Trump's Tall Tales of Genocide in Nigeria: Political Hypocrisy Amidst Systemic Crisis

November unfolded with threats from Donald Trump to invade Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” in defence of “cherished Christians” whom he claimed were facing a genocide in the country. This immediately sparked discussions across the country and beyond. The story made the headlines of all major newspapers on Monday, November 3, all except one  — the Nation, owned by President Bola Tinubu. By the end of the week, Trump reiterated not only his insidious threats; he put Nigeria on the United States (of parts of North) America’s list of countries of particular concern (CPC) for the second time.

Senator Ted Cruz, who boasts that he has “fought for years to counter the slaughter and persecution of Christians in Nigeria,” introduced a bill for religious freedom and accountability in Nigeria two months earlier. According to him, jihadists have murdered 52,000 Nigerian Christians and destroyed 20,000 churches and institutions since 2009, the year the Boko Haram Salafi-Jihadist group took up arms against the Nigerian state. His supporting act in Congress, Riley M. Moore, also draws our attention to his even more fantastic allegation that “50,000 – 100,000 Christians have been murdered since 2009”, as part of an ongoing persecution of Christians in Nigeria”.

These claims would have been laughable in less tragic circumstances. There is no doubt that Nigeria has been bleeding, with tens of thousands of people killed by an array of non-state actors and the military. But the reality, which is rooted in a history of imperialist machinations and morbid manipulation of the national question by those in power or contending for power, is much more complex. And the figures put forward to justify allegations of genocide are at best conjectural.

The major source of these figures, as well as several other numbers bandied over the years, is the colourfully named “International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law” or InterSociety, for short, which is headed by Emeka Umeagbalasi. Emeka, who is based in Anambra State in the Southeastern zone of Nigeria, joined the Civil Liberties Organisation – Nigeria’s foremost civic rights organisation at the time – in 1994. This was within a year of the commencement of the six-year-long June 12 democratic revolution. He was a dogged street mobiliser in that state. However, he was also known to exaggerate a lot.

Apart from Emeka, the only other two members of the group’s board, since 2008 till date are his friend, Anayo Okoli, a journalist based in the same town as him, and his (i.e., Emeka’s) wife, Blessing Chidiebere Ohia-Umeagbalasi. Blessing’s expertise on the Intersociety’s website are: being a “respected mother, public secondary school teacher, and a devoted member of the Deeper Life Bible Church where she holds various evangelical leadership positions. We are also told that she has “been very supportive of her husband (Emeka Umeagbalasi) since the formation of the Intersociety in 2008 and in all his Rights and Democracy advocacy works or activities including cracking research and investigations” without the slightest insight into what expertise she has that equips her with a capacity for the “research” that could generate these figures.

The United States has refused to call the massacre of over 69,000 people in Gaza (including 3% of the Christian population in that blood-soaked strip of land, for what Trump’s supposed cherishing of Christians is worth) a genocide. This is despite the impeccable documentation of this genocide which shows that “Israel has killed or injured more than 10 per cent of Gaza’s population over the past 24 months”. Yet, it hurls accusations of genocide and threats of consequential invasion at a “shithole” country like Nigeria for some supposed “genocidal” killing of 52,000 Christians over a 16-year period based on the most spurious of “data” by the most questionable of “researchers”. There can be no more macabre definition of hypocrisy in high places.

A spectrum of responses

There have been a broad spectrum of responses in Nigeria. The federal government has denied any genocide, with a timidity that is the very opposite of the arrogance with which it addresses and represses critics in the country. Liberals and politicians from the traditional parties of the ruling class have been more concerned with calming the situation and averting the breakdown of the Nigerian state’s long-term strategic partnership with the United States. Some have pointed out that the US’ position is “purely driven by national interest” and “strategic calculation”, and put forward proposals for action. Despite differences in their views, they all accept the United States government’s self-ascribed authority as legitimate. And they also situate the people as objects than as subjects of history, even at this crucial time.

Middle-class perspectives have taken two broad lines. On one hand are nationalist narratives that present the tirades and threats of Trump as responses to what would appear to be progressive politics by the APC government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. These include Nigeria’s: support for a two-state solution in Palestine and condemning the carnage in Gaza; refusal to accept Venezuelans deported by the United States; and apparent deepening of ties with Russia and even more so China. Some also claim that the Dangote refinery threatens US economic interests as a local competitor, even though Nigeria has mostly imported fuel from Europe, not the United States. On the other hand, the hypocrisy of President Tinubu and the ruling APC party has been highlighted, and used, in some instance, to justify a basis for Trump’s assertion. They have pointed out that an APC delegation met with John Kerry and other top officials of the United States to report an alleged Christian genocide in Nigeria in 2014. Also, in a 2014 tweet the current president had said “the slaughtering of Christian worshippers is strongly condemnable. It calls to question the competence of Jonathan to protect Nigerians”. 

The dominant perspective on the left is that the United States’ concern is much more profane than celestial. Trump’s aim, as Bangura argues for example, is to bully Nigeria into accessing its rich mineral resources for “the supply chains of US hi-tech companies and defence industries.” Others argue that “targets and victims of bloodthirsty jihadists”, herders or bandits, “have nothing to lose but their cruel chains of bloodbaths”. These include some activists in the Middle Belt, where armed herders, bandits and jihadi insurgents have killed thousands of members of minority ethnic groups in this region, most of whom are Christians. However, jihadi insurgents – Boko Haram and its various offshoots – have been more active in the Northeastern region, where most of their victims have equally been Muslims. Omoyele Sowore, National Chair of the revolutionary African Action Congress (AAC) pointed out that while the threat to launch a military action “may sound appealing to some…history has shown this to be perilous”.

Internationally, China has declared its support for Nigeria, saying the country’s state “leads its people on the development path suited to its national conditions”, and warning the United States government against interference. It underscored its taking this position due to what it described as a comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries. The European Union (EU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have also thrown their weight behind Nigeria, for what it’s worth, urging respect for its sovereignty. Closer to home, though, the Republic of Chad shut its borders with Nigeria, with immediate effect, over the US threats.   

Hands Off Nigeria!

Jeffrey Sachs underscored the political hypocrisy of Trump and the United States in playing the “moral symbolism” card of Christian genocide. He adds that this mirrors the humanitarian narrative of the post-Cold War Western imperialism. But this line of politics goes even deeper for us. Britain bombarded Lagos in 1851, ostensibly to stop the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A decade later, it annexed Lagos, beginning the period of formal colonialism, using the same lame excuse. In less than two months after the annexation, the colonial state established a police force and, soon after, a prison. Hospitals and schools would come only much later.

The hypocritical and brutish process of colonisation did not end with that. Divide and rule was a pivotal strategy of conquest. They recruited Muslims from the north into a Hausa constabulary to police Lagos and its environs in the West. Meanwhile, missionaries encouraged ethnic minorities in the north, especially in the Middle Belt region, who felt suffocated by the Emirate system expanding after the 19th-century Jihad in that region, to join the church, and they joined in droves. The religious divide, so to speak, became bound with ethnicity, geography and politics in what would become a very complex national question.

Twelve years ago, as Boko Haram waxed strong, I wrote an article for the Socialism and Democracy journal titled: “Limits of the Game of Masks; Class, Ethno-religious Identities and the Rise of Salafi-Jihadism in Northern Nigeria”. It looked at how the manipulation of religious and ethnic identities had developed in the country with the evolution of the global order – social, economic, geo-political, and environmental - into an incendiary situation, which was to get worse, as it has turned out. Donald Trump and his ilk in the United States have joined the masquerade ball with claims of genocide as their masks.

We must reject the reduction of the bloodletting to unfounded genocidal claims, and tear the masks off their faces. Working-class people in Nigeria must hold the Nigerian state responsible for the generalised state of insecurity, without any illusion in salvation from the United States. At the root of the problem is the systemic crisis of the exploitative system of capitalism which has engendered poverty mass unemployment, climate change, and social anomie.  We must stand firm against Yankee imperialism under any guise in Nigeria and across the world, and address the problem at its root.