If America’s guns are poised to cross the Atlantic, let us first be clear about the illness they seek to treat. Donald Trump’s thunderous ultimatum— “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘ guns-a-blazing ,’_to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” he said. “I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians” —lands like a lit fuse on a dry savannah. The flash is frightening; the real danger, however, is not foreign ordinance but domestic rot.
This is the upside down truth of our moment: external force can quell the sounds of gunfire, but it cannot pluck the thorns of treachery embedded in the crown of governance. To applaud the arrival of foreign soldiers without first naming the patrons of violence at home is to celebrate the wrong victory. Nigeria’s problem is not a deficit of weaponry or intelligence; it is a surplus of complicity.
We boast institutions—NSA, DIA, DSS—whose very letters should be talismans of safety. Yet these agencies, celebrated in press statements and budget lines, too often resemble statues in a courtyard: admired for their form, impotent in their purpose. The question is not whether our security architecture is capacious; it is whether those at the helm allow it to breathe. There are hands that clip the wings of warriors, palms that feed crumbs to spies while feasting on the buffet of blood that crisis yields.
Consider the economics of violence. Every massacre becomes a ledger entry that inflates budgets, justifies emergency decrees, and fattens shadow contracts. Where there is profit in panic, there will be investors in chaos. It is naïve to view banditry, insurgency, and ethnic clashes as spontaneous eruptions of lawlessness. They are, too often, manufactured weather—storms summoned by those who stand to sell the umbrellas. The actors in the bush are visible; the financiers in town wear anonymity like armor.
Foreign intervention carries a dual edge. On one side it carries a promise of immediate relief: precision strikes, intelligence-sharing, the disruption of terror networks. On the other side it magnifies the dangerous choreography of denial: leaders who have long romanced the death of citizens will point outward to deflect inward culpability. They will clap when drones hum, and then return to the business of politics as usual—profiting from the very instability they blame on outsiders. We must therefore ask: who benefits when the theatre of war is kept alive?
There is another, humbler truth that no missile can deliver: sovereignty is not merely the right to be left alone; it is the duty to protect. A nation that signs international covenants binds itself to the defense of its people. When that covenant is violated, the moral claim to unassailable sovereignty dissolves. Yet sovereignty stripped of moral content becomes a carnival mask—beautiful at a distance, grotesque close up. If the state negotiates with terror because it prefers the dividends of disorder to the discipline of justice, then external force may be the only blunt instrument left to pry open the door of accountability. But such force will never be the full remedy.
We must therefore turn our gaze from hypothetical foreign boots to the concrete boots within our own barracks. The Nigerian soldier who has served with distinction on peacekeeping missions and the intelligence officer who reads the maps of clandestine funding deserve more than being used as theater props. They deserve command that is free from political strings. Until the barracks are purified from the influence of politicians who traffic in blood, every external intervention will be a borrowed broom sweeping a dirty floor that will soon be filthy again.
Let us not be sentimental about truth: the sponsors of insurgency exist. They are not phantoms. They are politicians who profit from fear, businessmen who monetize insecurity, and officials who treat emergency powers as a business model. The assassination of governance is rarely accomplished with a single bullet; it is a sustained campaign of neglect, normalizing violence until it becomes a permanent condition. In the smell of smoke and the wail of mourning, contracts are signed and loyalties purchased.
What, then, is required of us? First, an unflinching audit of complicity—public inquiries that do not end in press releases but in prosecutions. Second, the restoration of institutional independence—security agencies that serve the constitution rather than the calendar of political advantage. Third, civic vigilance: a citizenry that refuses to be anesthetized by spectacles of foreign rescue while the local architects of suffering remain untouched.
If President Trump’s words are to be more than thunder, they must catalyze introspection rather than inducement to abdication. We should welcome any aid that returns the stolen breath to our people, but we must not allow it to become an excuse for our silence. Foreign soldiers can stop insurgents; only a transformed polity can stop the business of insurgency.
In the great proverbs of our land, there is a warning: you cannot pull a thorn from your foot with someone else’s mouth. Nigeria must extract the thorn of betrayal itself—or forever be trailed by the limp of dependency. If we allow external might to do the cleansing while we bury the corrupt in the comfort of impunity, then we will have exchanged one master for another.
The day Nigeria’s leaders choose the sanctity of life over the sanctimony of power, the drums of foreign intervention can be silenced. Until then, we will trade the dignity of sovereignty for the convenience of external salvation—and the true enemies of the nation will continue to dine in palaces while we cry and paingully pay for funerals.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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