Tag: Donald Trump

After about eight weeks of threatening to bombard ISIS camps in Nigeria, in what the United States President Donald Trump said would be “powerful and deadly” strikes against groups Washington claims are affiliated with ISIL (ISIS) in Northwest Nigeria’s Sokoto State, the bombs finally dropped on Christmas Day, last year. It was a big relief to Nigerians who had anticipated that the terrorists would want to disrupt the end-of-year festivities by carrying out significant, perhaps never-to-be-forgotten deadly strikes on several communities, particularly in the volatile areas of the north. The airstrikes probably averted such disasters.

America had insisted it would rain the bombs on the heads of the terrorists since October 31, 2025, when it re-designated Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC). That it eventually carried out its threat in collaboration with the Federal Government is indeed heartwarming.

As far as the Americans are concerned, they had to drop the bombs in order to protect Christians who had been victims of several attacks by some Islamic fundamentalists. As Al Jazeera noted in a December 31, 2025, piece titled ‘How many countries has Trump bombed in 2025?’, the strikes were ‘’timed, analysts say, to appease Trump’s Christian supporters as Washington doubles down on a narrative of “saving” Nigerian Christians, although Nigerian authorities insist the strikes are not about any one religion.’’ The Federal Government admitted that there was a problem of insecurity, with victims cutting across faith.

I pitch my tent with the Nigerian government. This is not necessarily because I want to be patriotically correct but simply because that would seem to me to be the truth. Although Christians who had lost loved ones to these senseless attacks would not agree with this position (and I won’t blame them; as they say, “he who wears the shoe knows where it pinches’’). What I know as a fact is that it was only at the beginning of the insurgency that the attacks were targeted mainly at Christians. At that time, many Muslims felt unconcerned. But it was only a matter of time for the insurgents to turn even against fellow Muslims that they also see as infidels because they do not accept to practice Islam as they (fundamentalists) practice it.

So, what we have in Nigeria today is not necessarily targeted against Christians; it is not Christian genocide but general insecurity imposed on the country by ragamuffins who had imbibed the wrong side of Islam’s pristine doctrine. They had been fed with the wrong assumption that the more blood they spilled in the name of the religion, the more the number of virgins they would have the opportunity to disvirgin in heaven!

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Expectedly, some Nigerians have criticised the Federal Government over the American bombings. Interestingly, for such different folks, it was different strokes. There are those who felt the American bombings demeaned Nigeria’s sovereignty. I do not know what that is supposed to mean. The last time I checked, it is only the living that can talk of sovereignty; not the dead. So, we need to be alive first to be sovereign. Notwithstanding my reservation on their reason for the American intervention, those of them who may feel genuinely so concerned about our sovereignty should accept my sympathy.

Naturally, there are also perpetual critics who have sworn not to see anything good in the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration. These include, but not limited to people who had lived all their lives on fuel and forex subsidies that the Tinubu administration stopped, and would stop at nothing to blame the government even for things that are visibly positive or result-oriented. They are entitled to their opinion, although I owe them neither an apology nor sympathy.

What we have to realise is that countries, from time immemorial, have always had cause to come to one another’s assistance in times of distress. Even in modern times, no country can be an island unto itself; hence, the different bilateral or multilateral agreements between and among the different countries. There is nothing unusual in America lending a hand in our fight against terrorism. Good enough, the US and Nigeria have a long history of security collaboration through training and intelligence sharing. The only difference is that the Christmas strikes marked the first known kinetic US military action in Nigeria.

Apart from Nigeria, the Trump administration has struck in six other countries, this year. These include Venezuela, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Yemen and Iraq. In all, monitors say the US had carried out at least 111 strikes this year alone, and that this surpassed the number carried out under the George Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations combined.

Well, the lexical semantic differences notwithstanding, what matters most to me was that the December 25 air raids were eventually carried out successfully. And Trump has promised to drop more bombs should the need arise. The fact of the matter is that Nigeria has wasted too much time and resources fighting insurgents. If we have not been able to have a handle on the problem, what is wrong in the US or any other friendly country for that matter that has the superior fire power and other requirements coming to help us out?

One of the things that pain me on this matter is this idea of some people saying we should negotiate with the terrorists, kidnappers who demand ransom, bandits, etc; or assimilate them into the society after deradicalising them. We have tried all of that in the last 16 years since the insurgency started, to no avail. I am pained the more because Nigeria has thrown more than enough good money into the bad rubbish that these nonentities represent. So, I do not see any patriotic Nigerian calling for a slap on the wrist for them given the havoc they have wreaked on the country. These are resources we should have spent to brush up people who value western education.

Those who think it is ‘haram’ or forbidden to have western education should be free to live their lives like the caveman; but to want to hide under the guise of religion to coerce the rest of us to join them in the blissful ignorance is highly reprehensible. Even Saudi Arabia that is the birthplace of Islam and home to Mecca and Medina, its two holiest cities, making it the spiritual epicenter for Muslims worldwide, has since embraced western education and is indeed comfy in its relationship with the current world power, the United States of America, based on strategic mutual interests. So, where did these undesirable elements get their own brand of Islam?

As I said earlier, I am not interested in semantics. I am more interested in the overarching needless loss of lives perpetuated by these murderers in human skin. What I am saying is that it is immaterial whether it is Christians or Muslims that are being wantonly killed. Human lives are too precious to be wasted on the altar of some jaded religious beliefs or, in terms of the Boko Haram, to curtail the spread of western knowledge.

As a matter of fact, I do not think we have been told the full story of what these so-called insurgents want. For one, it is unthinkable that some people could be so daft to think they can turn Nigeria, a country whose population is a nearly even mix of Christians and Muslims, to an Islamic country. But that is what you have when people are just given birth to without adequate planning for how they would get education so they can be useful to themselves and the society at large.

And for the so-called Boko Haram, too, how can people who are making use of the very products of western education say that western education is useless? What of the bombs that they sometimes use? Even if we talk about the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that the insurgents sometimes deploy, despite their being “homemade”, are they entirely devoid of western education or civilisation?  What of the motorcycles and vehicles that they transport themselves and their weapons in? 

For me, Nigerians have the almighty God to thank for the December 25 airstrikes. I am delighted. Anyone who is not should put in his or her all to rein in the terrorists. All the kid’s glove treatment should be over by now for good. They have to impress it on the terrorists that they are on a wild goose chase if they ever thought they could convert Nigeria to a Muslim country. This is necessarily because no single religion has a monopoly of violence.

Similarly, those of them who have problem with western education are living in fools’ paradise if they ever thought they can bring down the rest of us to their caveman level. But we should no longer continue to tolerate the situation where some misguided elements would make us continue pouring water into a basket, which is what the trillions we have spent fighting terrorism is, instead of using it to uplift our people’s lives. Those who want to continue pouring libation on terrorism are free to do so. But Nigeria as a country should not continue to pick the bill. Those who lost out to fuel and forex subsidies should not be allowed to continue to feast on our common wealth again via ransoms and terrorism; the new faces of subsidy.

Once again, thank you, President Donald Trump. But don’t go too far away yet because we might still need you. The people we are fighting have been so brainwashed that they have become recalcitrant criminals who, like King Pharaoh, would rather prefer to perish rather than repent.

As they say, ‘a child who says his mother would not sleep should also not have the opportunity to doze’. The criminals and their sponsors should not be allowed to continue to unleash mayhem on innocent Nigerians, Christian or Muslim. People cannot be giving us sleepless nights and all we do is trying to differentiate between bandits and terrorists. To the extent that they all maim, steal, rape and kill, leaving tears and blood in their trail, they are all birds of the same feather.

Come to think of it; how can human beings with flesh and blood slaughter fellow human beings like cow and say they are fighting a just cause? I don’t think we should split hairs over whoever is coming to save us from such brutes.