Tafi Mhaka: Trump’s rhetoric could break Nigeria

In mid-November, a new wave of school abductions revealed how perilous parts of northern Nigeria have become for children of all faiths. On November 17, armed men raided Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State, killing a vice principal and abducting 25 students. The school was state-run, and the victims were Muslim girls. One escaped, and the remaining 24 were later rescued.

Days later, in the early hours of November 21, gunmen stormed St Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri, Niger State, abducting pupils and teachers. While some captives later escaped or were released, many remained missing into mid-December, leaving families in agonising uncertainty. Parents continue to wait without answers, their desperation and anguish hardening into anger as official assurances fade.

Taken together, these attacks do not reflect a campaign of religious persecution. They follow a pattern that has become increasingly familiar across northern Nigeria: mass kidnapping for ransom, striking opportunistically rather than along religious lines.

Trump’s remarks do more than misdiagnose this violence. They reimagine it. With a few lines of incendiary rhetoric, a country grappling with criminal insecurity and institutional collapse is recast as a front line in a civilisational struggle — a place where force, not reform, becomes the implied solution.

Once framed that way, Nigeria is no longer a society in need of protection and repair, but a battlefield-in-waiting.

That shift matters. When violence is described as religious war rather than organised crime, responsibility moves outwards, solutions become militarised, and foreign intervention begins to sound not reckless but righteous.

This pattern is hardly surprising.

American power has a habit of transforming complex foreign crises into apocalyptic moral dramas, and then acting on the story it has told itself.

Nonetheless, Nigerian church leaders, who know the terrain and the people intimately, reject Washington’s narrative. The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Kukah, a leading figure in Nigeria’s peacebuilding efforts, for example, cautioned against interpreting the violence as religious warfare, pointing instead to criminal motives and state failure.

Analysts concurred, emphasising that attacks fall on Christians and Muslims alike and often follow patterns of banditry and ransom rather than theology.

In Kebbi State, the victims were Muslim schoolgirls taken from a state-run boarding school. In Niger State, the targets were pupils and teachers at a Catholic mission school. Across Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kaduna, Niger and Plateau states, villages have been raided, farms abandoned and populations displaced.

This violence is driven primarily by profit-driven criminal violence rather than religious belief.

Chronic poverty, rural neglect and youth unemployment — with about 72 percent of rural Nigerians living in multidimensional poverty — fuel recruitment into criminal and armed networks.

True to Bishop Kukah’s analysis, ideology accounts for far less of this violence than predatory criminal behaviour and opportunism. What flourishes instead is organised crime in areas where the state barely functions. The principal threat now stems from armed “bandit” networks rather than a single ideologically driven insurgent movement.

Trump’s remarks do more than misdiagnose this violence. They reimagine it.

These criminal militias kidnap schoolchildren and commuters for ransom, rustle cattle, extort villages, attack highways and, according to multiple reports, increasingly tap into illegal mining economies, often operating from forest bases across the northwest.

At the same time, Nigeria is not confronting one armed threat but several. Across the northeast, Boko Haram and the ISIL (ISIS) affiliate in West Africa Province (ISWAP) remain active. In the northwest and north-central regions, armed bandit networks dominate. Further south, in the middle belt, militia violence feeds on land disputes and communal tensions.

The outcome has been mass displacement and civilian death on a devastating scale.

Amnesty International estimates that more than 10,000 civilians were killed in armed attacks in the two years after May 29, 2023, when President Bola Tinubu took office. Hundreds of villages have been destroyed or emptied. Thousands of children have abandoned school. In parts of the northwest, attacks are reported to occur weekly and, at times, even daily. More disturbingly, kidnapping now reaches highways and commuter routes in and around the capital, Abuja.

To treat this catastrophe as religious persecution is not just inaccurate but profoundly dangerous. This false framing transforms organised crime and state collapse into a myth of religious war, one that obscures causes and invites disastrous cures.

That is why language matters: it shapes intent and consequences.

When Washington defines domestic collapse as moral failure, Nigeria ceases to be seen as a country in need of reconstruction and starts to look like an international threat to be managed from outside.

Global attention shifts from strengthening local institutions towards employing financial leverage, coercive tools and military force.

Communities become talking points in US politics.

In the process, Nigerian citizens are reduced to abstractions rather than treated as living human beings with rights, and localities like Kebbi and Niger are recast as conflict zones instead of places in need of urgent repair.

When powerful states define a crisis, they begin shaping the outcome.

History offers no reassurance.

From Iraq to Libya, US-led interventions have ushered in untold devastation, leaving in their wake public institutions in ruins and wars without end.

Crucially, every military campaign promised peace and stability. Over time, every mission has killed thousands of civilians and left entire countries in ruins.

If US forces entered Nigeria, even in small numbers, foreign troops would quickly become magnets for attack and targets for retaliation, turning villages and forest communities into potential battlefields.

This violence is driven primarily by profit-driven criminal violence rather than religious belief.

Communities would be squeezed between bandits and foreign firepower, as criminal networks splinter, rebrand and adapt to the new battlefield.

This is the architecture of the US’s war cycle: an excuse first, force second, and civilian lives last.

Nigeria should not assume immunity from this great power logic, as countries do not become warzones overnight. They are first described as failures, then reframed as threats, before being treated as acceptable targets.

Nigeria’s institutional weakness is no accident. It is rooted in years of protecting assets instead of people, while neglecting policing, justice and basic services.

Colonial and post-colonial rule built systems for natural resource extraction rather than citizen protection. For many decades, often under military rule, securing oil revenue and political control mattered more than effective governance, public welfare or human security.

In the Niger Delta, this approach has meant environmental ruin, loss of livelihoods and institutional neglect — the true cost of protecting wealth before people.

Today, that systemic design persists: the state still defends assets more effectively than lives, while inequality and neglect have deepened civilian exposure.

Even so, Nigeria still has options.

In late November, Tinubu declared a nationwide security emergency, ordered the recruitment of 20,000 additional police officers as part of a broader expansion plan, redeployed VIP escorts to front-line duties, and authorised the deployment and expansion of DSS forest guards to hunt bandits and rebels.

Whether these moves produce results depends not on announcements but on enforcement and extensive reform.

Police and intelligence services must be strengthened and reoriented towards community protection, with proper oversight and resourcing, not merely expanded on paper.

Only about 15 percent of Nigerians say they trust the police, while many view officers as corrupt or violent, leaving communities fearful of both criminals and law enforcement.

Courts and financial regulators need the capacity to dismantle ransom and extortion networks as business systems, not only to chase their gunmen.

Regionally, Nigeria must push for serious cooperation on intelligence sharing, border control and joint operations, or armed groups will continue to move freely across borders with near-total impunity.

From Washington, Nigeria does not need troops or threats.

It requires support to rebuild the institutions that keep citizens safe: forensic capacity, actionable intelligence, training and diplomatic backing that strengthens Nigerian sovereignty instead of overriding it.

With about 61 percent of Nigerians reporting that they have felt unsafe in their communities in recent years, this must be a national wake-up call for Nigeria’s political class.

READ: Martin Jay: The ‘Russian threat’ narrative conceals Ukraine’s graft

Only a comprehensive solution can deliver peace and protect besieged communities in northern Nigeria.

Trump must de-escalate. Tinubu must act decisively.

What will determine Nigeria’s future is not foreign firepower, but whether its institutions are rebuilt to protect citizens rather than assets.