1. Why on earth is Nigerian President Bola Tinubu subcontracting Nigerian
sovereignty to the United States?
2. When did Tinubu and his political and military advisers get the idea that
missile strikes alone (whether from air or sea) can defeat an indoctrinated and
determined insurgent militia?
I strongly suspect that this action is a strictly performative gesture aimed at
insinuating American military forces onto Nigerian territory as a prelude to
launching attacks on neighbouring Niger from where both United States and
French military personnel have been expelled in recent years.
The military regime in uranium-rich Niger, as is the case with its counterparts
in Burkina Faso and Mali, has pivoted towards China and Russia, and the United
States is keen to prevent a scenario where it is starved of Rare Earth Minerals
of which Niger potentially has large deposits.
But US interests lie not only in seeking a means of reversing Chinese and
Russian entrenchment in the Sahelian region, it also lies in Nigeria which has
substantial, though untapped, reserves in Rare Earth Elements.
Are you getting the picture?
The goal is gaining untrammelled access to the mineral resources of Nigeria and
its minerally-rich Sahelian neighbours.
It is not about "targeting" Islamic State because:
. The US (as was the case with previous powers such as Britain and Wilhelmine
Germany) has a history of using Islamic extremists both as proxies and
bogeymen.
. The US backed the Muslim Brotherhood against the secular socialist Arab
government of Egypt which was led by Gamal Abdel Nasser during the 1950s.
. It backed both domestic and foreign Mujahedeen in the anti-Soviet War in Afghanistan
from 1979. Both groups formed the basis of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
. It backed al-Qaeda groups against the anti-Zionist secular Arab nationalist
governments of Libya and Syria.
. It is presently backing the al-Qaeda-originated regime in Syria whose leader
Ahmed al-Sharaa (nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) was the deputy emir of
Islamic State in Iraq and the leader of the al-Nusra Front in Syria before it
was rebranded as Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
. Jolani had a 10 million dollar bounty on his head issued by the US State
Department scrapped in December 2024 just after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's
Ba'athist government.
It is not about "protecting" Christians:
. US President Trump whose statement on social media after he strikes referred
to the "slaughtering of Christians" plays up to the Christian
Nationalist crowd in the United States many of who are white identitarians with
little sympathy for black or brown people.
. Zionist Israel has in recent times destroyed Christian churches and artefacts
in Gaza and southern Lebanon with Trump failing to issue either a rebuke or a
protest to the Netanyahu government.
. HTS forces have murdered Christians in Syria, again with no rebuke or protest
emanating from the White House.
Therefore this is just another episode of the United States "manufacturing
consent", a duplicitous method of shaping public opinion via the mass
media.
Unfortunately the present leadership in Nigeria appear to be ignorant of the
aforementioned facts and analysis. Elements of Nigeria's leadership may also be
compromised by external forces.
How else does one explain the ceding of its sovereign powers to enable an
attack to be made on its own soil by a foreign power?
The point regarding the inability to defeat an insurgent army by unleashing
powerful missiles and bombs is worth reiterating.
The use by the US military in 2017 of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast
(AKA The Mother of All Bombs) in Afghanistan did nothing in the long run to
prevent its humiliating exit from that country in 2020.
It is worth reminding Nigeria's leaders that the longest war in America's
history, namely the near 20-year anti-insurgent campaign during its post 9/11
occupation of Afghanistan ended in abject failure.
It prompted the American scholar Norman Finklestein to opine the following:
If you ever feel
useless, remember it took twenty years, trillions of dollars and four US
Presidents to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
Insurgencies are difficult to defeat but it is a task which Nigeria can do if
it possessed a capable and united political leadership with a sound
counterinsurgency strategy that was ably executed by its armed forces.
The forces of Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) and Boko Haram can
only be defeated if Nigeria's armed forces have developed a specific
"national style" and a resulting "strategic culture"
related to dealing with insurgent forces in a low-intensity conflict.
It cannot rely on foreigners -including the well-armed but flawed United States-
to accomplish this.
But as mentioned above, the United States has no intention of defeating
jihadism. It is merely using Nigeria as a means to an end. That end is its
determination to preserve its global dominance; a task which, in line with the
Trump administration's National Security Strategy (NSS) document, is about
positioning America as a perpetual hegemon.
The NSS, a repurposed "Wolfowitz Doctrine" entails that the United
States must prevent the rise of competing powers such as China and Russia. And
one aspect of this is to seek to control access as much of the world's mineral
resources as it can - even at the cost of the destruction and exploitation of
other countries whether they are cast as "friends" or as
"enemies.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2025).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England. He has an interest in
geopolitics and history.
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