Donald Trump steps up military threats against Nigeria over attacks on Christians

In the days since Donald Trump first threatened military action in Nigeria over the jihadi attacks on Christians, the leaders of Africa’s most populous country — a long-standing American security partner — have reacted with confusion, outrage and dismay.

But one person was elated by the fact that someone was apparently finally taking notice: Reverend John Joseph Hayab, a Baptist minister from northern Nigeria.

“They’ve killed pastors, women and children. They’ve burnt churches and houses and displaced communities,” Hayab, chair of the Christian Association of Nigeria for northern states, said of the jihadis. “Concrete actions have never been taken against them and someone out there is watching and feeling concern.”

Trump’s broadside against Nigeria marked the latest twist in his mercurial, often bellicose approach to global affairs, from penalising South Africa over false claims of a genocide against white people to ordering a military build-up around Venezuela.

The US president, who last week designated Nigeria a “country of particular concern” over threats to religious freedom, has since instructed the military to prepare to go in “guns-a-blazing” if Nigeria did not do more to protect Christians, warning on Wednesday that there would “be hell to pay” if not.

Nigerians say Trump’s intervention — which follows months of growing agitation from congressional Republicans — misconstrues a complex security crisis and caricatures a multifaith country whose 230mn population is split approximately evenly between Christians and Muslims. Both are the targets of jihadis and the gangs fuelling violence in the country.

But his threats also follow deep failings by successive governments, including that of incumbent President Bola Tinubu, to not only control the spiralling violence but also prepare diplomatically for being in the crosshairs of the world’s most powerful man.

“Something is fundamentally broken,” Chidi Odinkalu, a professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, said of the violence and Nigeria’s inaction. “And anybody who doesn’t accept that is being dishonest.”

More than 20,000 people have been killed in attacks in the country since 2020, according to the conflict monitoring group Acled.

Some of this violence has a religious character, with mostly Muslim pastoralists clashing with Christian farmers in central Nigeria over land and water. There have also been incidents targeting predominantly Christian villages across northern Nigeria.

But most of the 12,000 attacks recorded by Acled since 2020 were not related to religious violence, and the Muslim-majority north bears the brunt of extremist violence.

Islamist group Boko Haram, which became infamous in 2014 after kidnapping 276 mostly Christian schoolgirls from the town of Chibok, attacks towns and villages indiscriminately — and has killed thousands of Muslims.

The government fiercely disputes the idea that the country is intolerant of Christians, with Tinubu’s spokesperson Daniel Bwala stressing that “insecurity is against all Nigerians, and we’re committed to fighting the insecurity that affects every citizen of Nigeria”.

Yet Tinubu, elected in 2023 partly on the back of a vow to tackle the violence, has had limited success cracking down on the perpetrators, and the president’s call earlier this year for “an immediate and comprehensive overhaul of national security strategies” amounted to little.

One Nigerian Catholic priest told a Catholic outlet that Trump was like “Moses, who from nowhere appeared at the palace of Pharaoh to set his people free”.

The country has also been hobbled by diplomatic dysfunction. Tinubu recalled the country’s entire ambassadorial core — including from Washington — after taking power and is yet to replace it more than two years later.

This has left the country ill-equipped to counteract campaigning by Trump allies, including Senator Ted Cruz and Chris Smith, chair of the House foreign affairs sub-committee on Africa, to have Nigeria redesignated as a country of particular concern. Trump first designated Nigeria as a CPC in 2020 towards the end of his first term, a move reversed by the Biden administration the following year.

“An absent envoy symbolises the failure of Nigeria’s elite to put competence and national interest first, thereby weakening Nigeria’s advocacy on the global stage,” said Cheta Nwanze, partner at Lagos-based consultancy SBM Intelligence, adding that the CPC designation was the “logical conclusion to the pervasive poor leadership and irresponsibility” of Nigeria’s ruling class.

Even if Nigerians are sceptical about the probability of US military action, at least in the foreseeable future, many are concerned at the precedent set by other US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, widely considered to be failures. Another fear was Trump’s accompanying threat to “immediately stop all aid and assistance” to the country — a step he also took towards South Africa.

China, Nigeria’s largest trading partner, said on Tuesday it “supports the Nigerian government” and “firmly opposes any country using religion and human rights as an excuse to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, and threatening other countries with sanctions and force”.

What Trump’s threats will mean for US-Nigeria relations is unclear. Jervin Naidoo, a political analyst at the Oxford Economics consultancy, said he suspected the pressure campaign was linked in part to Nigeria’s public refusal to take in deportees from the US, a demand to which several other African countries have agreed.

Analysts said Nigeria’s politicians could seek to propose a deal to appease the US president, including in areas such as deportations.

But one senior Nigerian politician, who has served in previous governments, said a silver lining could emerge if the US president’s belligerence “helps to shine a light on the inexcusably shoddy response to these mindless killings and gets the authorities to act more decisively”.

Nigeria’s political leadership needed to get a handle on protecting its citizens, said Nwanze. “No amount of marketing can offset the toxic liability of a state that refuses to prosecute its own powerful offenders.”