The tweet missile seesawed through the spines of allied nations. And the warhead it carried sagged the bones of the powerful in the Nigerian government. Sleepless nights in the Presidency and diplomatic circles in Nigeria and beyond quickly followed the growling heavyweight cyber announcement. For Nigeria’s plenteous traducers, many of them from one block of a country so flummoxed, the tweet was sweet to retweet.
It was a long-overdue adrenaline shot that a group of anti-Bola Tinubu fellas needed to move their limbs in euphoric ballroom dance. They believe that something bad was going to happen to the country they so much despise. They surged into a continual cotillion, hoping that suddenly power would change hands, and a new Sheriff would occupy Aso Rock Villa. What jocosity! The conclusion of the matter, however, is that a banal bomb threat from a distance so long can wake up a sleeping giant.
Five thousand miles away in Washington, DC, US President Donald Trump’s cryptic and creepy words came as a warning shot on his Truth Tweeter handle. A Fox News video report on violence in Nigeria titillated the American President’s furious idiolect: “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,” Trump wrote.
Wow! So, Yankees are coming ‘guns-a-blazing’ into Nigeria? And bombs will be dropped on a sovereign country that has no known beef with America? Well, that’s what Trump threatened. He promised to barge in with the US Marines to wipe off the terrorists who are killing Christians. “If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our cherished Christians!” As a patriotic Nigerian, a part of me agreed with the idea that focuses on wiping off the terrorists. These miscreants have put Nigeria through the hellhole for too long, and nobody is halting them as they hurt. The other part of me sensed ‘military occupation’, a disgusting and disguised form of colonisation that Nigeria broke its chains in 1960.
The terror thugs that anger Trump anger Nigerians, too. They sneaked in from the Sahel and are snuffing lives indiscriminately out of every shade of humanity. Families of the 37 worshippers at St Theresa Catholic Church in Madala, Niger State, are still mourning their loved ones bombed by Boko Haram on Christmas Day 2011. The Great Mosque of Kano got its own share of their mayhem from the same group in 2014 when 107 defenceless Muslim worshippers were killed. What about bomb blasts on soft target non-religious places in the Federal Capital Territory, such as the UN building, police headquarters, Nyanya motor park, THISDAY offices, where hundreds of Nigerians succumbed to the killing and cold hands of Islamic terrorists? These thugs, who are aided and abetted by Nigerians in powerful places and personalities with Brobdingnagian bags of stacked cash, are killing everybody.
This should also interest Trump. Many times and in times past, the loonies took their rampages even to the home of the then President, Mohammed Buhari, killing men and women; pillaging villages and hamlets; and sparing not their daggers and swords against the Muslims or Christians in the backyard of a retired general who was the sitting President. They are awkwardly audacious as the bandits carry out their mayhem with ease. On Buhari’s watch, many parts of the North became valleys of death. Despite the safety net provided by Buhari’s government to ‘repentant’ Boko Haram bandits and terrorists under Operation Safe Corridor, violence unleashed in the Northeast and Northwest intensified. The loonies are slaughtering everybody!
Just last month in Rome, President Bola Tinubu received Mr Massad Boulos, Senior Adviser to United States President Donald Trump on Arab and African Affairs. After the meeting, Boulos submitted this account: “People of all religions and of all tribes are dying, and it is very unfortunate, and we even know that Boko Haram and ISIS are killing more Muslims than Christians…. So, people are suffering from all sorts of backgrounds. This is not specifically targeted at one group or the other.” But who cares that the killers are killing not only Christians? Because they kill everybody, does that mean they should kill anybody? Must we fold our hands in timidity and allow these lunatics to keep killing because they kill Muslims too? Must any decent society accord free rein to this genocidal group of human beasts to murder the innocent at will? Have we lost our right to life and living because we don’t serve their god? That is what Trump is saying in many unspoken words. These killers are not Christians, Jews, traditional idol worshipers, or atheists. They are all Islamic terrorists. That is the point here.
If the killings don’t anger Nigerian leaders enough, they anger Trump. And they anger Nigerians. Deborah Yakubu was a 200-level Economics student at the Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto. She had reportedly posted a message in a class WhatsApp study group asking her classmates to stop sharing religious content and focus on academics. This led to accusations of blasphemy. She was lynched in broad daylight, roasted in a bonfire, as Muslim elites defended her killers. These are the stories and ugly events that were brought to the attention of the most powerful man in the world, who happened to be the US President.
Nigerians aren’t looking for perfection in government. They just desire a commonsense approach from our leaders regarding issues affecting them. There is no shred of commonsense in the way governments from Olusegun Obasanjo till now have handled wanton and senseless killings of Nigerians by trifling terror errors called Boko Haram, Al Qaida, or ISIS. With billions of dollars sunk into that security terrain, the results are flat-out disgraceful.
Between 2016 and 2022, security spending exceeded $19.9bn. In 2023, $3.2bn was the commitment and N1.65tn in 2024. Despite large allocations, spending effectiveness has been hampered by corruption, poor management, and political factors.
Under Buhari, those guys were shipped into Nigeria with all expenses paid by Nigerians. Under the late President was an unsavoury uptick in terror activities. Under Buhari, security worsened. Tinubu, as President, is now groping around in the dark, trying to revive a dying economy and preside over an unsafe terrain now under the grips of horsemen from the Sahel. The Nigerian Government must live up to its responsibility enshrined in section 14 (2)(b) of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution, which states that the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.
We thank Mr Trump for his love for Nigerian Christians. We have heard him. He has awakened a sleeping giant. Violence in Nigeria stems from complex socioeconomic factors rather than simple religious conflict. Clashes between farmers and herders are driven by resource scarcity and land competition, not religion alone. We will put our house in order. God has used Trump to wake up the Giant of Africa. But we decline the offer of a unilateral military strike on the terrorists’ terrain. We hope that the US will work with Nigeria to help clean up the evil debris that has built up over decades, as we build a stronger relationship between the two nations. Now, we hope that our President will fumigate our consulates around the world, especially Washington, DC, which has had no ambassadorial presence for the last two years. Diplomatic push toward the US must be in overdrive. We thank Mr Trump for the tweet and threat. We thank him for the reset that has woken up the sleeping giant.
#SMACKDOWN
X-@Folaojotweet
