As so often with Donald Trump it was a half-digested news item that prompted him to reach for his box of matches. After watching a segment on Fox News about attacks on Nigerian Christians, the US president took to Truth Social for one of his customary blasts. If Nigeria didn’t stop the killings, he warned, he would deploy the US military “guns-a-blazing” to get the job done. “If we attack, it will be fast, vicious and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians.”
Trump has got it wrong, or at best only half right in what one Nigerian commentator called a “scandalous oversimplification”. Nigeria’s problem is not that it fails to protect its Christians. It is that it fails to protect anyone of whatever faith — from criminal gangs, bandits and organised terror.
For nearly 20 years, successive Nigerian governments have failed to provide even minimum security — let alone job prospects or decent public education — in swaths of ungoverned territory. Many of these are in the predominantly Muslim north.
Into these lawless lands have rushed the forces of religious fundamentalism, kidnapping gangs and marauding herdsmen. Nigeria has at least three overlapping security crises, none of which explicitly targets Christians, but in which Christians — who make up half of the nearly 240mn population — are inevitably victims.
Kidnappers sometimes target Christian boarding schools, as happened when more than 300 children were seized from St Mary’s Catholic school in Niger state last week, believing they will fetch a good ransom. Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province, two Islamist groups that operate in the north, are happy to attack Christians, but also Muslims who do not share their medieval doctrines. Herdsmen, armed with AK-47s that poured out of Libya 15 years ago, are Muslim. Most of the farmers they attack are Christian. But their struggle is over land and pasture, not religion.
Christians and Muslims occupy senior positions in Nigeria’s state. Bola Tinubu, the president, is a Muslim; his wife is a Pentecostal Christian. The problem with Nigeria’s state is not that it is anti-Christian, but that it is outrageously incompetent. The security forces that have proved so ineffective at providing law and order are merely a reflection of other parts of government: they are riddled with corruption and ill prepared.
Much as Nigeria feels slighted by Trump’s characterisation of its overlapping crises, its pressing job is not to educate Washington, as it seems to believe. Its single urgent task is to seize the security crisis by the scruff of the neck and to bring it under control. This is a gargantuan task that entails nothing less than rebuilding the state, starting with the police and armed services.
Nigeria could, however, flip the tables on Trump. It has heard him. Now, it should ask, is the president prepared to help Nigeria tackle the problem through a multiyear plan, supported by Washington, to rebuild its law-enforcement apparatus?
In the long run, of course, even competent law enforcement will not end the crisis. A stronger economy with better prospects, more public services funded by taxes and the establishment of a secure investment environment are the best things the Nigerian government can provide.
To be fair, after years of disastrous drift, the ship of Nigeria’s economy may at last be turning around, providing the faintest glimmer of hope. Tinubu must now urgently set about building a competent state with security control over all its territory. In all probability, Trump’s attention will soon drift to something else. Nigeria’s must not.
