Over the past year, a talking point about Nigeria has gradually gained a foothold in U.S. right-wing media. It spread even to relatively liberal spaces such as Real Time With Bill Maher, and has now become an official government policy. On Oct. 31, U.S. President Donald Trump instructed his cabinet to put the country in the category of “country of particular concern” and, if necessary, make plans for going in “guns-a-blazing.”
The ostensible reason: the Nigerian government’s terrible job in protecting “Christians” in its fight against bandits, terrorists, and other purveyors of insecurity.
It’s true that there has been violence against Christians in Nigeria—but they are not the only victims, nor would U.S. military intervention help. Nigeria, Africa’s largest democracy, is a multiethnic, multireligious country, with the northern part of the country mostly inhabited by Muslims and the southern part of the country mostly inhabited by Christians. But the delineation is not black and white. The middle belt, often characterized as part of the north, has a number of non-Muslim residents. In the south, Christians, Muslims, and traditional animist believers live side by side.
While the vast majority of Nigerian Muslims live peacefully with their neighbors, the country has battled a militant Muslim insurgency, Boko Haram, for at least a decade. The global #BringBackOurGirls campaign arose after the kidnapping of about 276 schoolgirls age 16-18 in April 2014 by Boko Haram militants in northeastern Nigeria. Boko Haram has been operating across Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and Mali since around 2002, but it has also carried out a number of insurgent attacks in northern Nigeria.
There are tensions between Muslims and Christians elsewhere in Nigeria, but these issues blur with the usual political divisions that that have bedeviled the country since independence. The mostly Muslim north enjoyed greater federal government power through the military for decades. (This issue stemmed from the north’s fear of elimination after the country’s first military coup, which mostly targeted northern politicians. Young northern men enlisted and eventually took over the military. This original sin is also part of Nigerian politics’ villain origin story.)
But in a country of nearly 240 million people originally pressed together by colonialism and often kept together by military force, painful tensions are inevitable—and religion is far from the only dividing line. Other violent groups in recent years have included the Bakassi Boys, a vigilante group that operated mainly in the southern part of the country; the Oodua People’s Congress (and lately Àmọ̀tẹ́kùn, its militant arm); and the Eastern Security Network, a militant group created to implement and enforce the aspirations of Nnamdi Kanu, the founder of the Indigenous People of Biafra, a separatist group whose aim is to cleave the eastern part of the country away from Nigeria.
The presence of oil in the Niger Delta, which forms the bulk of Nigeria’s foreign revenue, is a factor in many of these issues. Another driver is the hunger and political corruption that have been a hallmark of much of Nigeria’s public life. The “End SARS” protests of 2020—led by young Nigerians who sought to end police brutality, through which agencies of state typically oppressed and extorted young citizens—ended with a military attack on unarmed protesters that killed dozens. Even the election that brought President Bola Tinubu into power was not devoid of ethnic and other types of violence.
Another powerful driver of conflict is climate change —a topic, of course, that the Trump administration refuses to admit exists. For many years, the biggest causes of clashes between nomadic (and often armed) Fulani cattle herders and (usually unarmed) local farmers in the country’s middle belt have been the loss of grazing land due to the effects of climate change in the arid north and the incursion of these cattle into private farmland, which leads to violent clashes.
Religion, money, regional divisions, and volatile politics have produced a combustible situation—one that could turn into a roaring fire. U.S. action would add fuel to this conflagration, not quench it. There have been many instances of violence against Christian communities recently and through history—but also against moderate Muslims, who are as much of a threat to religious fanatics as Christian residents are. Understandably, some have cried out for help from abroad.
In Plateau state in the middle belt, for instance, the Rev. Ezekiel Dachomo has spoken out about many of the issues affecting his community, including a recent attack on Oct. 14 in Barkin Ladi area, where at least 13 people were killed, all Christians. He has appealed for international intervention, having failed to get the federal government to take the long-running security problems in the state seriously. (I served in the National Youth Service program in Plateau state back in 2005 and 2006 and personally witnessed clashes between local farmers and Fulani settlers.)
Followers of traditional religions haven’t been spared, either. In October, a notable case in Kwara state involved a female practitioner of Yorùbá traditional beliefs being harassed by Islamic clerics.
So yes, intolerance and extremism run deep in the country and often obscure other significant issues. And yes, self-inflicted PR wounds such as Nigerian soldiers taking photos in November 2023 with Zakir Naik (an Indian preacher banned from several countries for hate speech and alleged links to terrorism), and a national TV interview with a Hamas spokesperson in February 2024 where he defended the October 2023 attack on Israel, may give the impression of a country that doesn’t have its act together.
Still, none of it calls for an invasion.
What unites everyone today is a desire for good governance, better cost of living, and security. Two years ago, Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos state and an acclaimed economic reformer, was voted into office with a northerner as vice president. Although both were Muslims, many Christians voted for them, and a bitterly divided opposition split the vote.
Since that time, the president has given public assurances of economic transformation; commissioned massive public projects; and mostly stabilized the country’s currency, the naira. A new private oil refinery—controlled by Nigerians— has begun operating, and at the end of October, a tariff on foreign imports was instituted to keep local production viable. The citizens continue to await tangible returns from his mandate.
Nigerians are also wondering whether these changes, and Nigeria’s new assertions of economic independence, have anything to do with the United States’ fresh interest. Conspiracy theories abound, especially given Nigeria’s mineral reserves and China’s leveraging of rare earths against the United States.
The revocation—a week ago—of the visa of Wole Ṣóyínká, Africa’s first Nobel Prize winner in literature, has put many Nigerians on edge against U.S. policies, which seem increasingly driven by impulsiveness and, sometimes, racism. (Only South Africa’s white farmers seem free from Trump’s sweeping new immigration policies around the continent.)
Domestically, the political mood was already tense. About a week ago, the Nigerian president fired and replaced all the army chiefs on suspicion of a failed coup attempt, which took the country by surprise. There has been no coup in the country since the end of military rule in 1999.
There’s so much in the air for one to make an informed conclusion of what is going on. But the U.S. president is apparently confident that he understands this volatile and complex situation. He is being egged on by those already disgruntled by historical grievances, including his own defense secretary—or “secretary of war”—who is eager to prove himself in at least one winnable theater.
Some of these claims made it to the right-wing media sphere through social media, celebrity attentionto Trump circles, the evangelical ecosphere, Nigerians with an axe to grind with the Nigerian state, and a seeming desire in Washington for some distraction from the public’s upset about the U.S. role in the war in Gaza. (Maher repeated a common theme, blaming young Americans for protesting Gaza but not attacks on Nigerian Christians.).
The voices of Nigerian Christians and Muslims who have been victims of Boko Haram as well as other victims of violence (including illegal miners of mineral resources in the country) are being drowned by this intervention cloud for fear of adding to an already incendiary environment. And the conspiracy theories about the United States’ own interest in Nigeria’s instability continue to abound.
A U.S. military intervention will be disastrous. It would sow distrust, exacerbate divisions, fuel conspiracy theories, and would not end the insurgency in the northeast, which seems to thrive on the poverty in the area, illiteracy, access to illegal mining opportunities, a distrust of a central government, and links to larger jihadi networks.
Many prominent Nigerians have called for a type of national constitutional conference to properly negotiate the definition of the state, outside of the parameters foisted on it by the departing military in 1999. This would seem to solve a number of problems, including the call for self-determination of component parts. Washington’s own military adventures, from the Bay of Pigs to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, have been largely disastrous. A protracted U.S. action would only lead to refugees, waste, loss of lives, and a destabilization of the West African subregion.
If the Trump administration really cares, it could place sanctions on leaders fostering religious divisions, impound corrupt funds stashed abroad, and provide military cooperation with Nigeria’s leaders in a way that helps remove insurgency without victimizing citizens.
Nigeria’s government itself has much to do to regain the trust of its citizens. The alienation that so many groups feel as a result of years of neglect, corruption, and sometimes outright victimization is real and deep, and citizens have lost trust in the country’s military to keep them safe, especially in the north. Allowing violence to fester can only lead to more fragmentation. When the country’s own foundations of trust and unity are collapsing, the offers of even foreign demagogues to fill the gap may be tempting.
