“O deity, save me if you can; if not, just leave me as you met me”, Teacher Abel soliloquised when he learnt of President Trump’s threat to invade Nigeria to rid the country of Islamist terrorists. Abel is of southwest extraction. He used to teach in a primary school in Northern Nigeria. He had fled southwards when terrorists seized power.
The North used to be a melting pot of social and religious tendencies, even though Islam was the number one religion. But within the last two decades, especially with the introduction of Sharia Law in 2000, several extremist groups have reared their intolerant heads.
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Sharia
Many people felt that the introduction of Sharia by the then Zamfara State government under the leadership of Governor Ahmad Sani Yerima was a calculated move to undermine the federal government led by a Christian, Olusegun Obasanjo. In Nigeria, the more ridiculous a conspiracy theory looks, the more traction it gains. Today, 12 states of the North have adopted Sharia Law in defiance of the Constitution which declares Nigeria as a secular state.
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Twenty-five years on, we have graduated from localised terrorism to pan-Nigerian banditry on such an industrial scale that it has created its own war economy.
The dark trade of banditry was professionally honed by Libyan terrorists who set up training camps for sundry groups intent on vending their trade around the Sahel. Some Nigerian politicians have confessed that they invited the terrorists to Nigeria to help them conquer territory or protect their herds of cattle. The vandals were brought in as a tribal army in 2015 to help enthrone Muhammadu Buhari as president. After Buhari’s victory and his alleged refusal to live up to the promises he had made to them, they refused to return to their base and opted instead to remain in Nigeria and use their weapons to rob, kidnap, kill and generally terrorise Nigerians.
To compound the problem, local terror gangs intent on land grabbing took advantage of the situation and either mounted raids of their own or did so in collaboration with the foreign legion to destroy farmlands and take over villages in the fertile Middle Belt areas of the country. As I have pointed out in this column before, most of the victims of the heinous crimes committed in the Middle Belt are Christians. The area is 98 per cent Christian.
Trump
US President Donald Trump shook Nigerians awake last week when he threatened to come to the aid of Christians who he alleged were being decimated in an ongoing genocide in Nigeria.
“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,'” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
”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!” he said. Echoing rhetoric from right-wing lawmakers who depict Nigeria’s violent conflicts as attacks by radical Islamists on Christians, he warned the Nigerian government to move fast.
I wouldn’t take President Trump’s threat lightly if I was the Nigerian president.
Mayor Mike Arnold, founder of Arise Africa International was one of the prime sources of the genocide story. Having travelled extensively in Nigeria and interacted with several government operatives, he reported that there was a systematic war to rid northern Nigeria of Christians. According to him, the violence was driven by three forces:
(a) Radical Islamic conquest consisting of Armed Jihad groups, bolstered by foreign fighters from Libya/Sahel post-Arab Spring, intent on conquering and occupying territory
(b) Blood mineral extraction, with an annual $10 billion mineral loot enjoyed by illicit miners of gold, tin, and lithium, with an estimated 10 per cent applied to funding violence and corruption.
(c) Forceful redrawing of electoral map as militants resettle in overrun local government areas and electoral districts redrawn by force, to skew demographics, dismantling communities deemed inconvenient.
Arnold argues that the term “farmer-herder clashes” is cynical doublespeak, weaponising historical land disputes to mask jihadist conquest. According to him, “The puppets may change but the same forces pull the strings. A jihadi by any other name is just as deadly. Mincing words over labels appears to be intentional obfuscation.”
President Trump has apparently bought Arnold’s argument amplified by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. His reaction is the result of a build-up of reactions and social media exposés since the much publicised deadly attacks in Yelwata, Benue State, where scores of rural folk were slaughtered and their village burned down.
Turning Point
The Yelwata horror gave renewed life to an earlier deposition by the Catholic Bishop of Makurdi, Rt Rev Dr Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe on genocide in the Middle Belt. In an interview with ACI Africa, Bishop Anagbe said that since 2018, he has shut down some 17 parishes. He described the killings as part of a systematic campaign of territorial conquest and religious persecution that targets Christian communities in Nigeria’s Benue State.
A Nigerian activist, Charles Ogbu, lent his voice to Bishop Anagbe’s outcry: “The government has not prosecuted any known Fulani jihadist for any of these genocidal attacks. Most shocking is the fact that after similar attacks in Jos which left over 271 Christians dead, the leader of the Fulani jihadists called a press conference where he was shown in a video shared by Tvcnewsng, a television station owned by the president, giving conditions that must be met before they stop killing innocent people…”
There is enough blame to go round all those that have been in government in the last 16 years. How do we account for the official tardiness, complicity, impunity, control of territory by Jihadists, jail breaks by arrested terrorists, ransom negotiations by so-called clerics, expenditure of billions on “repentant terrorists” while their victims languish in IDP camps, refusal to operationalise state policing… The appearance of injustice cries to high heavens!
Collaboration
However, Trump’s threat to send troops to Nigeria if, in his judgement, the Nigerian government is tardy could be a double-edged sword even if it is true that, as Pete Hegseth, the US War Secretary, contends, “This is not farmer-herder conflict. This is not climate change. This is not resource competition. This is genocide.”
President Trump will do well to beam the laser of his wrath (and his messaging) on the problem, not on any particular tribe; otherwise, he will be bogged down fighting the wrong war.
It will be a win-win situation if the US works side by side with Nigeria, especially in the area of intel and logistics, to obliterate the scourge, rather than parachuting in, Rambo-style, like the god of Armageddon, and deploying doomsday wares which incinerate saints and sinners alike.
The US Africa Command (AFRICOM) has drawn up three escalatory options for President Trump — light, medium, and heavy. For me, the preferred course of action would be the light, partner-enabled option with the non-negotiable aim of totally wiping out all terrorists operating in Nigeria.
The least that an ailing patient expects when he takes his medicine as recommended is that it will not make his condition worse. Bless our forebears for their words of wisdom: “O deity, save me if you can; if not, just leave me as you met me.”
Wole Olaoye is a Public Relations consultant and veteran journalist. He can be reached on [email protected], Twitter: @wole_olaoye; Instagram: woleola2021
