the fact of religious intolerance in parts of the North is hard to explain. Whether the Council likes it or not, years of intolerance and denying Christians their constitutional rights in some states in the North probably or partially encouraged terrorists and jihadists to pretend to fight under the banner of Islam, believing that the elite in the region would be less inclined to stand in their way.

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In addition, decades of the northern elite shirking their responsibility to ensure justice for Christians murdered for their faith, sometimes in the name of blasphemy, may also have contributed to strengthening the allegations of official genocide. In Kano, Sokoto, Abuja, and elsewhere, some Christians had been lynched for blasphemy, and their attackers were identified. In Kano, prosecution of the lynchers was dropped and the federal government declined to take the matter up; and in Sokoto, no prosecution was even attempted as leading legal minds and academicians stood up as one man to defend the lynchers. Why would Christians not think the state connived at the killings? In some northern states, as some public officials appear to embrace militant Islam, indigenes deserving of promotion into sensitive positions in the civil service and the judiciary were overlooked until a Muslim replacement could be found. Why would Christians not fear they were being persecuted, despite being indigenes of those states? The NSCIA statement tells itself a lie when it argues that religious intolerance does not exist in Nigeria. Yes, it does not exist in many states; but it exists in some northern states. The Council should at least have acknowledged this fact. What the Trump explosion indicates is that if a country promotes fissures in its polity, outsiders will be tempted to do something about it, and they will always find local collaborators.

In many paragraphs, the NSCIA merely regurgitates admittedly sensible arguments about the questionable US justification for intervening in Nigeria. Mr Trump is himself amoral, for by his own admission he is not even a Christian, and his arguments are also largely self-serving and designed to advance American interests over Nigerian interests. Getting bogged down in the definition of genocide is, therefore, meaningless, a point the NSCIA misses very badly. What cannot be disputed, however, is that mass killings of Christians have taken place in some parts of the Middle Belt and their lands seized without any attempt by the state to enforce restitution. Much more than the concomitant killings of Muslims in other parts of the North by insurgents and bandits, it is the killing of Christians and the land element involved that has triggered the cry of genocide. The NSCIA should not have pretended that these jarring anomalies and paradoxes do not exist. They should have patiently, carefully and empathetically worded their statement, and acknowledged the various nuances of the insecurity ravaging the North particularly. Instead, they went at the untrustworthy Mr Trump hammer and tongs and try to portray his justifications as selfish and fallacious. But the Council should also in the same breath have provided an explanation for the adoption of Sharia as part of the criminal laws of some 12 states in the North when the constitution disowns state religion.

Had the Council explored the Christian position and admitted that some states in Nigeria needed to review their governing paradigms, its apparently tendentious conclusions about genocide would have been less certain and provocative. It is incontrovertible that a significant percentage of northern leaders, mainly because of religion and to some extent regional exceptionalism, have refused to admit that to run a united, stable, progressive and peaceful country, they would have to live and let others live, and engage in so many give and takes. Unfortunately they do not seem prepared to sacrifice anything, a reason the Christian genocide claim has resonated with many Nigerians in the Christian Middle Belt and the South. If sooner rather than later nothing is done to coax the country to work together and for each dominant group to give up on some of their fanatical and unsustainable ideas and expectations, the country will itself soon become untenable.

November 16, 2025
Trump’s war against Nigeria

Religious and political leaders in Nigeria have been generally ambivalent over United States President Donald Trump’s plan to levy war of some kind on Nigeria, a country he contemptuously dismissed as disgraced. If Christian leaders oppose him, they fear the church might consider them as apostates indifferent to the plight of their persecuted members. If Muslim leaders oppose the US plan, they also fear they might be equated with the terrorists who have laid the Northeast and Northwest waste. Worsening the dilemma for faith leaders is how to agree on the definition of genocide. But they really don’t need a definitional consensus anymore than they need to agree on the genocide’s varying and largely inaccurate statistical underpinnings. Even US officials who have spoken on the so-called Christian genocide in Nigeria have based their arguments on conflicting and, in some cases, deliberately concocted data.

Analysts and commentators have also encountered their own dilemmas over the genocide claims. If they present arguments about Mr Trump’s real aims, mostly different from his stated claims, they risk being judged as callous and cruel in their disregard for the thousands of lives lost to killers, particularly in the Middle Belt of Nigeria. And if they suggest that supporting the attack on terrorists in Nigeria would probably enable a solution to Nigeria’s terrorism problem, they risk being described as naïve or mentally insufficient. More than one week after Mr Trump first spoke about attacking Nigeria to deal with its terrorism problem, there has been no consensus on his justifications. There is unlikely to be any such consensus. Support for or opposition to the US plans is divided almost in almost equal half between Christians and Muslims. Pragmatists and patriots are smothered in-between the two dominant and unyielding groups.

It is significant to note that the lobbyists who took the Christian case to the US, including the Catholic Bishop of Makurdi Diocese, Bishop Wilfred Anagbe, stopped short of framing the massacres in Benue State as religious genocide. They hinted very strongly that the killings were in many ways ethnic cleansing related to an orchestrated plan to grab and rename their lands. They wanted the US to intervene, but there was nothing in their letters and speeches that suggested they wanted unilateral military intervention. Their primary quest was for the US to pressure the Nigerian government, re-designate the country as a Country of Particular Concern in order to attract a welter of sanctions and naming and shaming of terror financiers and sponsors, and perhaps join the Nigerian military to wage war against the rampaging militias to force them to give up confiscated lands. But Mr Trump, seeking diversions from his domestic troubles, has gone a step further by threatening to attack Nigeria and using intemperate and contemptuous language. The lobbyists now have little choice but to associate with the US plan and claim credit for the ululation the Trump threat has raised.

Indeed, given the acclamation the threat has elicited, particularly in the South and Middle Belt, many journeymen activists have tried to associate with the humiliating US campaign against Nigeria. Labour Party chieftain and former presidential candidate, Pat Utomi, swore he also lobbied the US against Nigeria and the killings. A US-based military veteran group associated with the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) has also claimed responsibility for stirring the US into bellicosity, and they have published one of the letters they wrote to that effect. A faction of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) last week chose the awkward moment of these times to petition the US Embassy in Nigeria against the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) which they accuse of fostering dictatorship. And the African Democratic Congress (ADC) has hemmed and hawed over the Trump threats, suggesting that while they fear the consequences of an attack, they nevertheless blame the government of the day for getting the country into this pretty pass.

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Only a few people among those brave enough to voice their feelings have warned that US intervention in Nigeria, despite the genuineness of the cause of the Middle Belters, is not and cannot be altruistic. They judge US interventions, some of which were undertaken for supposedly good reasons, to be bloody, disruptive, retrogressive, indiscriminate, and generally inimical to the victim country. Nigeria would not be an exception should the US carry out its plan. In any case, they queried, who would monitor and punish US racism, uncontrollable gun violence, and bureaucratic and institutional contradictions? The few Nigerians who chose not to be enthusiastic about the invasion threat argue that the US is surreptitiously interested in economic exploitation of Nigeria as well as checkmating Chinese and BRICS influence. They suggest further that there are many more countries on the list of Countries of Particular Concern who are not being threatened with invasion because they are either in the US orbit already, such as some Middle Eastern countries, or are Asian countries who have either sucked it up to Mr Trump or are too powerful to be messed with.

What is clear in all the analyses of the terror war in Nigeria is that massacres are taking place in various parts of the North, including in Christian and Muslim towns, with casualties almost evenly spread. Though the situation has improved considerably, the failure to put an end to the killings quickly has exposed Nigeria to unsavoury threats and categorisation. It is embarrassing that the country may now obviously redouble its effort to curb terrorism on account of the US threat. But whether that will be enough to cause the warmongering American president to stand down remains to be seen. There are reports of backchannel diplomatic engagements ongoing; however, the Nigerian authorities must be mindful of the fact that they represent 230 million people, the largest and preeminent concentration of Black people in the world. In the final analysis, despite their many failings, including in the battle against massacres and genocides, Nigerians are mindful that whatever they, they represent the world’s Black people, and will prefer to die on their feet than on their knees. This is not sentiment. They know that Mr Trump has undisguised contempt for Blacks inside and outside the US, regards Nigeria as a disgrace, and remains a bully without any moral compass. Yes, they recognise the enormous military power of the US, but they also know that that power had repeatedly come unstuck in the face of war with Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq among others.

While America may be rightly concerned about the killings in the Christian areas of Nigeria, it imperiously and suspiciously feigns ignorance of the killings in Muslim states. If Mr Trump truly wants to help, he knows what to do, and everyone in Nigeria, including those who are foolishly egging him on, knows what he should do. But the path he has chosen, if executed, may tragically complicate the war on terror for Nigeria, and the country, if it survives the intervention, may never be the same again. As many countries have shown in recent decades, no one can predict the course of a war, no to talk of how it ends. Everything is often open-ended. The past one week has been so frenetic that it is uncertain the country has ever felt this way before, with a threat of invasion looming over it. Mr Trump confesses himself to be evil and undeserving of heaven; but it is such a man that some groups in Nigeria have made their champion. He glamourises war and bloodshed, and has repeatedly connived at the mistreatment of Blacks and Hispanics, and sneered at international law, but some Christian leaders shrug their shoulders. For Mr Trump, might is right. Once such a man gets a foothold in Nigeria, there is no telling what the unscrupulous and rapacious politician and businessman will do.

Sadly, the combination of Fulani exceptionalism and religious prejudices in the North had long stunted government’s response to overt acts of bureaucratic unfairness, discrimination, and perversion of justice. It is hoped that rather than being defensive, the North will use this moment to recalibrate its culture, policies and jurisprudence. Might may be right for some powerful groups in Nigeria; but as events have shown, much more might can be imposed from outside. For years, Nigeria was unable to expose terror financiers and courageously deal with sponsors in high places. For years, it was unable to unite its people behind great national causes. And for years, lands had been forcibly seized by militias and cleansed of their original owners. Now, an unscrupulous outsider is calling Nigeria to question. If Nigeria wishes to oppress its minorities or those who are ethnically and religiously different, then it must strive amorally to be like the US, China, North Korea, India, Russia, et al, who are too strong to be questioned by outsiders or imposed upon. Until Nigeria acquires such muscles, it had better put its house in order. But even after restructuring the country and finding a political equilibrium by which to ensure stability and peace, it must still need to rearm, fund scientific research in missile (ballistic missiles) and anti-missile (interceptors) programmes, and establish itself as a continental military power. Its benevolent neutrality and schoolboy approach to power are unprofitable and continue to expose it to the kind of predatory and humiliating remarks by Mr Trump. Who ever thought the day would come when the most populous black nation on earth would be exposed as impotent and ridiculed, ridicule partly conjured by Nigerians destitute of national pride and identity?

Trump breathes threats against Nigeria, Oct 31

“Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter. I am hereby making Nigeria a ‘COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN’ — But that is the least of it. When Christians, or any such group, is slaughtered like is happening in Nigeria (3,100 versus 4,476 Worldwide), something must be done! I am asking Congressman Riley Moore, together with Chairman Tom Cole and the House Appropriations Committee, to immediately look into this matter, and report back to me. The United States cannot stand by while such atrocities are happening in Nigeria, and numerous other countries. We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian population around the world!”

Imperial, warmongering Trump on Truth Social, Nov 1

“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities. I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!”

Sen. Ted Cruz sponsors legislation against Nigeria, Nov 4

“I’ve been pushing legislation to designate Nigeria a CPC and to impose sanctions on the Nigerian officials responsible. Thank you to President Trump for your leadership in imposing the designation, and more broadly, for fighting to stop the murder of Christians in Nigeria. Now we should take the next step and hold Nigerian officials accountable. I intend to be very explicit about who they are in the coming days and weeks.”

November 9, 2025
Terrorism: Tinubu needs contingency plan on Mali, AES

There are no immediate indications that Mali, one of the three countries that last year exited ECOWAS and invited Russia as patron saint, is close to falling into the hands of the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist organisation operating in Mali and in some parts of West Africa. But it could. The JNIM, which is also operating in Burkina Faso and Kwara State, Nigeria, is already strangulating Mali’s capital city of Bamako by grounding the city and suffocating its fuel supply. It plans to weaken the city and the administration of Gen. Assimi Goita before launching a final attack to decapitate the government. If that should happen, President Tinubu, who is enmeshed in dispute with the United States, will have one more headache to pacify, probably a much bigger headache than the US challenge.

The Russian Africa Corps, to which Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger made recourse after sacking the French and Americans, has not been as effective as the Malians hoped. Mali’s relations with Algeria to the North has also been strained, leading to the abrogation last year of the 2015 Algiers Accord which initially kept insurgency at bay in those barren regions of Mali’s north. Turkey has tried to muscle in, supplying drones and other military equipment, but it has also begun to waver. With few or no friends left, and its fellow Alliance of Sahel States (AES) members encumbered by insurgencies of their own, Mali has become a sitting duck. Worse, it has become a turf where both Ukraine and Russia fight proxy wars, with Ukraine allegedly but indirectly supplying JNIM with drones and intelligence to tie down and deplete the Africa Corps.

The fuel blockade orchestrated by JNIM has lasted for weeks, and Bamako has seemed to be helpless to secure its fuel supply routes. Worse, Mali itself has become a fractured society, with ethnic tensions rife in the northern and central regions, while purges in the military and bureaucracy have become rampant as insurgency appears intractable. In short, Mali is teetering on the brink. While it may not necessarily fall in the near term, its survival is not guaranteed in the long run. The fall of Mali began quietly and insidiously, but is now gathering momentum. Should a worst-case scenario become a reality, it may engender a domino effect on the other two AES members and, apocalyptically, the larger sub-region. If nothing significant is done to curb the tilt towards catastrophe, the Arab Spring’s bloody torch may pass to West Africa as the new terrorism hub.

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This is where President Bola Tinubu comes in, despite his ordeal with the gung-ho and warmongering American president, Donald Trump. The job of visioning for West Africa and even securing it against jihadism lies squarely with the Nigerian president. With a population of about 230 million people and GDP of almost $188bn, only Nigeria can muster the will and the force to lead the effort to checkmate the jihadist rampage threatening the region. It won’t be easy, especially in light of the ill-advised exit from ECOWAS of the AES. That exit has not only isolated the three countries and their military juntas, it has made them considerably vulnerable to disintegration. President Tinubu must lead ECOWAS to prepare a contingency plan for the region. Yes, he needs to mind Mr Trump’s warmongering and evil relish as well as be prepared to be shaken by his menacing rhetoric; but notwithstanding, the ominous interplay of jihadist and political forces by the AES and the entire sub-region demand his attention. He desperately needs to multitask, and hopefully can find the small body of thinkers who can help him through this difficult and dangerous times.

As part of his anticipations, President Tinubu must prepare ECOWAS to deploy a powerful force if the situation deteriorates. After all, JNIM militants have found their way into Nigeria. They will do worse if they find the leeway to enact their brutality. In addition to the Mali challenge, which is perhaps the worst of the three AES states, President Tinubu must prepare for extraordinary upheavals in Burkina Faso and Niger. Jihadists are targeting the sub-region. Unfortunately, Nigeria cannot wish the caliphal danger away anymore than it can mollify the ghoulish relish in Mr Trump’s turbulent soul. Keeping Nigeria together, preparing for 2027 election, contending with those who never reconciled themselves to his 2023 victory, and now having to deal with the excitable and morally unmoored Mr Trump can task the ingenuity of the most gifted juggler. President Tinubu has to find the political dexterity to juggle these many iridescent balls in the air.

It is sad that the AES chose this perilous moment to engage in mindless escapism and isolationism, when the challenges of the region calls for cooperation and introspection. By now the rest of ECOWAS, a few of which had probably briefly toyed with also embracing the weakened Russia, must be disillusioned. Let President Tinubu harvest that disillusionment and rally the region behind his savvy plan to extricate West Africa from the jaws of jihadism. Mr Trump may not have shed enough blood to sate his narcissism, but West Africa has, on the other hand, haemorrhaged more than enough to fancy the bloody but ephemeral interventionist policies glamourised by a US administration seeking foreign adventures to mask his domestic troubles.

November 9, 2025
PDP faces appalling dilemma

What started as a trickle of ‘deserters’ in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has become an avalanche threatening to bury the leading opposition party. In the past few months, and especially in the past few weeks, the PDP has lost a number of states, scores of national lawmakers, and hundreds of state legislators. It in effect allowed a small wound to become gangrenous, thus making the frenzied exits enormously difficult to curb and the storm almost impossible to quieten. Alarmed that its elective convention was days away, the party desperately tried to keep up appearances and force a healing. Unfortunately, that abrasive effort to paper over the cracks has exposed it to a chasm far worse than it ever imagined in nearly three decades of existence.

Of all the complications it feared, it is doubtful whether it thought the courts could take the wind out of its sail as peremptorily as it did late last week when it dismissed its preconvention formalities, judging them a breach of the law. Justice James Omotosho of the Federal High Court in Abuja, deploying idiomatic jurisprudence, ruled that the PDP had failed to observe its own constitution in planning its convention. He warned that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) should not recognise the outcome. But the party remains defiant, however, citing a Supreme Court judgement enthroning party supremacy in such matters. In the next few days, when push comes to shove, and the litigants push their rights in the face of a stalling appellate court, it will be determined whether that defiance is not just braggadocio.

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The party will be wondering how it got to this pass. From the Olympian height of commanding about 31 states to a miserable and almost concessionary eight, it is not certain that the party would not imagine that more could still be taken from them, the biblical equivalence of ‘whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him’. The party should be cheerful that its case is not as hopeless as the African Democratic Congress (ADC), which so far cannot see the forest for the trees, or the Labour Party (LP), which is at the mercy of its infanticidal parents.

November 2, 2025
2027: dangerous fixation with peripherals

Even before last month’s coup stories began to circulate and fuel anxiety and speculations, Nigeria’s political elite have been far less circumspect or sanguine about their country’s politics. The coup stories will not go away quickly, as everyone now understands, but perhaps the elite would find the inspiration to begin recognising the dangers posed by their extreme focus on political peripherals. Here are a few reasons the elite must begin to slow down and be less schizoid about the nature and course of their politics. By focusing almost exclusively on the person of President Bola Tinubu, his idiosyncrasies and ethnicity, Nigeria’s ‘eternal’ fault lines become more reinforced than ameliorated. Something is clearly not right about the methods the elite have chosen to drive home their arguments or compete for relevance and office, a fact that probably explains why following the All Progressives Congress (APC) victory in 2023, there were calls for a coup d’etat, and later conspiratorial mass protests to reverse the gains of democracy and clip the unseen fingers helping the country to recalibrate and balance its politics away from ethnic and religious pivots. That political modus operandi may in fact explain why the coup stories of last month have lingered, and why many believe there was probably a plot after all.

Firstly, the United States president Donald Trump’s right-wing politics has paradoxically made the world less safe and many Western countries more insular and self-absorbed. Should Nigeria come to any mishap, it is unlikely to find succour anywhere or apologists who would argue the country’s case and help modulate the consequences of a potential fracture. The US is narrowing its borders against foreigners; the United Kingdom is inadvertently fuelling the rightist and extremist politics of the Reform Party’s Nigel Farage; and rightwing politics, with special focus on anti-immigration regulations, is taking over Europe, further constricting any relief for Nigerians. Reworking and fixing Nigeria is, therefore, the crying need of the moment. Unfortunately, the Nigerian elite are oblivious of the danger their peculiar form of politics has elicited.

Secondly, Nigeria is not too big to fail. The elite and their parliaments, not to talk of the drafters of Nigeria’s malleable constitution, may live in denial and suggest that national unity is inviolate and not subject to negotiation, but more has been said and done by the elite to degrade that tentative unity rather than nurture it. Apart from Somalia which has been unravelling for 24 years, Sudan has also become the poster child for political and governmental dysfunctionality. It first split into two, with South Sudan carved out of the country in 2011, then in April 2023, civil war broke out about four years after President Omar al-Bashir was toppled. The army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are now locked in a deadly struggle for the ravaged country, with some analysts fearing that Sudan could further split into east and west. The Sudanese tragedy is a study in elite recklessness which produced alienation of the less developed southern part, empowered the Janjaweed Arab militia (from which the RSF was birthed) to brutally pacify the Darfur region, and finally predisposed the country to further balkanisation.

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Sudan mirrors Nigeria in many ways. When the elite (doctors, health workers, lawyers) ignited protests on the streets of Khartoum, the al-Bashir presidency fell in a matter of months and was replaced by a civil-military leadership, which upon further protests fell apart until civil war broke out in 2023. At every election cycle in Nigeria, some powerful groups lose out. If that loss is not handled well, as it is happening now, and is compounded by economic hardship, discontent could fester to the point of incitement. Among the opposition, there has been little effort to appreciate the economic realignment and rejuvenation taking place, partly because the positive effects of the realignment have not been substantially felt among the poor. Massive economic rejuvenation is taking place amidst dramatic social and political realignments, but the opposition, given the nature of Nigerian politics, will de-emphasise progress and focus on the inconsistencies, contradictions, immiseration, and policy reversals of the administration. The fixation with peripherals is mainly due to the displacement of powerful members of the political elite, the controversiality of some of the government’s economic policies, and the panic that some of the policies might actually be effective thus leaving the opposition to muckrake and centre their attacks on the person and affiliations of the president.

There is a lot to fix about Nigeria; but it is dangerous to let the effort be inspired by self-centred and shortsighted politics. If the elite are not restrained by either the existential crises undermining peace and development in the continent or the unwelcoming racial and political atmosphere wafting over Europe, Asia and the Americas, centrifugal forces may take over. Opposition is essentially about policies, to a little extent about style, and certainly not about exploitation of ethnic and religious fault lines. The elite must be aware of the cataclysmic effects of deliberately promoting instability or letting divisions ossify in a country still susceptible to fracturing over small differences. Incendiary speeches, sponsorship of domestic revolts, and copycat embrace of the political dynamics unsettling other countries need to give way to responsible politics that take cognisance of the day after tomorrow. Whether the government and the opposition like to hear it or not, Nigeria’s survival is more threatened today than at any time in its history, partly because of the dangerous interplay of global forces.

November 2, 2025