By Abayomi Azikiwe
Federal Republic of Nigeria President Bola Tinubu has dismissed the statements by his United States counterpart’s administration that a deliberate campaign of persecution and killings of Christians is taking place.
Quite similar to the blatantly ridiculous lies earlier in 2025 that the Government of National Unity in the Republic of South Africa was carrying out a concerted genocidal onslaught against the Boers who were the dominant racial group during the apartheid era, President Donald Trump is consistently making outlandish claims to deflect attention away from the rapidly deteriorating situation in the U.S.
Nigeria has the largest population of any African state with more than an estimated 237 million people. The country is well-endowed with strategic natural resources including crude oil, natural gas, coal, iron ore, tin, columbite, limestone, gemstones, etc. It has major ports on the Atlantic Ocean and other areas of the country including Lagos, Tin Can Island, Calabar, Delta, Rivers, Port Harcourt and Onne.
Historically Nigeria has been a close ally of successive U.S. administrations both Democratic and Republican. As a former British colony, the country is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations along with other international organizations such as the African Union (AU), the United Nations, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
These attacks by the U.S. on the Nigerian government are part and parcel of the imperialist strategy of the administration. Trump has pressured the European Union (EU) member-states and the United Kingdom (UK) to raise their levels of military expenditures to 5% of their national budgets to help facilitate the war policies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
While traveling in the UK on a state visit during September, Trump claimed that $17 trillion has been collected by the U.S. from tariffs imposed on countries around the world. Yet, for over a month the federal government has been shut down due to purported concerns by the MAGA Republicans over the growing budget deficits in the U.S. Nonetheless, if the tariffs were reaping such liquidity the deficit would have been eliminated.
These notions of “Making America Great Again” are obviously delusional being based on false narratives related to the history of the U.S. The actual history of the U.S. illustrates that the origins of the country are based upon the forced removals, genocide and national oppression of the Indigenous people whose land was expropriated. While seizing and clearing the vast lands which today constitute the U.S., European settlers kidnapped millions of Africans from the continent to work without compensation for nearly 250 years.
Considering this sordid history, it is hypocritical for the Trump administration or any other U.S. regime to accuse Africans of targeting Christians for persecution absent any concrete proof. Millions of Native Americans, Africans, Mexicans and other oppressed people in the U.S. have died over the course of the last four centuries in North America.
Origins of Inter-regional Conflicts in Post-Independence Nigeria
The situation which the Trump administration and its allies are mischaracterizing in northern Nigeria is a direct outcome of the centuries of the Atlantic Slave Trade, British colonialism and world imperialism dominated by the U.S. since World War II. The legacy of western domination has divided, weakened and underdeveloped Nigeria and the entire African continent and its Diaspora scattered throughout the world.
Centuries of the Atlantic Slave Trade and classical colonialism continued the process of underdevelopment. Although Britain was designated by imperialism as the ruling power in the area which today is known as Nigeria, for many years prior to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, other European states such as Portugal were involved in the capturing and exploitation of African people in West Africa.
The evidence of the deep penetration of the Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa is revealed by the profound genetic ancestry of African Americans. A scholarly examination of this phenomenon says that:
“In a recent paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics entitled ‘Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas,’ Micheletti and colleagues detail the ‘overrepresentation’ of genetic lineages designated as Nigerian in the ancestry of Legacy African North Americans. Legacy African North Americans are US-born African North Americans with the heritage of approximately 16 generations of exposure to a history of enslavement and institutional racism in the United States. This socio-residential pattern has influenced their genetic ancestry as well as their epigenome. However, even after 401 years of residence in North America, this population remains primarily genetically African with modest gene flow from non-Africans.”
Subsequent to the Atlantic Slave Trade, British colonialism divided Nigeria and left a legacy of regionalism and sectarian strife. Gaining its independence in 1960, only six years later events would lead to a civil war largely centered in the southeast of the country where a secessionist war resulted in a million people being killed between 1967-1970.
Parallel to the civil war in Nigeria, a series of military coups hampered the capacity of the masses to build a democratic state. All of these historical events laid the groundwork for continuing western domination through neo-colonialism.
Encyclopedia Britannica, through an article on the history of British colonialism, noted:
“To prevent any united opposition to its authority, the British adopted a divide-and-rule policy, keeping Nigerian groups separate from one another as much as possible. Traditional authorities were co-opted in the north, where the spread of Western education by Christian missionaries was strongly resisted by Muslim leaders. In the south the British occasionally created a political hierarchy where there had been none before; in most cases they ruled through those who were most malleable, whether these people had held traditional positions of authority or not. Because Western education and Christianity spread rapidly in the south and not in the north, development was much slower in the north, and the growing disparity between north and south later caused political tensions.”
Even with the return of civilian rule in 1999, the country has experienced periodic regional conflicts. Insurgency movements and rebellions are still occurring in various regions of the South and North of the country.
With specific reference to northern Nigeria, the Boko Haram insurgency began violently in 2009, a decade after the resumption of multiparty bourgeois democratic rule. The origins of Boko Haram can be traced back to 2002 when the group was formed as an Islamist movement.
Since 2009 successive Nigerian governments have failed to quash Boko Haram. Since 2009, the group has engaged in attacks on the military, police, educational institutions and indeed some churches. Yet, the character of the conflict in the northeast region of Nigeria cannot be explained as a religious conflagration since the majority of people impacted are Muslims.
Boko Haram has splintered into two factions with these groupings taking on other names such as the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWOP). The atmosphere in many areas of the northeast has become lawless and insecure.
The insurgency in northeast Nigeria has spread to other regional states such as Niger, Cameroon and Chad. Efforts to form a regional taskforce to repel these rebel groupings have made gains. However, the role of ISWOP and Boko Haram has contributed to the atmosphere of insecurity of areas in West Africa including the Sahel.
Historically, these problems can be traced back to the disruptions caused by the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Berlin Conference (1884-1885), classical colonialism and modern-day neo-colonialism. The solutions to these problems will not be the result of a military intervention by U.S. imperialism.
U.S. Imperialism Seeks to Reconfigure Its Approach to World Domination
The Trump administration is pressuring fellow imperialist states within Europe while attempting to enhance its role in the Global South through false proclamations of resolving regional wars while aggravating existing tensions. Massive aid cuts from Washington are increasing rates of poverty, food deficits, declines in public health and massive unemployment.
Therefore, the MAGA Republican fabrications about genocide against whites in South Africa and Christians in northern Nigeria are designed to provide further rationales for destabilization campaigns and possible military interventions. The Nigerian government and the people of this vast West African state must unite to ward off the potential for national disintegration.
The “balkanization” of Africa is the direct outcome of enslavement, colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism. A unified continent under an anti-imperialist program is the only remedy to indirect western domination designed to continue the exploitation of African resources, land and labor.
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