Trump’s strikes, AJ’s accident and Nigeria’s bleeding reputation
In the last week, Nigeria has suffered some reputational bombardment, from US tomahawks landing in Sokoto and elsewhere to the tragic accident in which Anthony Joshua barely escaped death, but his friends unfortunately weren’t so lucky. Together, these incidents have stirred conversations about Nigeria and our national pride, or the lack thereof. It is old […]
In the last week, Nigeria has suffered some reputational bombardment, from US tomahawks landing in Sokoto and elsewhere to the tragic accident in which Anthony Joshua barely escaped death, but his friends unfortunately weren’t so lucky. Together, these incidents have stirred conversations about Nigeria and our national pride, or the lack thereof.
It is old news now, but the implications are still reverberating. In the cover of night on Christmas Day, the US President, Donald Trump, put on about a $30 million to $32 million firecracker display in North West Nigeria when the US military fired over a dozen tomahawk missiles targeting two terrorists’ camps in Sokoto State. Each one of these missiles cost $1.9-2 million. Most reports claim about 16 were fired, with at least three of them failing to reach the target.
As a Nigerian and lover of my compatriots, I am delighted that those who have denied us peace—terrorists and bandits—are being decimated and degraded. As a patriot, I am concerned that a foreign power is launching airstrikes into my country, and I am disheartened that we put ourselves in this position.
Whatever damage these strikes have done to the terrorists—and it is strange that a week later we are still unsure of the extent of this damage—Nigeria has incurred a proportional reputational harm. After all, the Nigerian military is the third strongest in Africa, behind Egypt and Algeria, and ahead of South Africa, according to the 2025 Global Firepower Ranking. It is ranked 31st in the world. Why then did we need the US to bombard the proliferating terrorists holding the country to ransom?
As Nigerians, we must all be ashamed that an unholy broth of politics, lack of political will, negligence, corruption, and systemic failures have put us in this predicament and left us with a spoon for a paddle to navigate. On the morning of the strikes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yusuf Tuggar, went on an interview blitz trying to control the narrative that Trump, in his typical fashion, had set off, like a rolling stone on steroids, when he claimed the strikes targeted groups killing Christians in proportions “never before seen in history” and presented the strikes as a Christmas gift.
One of the main claims of Amb. Tuggar was that Nigeria shared intelligence with the US that facilitated the strikes. If Nigeria had been acting efficiently on the intelligence it had been gathering on these groups, we wouldn’t have been in a situation where Trump would use strikes in Nigeria to deflect attention from the Epstein files, Gaza, inflation, and the increasing sharp political polarisation in the US, while at the same time appealing to his evangelical Christian support base by claiming to care for Nigerian Christians, when we know that is not really the case. Did Trump strike these terrorists because he cared about Nigerian Christians? That is very unlikely. First, no one can argue convincingly that Trump is that religious, and the US, no matter how much one wants to frame it, is not a Christian state. The First Amendment of the US Constitution expressly forbids it from being one. This is aside from this eagerness to throw the term genocide around, from Nigeria to South Africa, where claims of a “white genocide” failed to stick.
But this is about Nigeria. For a military that only weeks ago was launching air strikes to protect democracy in neighbouring Benin Republic, it is now one whose efficiency and competence are being questioned. Nigeria put itself in this position that allowed Trump and his loyalists to craft a false, or at best a skewed or exaggerated narrative which serves certain interests and harms our reputation. But reputations often become secondary when human lives are involved—and enough Nigerian lives have been lost already—and if the strikes did help achieve the aim of degrading the terrorists, then Nigerians would take that as a win.
The reality, however, is that a week later, we still don’t know if those strikes achieved their objectives. While Amb. Tuggar is working overtime, Safa-ing and Marwa-ing to patch up our tattered foreign image, the Nigerian military should have been sweeping into these locations to finish off the terrorists. While we have had reports of our military striking other targets, we are yet to see them mopping up those struck on Christmas Day.
Many of the successful air strikes we have launched previously have been operationally isolated. For them to be meaningful, there need to be coordinated ground operations to mop up the scattered terrorists. If that does not happen in this instance too—and this seems to be the case—this strike will not be any different from what Nigeria has done before, other than killing a few terrorists and embarrassing the Nigerian government.
I hope this is the first and last time a foreign power will launch any kind of strikes into our country because I hope my country tightens its belt over its pot belly and does what it needs to do with all the bloodthirsty maniacs from every part of the country.
While we are all trying to process this, the unfortunate accident involving the boxing champion, Anthony Joshua, presented yet another opportunity for some Nigerians to demarket the country. There was a willingness to ignore the fact that two young lives were obliterated in an instance and that there are families mourning and going through a hard time.
There is no gain in pretending that emergency care, or any kind of health care service in Nigeria, is optimal—the accident scene was chaotic, rowdy, and embarrassing for the country, but at the same time, it showed a willingness to help by Nigerians. This crowd surge unfortunately also presents an opportunity for more harm to be done to the victims and their loved ones. For instance, a few months ago when a course mate of mine died in a road crash, some shameless persons rushed to the accident scene only to steal his phone as he lay dead, preventing his family from learning of his death until the next day.
An accident like the one AJ was involved in, or even the one in Gombe that killed seven journalists, especially when cars are travelling at high speed, could have happened anywhere. US celebrities like Paul Walker died in a similar accident. Accidents happen, even in countries like Norway, Sweden, and Iceland, which have the highest road safety records in the world.
Unfortunately, Nigeria has not been committed to developing measures to improve road safety in the country. Speed limits are not maintained, speed limit signs are scarce and poorly maintained, as are the roads themselves. Where the world is moving towards road traffic cameras to enforce safe driving, our idea has remained primitive—mounting checkpoints that often create more havoc than sanity.
What is worse, though, is the scanty help resources available to accident victims. We still do not have a functional national emergency number that is widely known by Nigerians and that is efficiently responded to. We are lacking ambulances that will respond promptly to distress calls and provide life-saving care for victims on the scene while safely transporting them to functional and well-equipped hospitals.
The correlation between Trump’s strike and AJ’s accident is that both could have been prevented if we had learnt our lessons from previous incidents, and that both could be the opportunity to take definitive steps to address sectors that are crucial to our development as a country. Knowing Nigeria as I do, it is hard to imagine that any lessons would be learnt or that anything would change. Military operations will still be uncoordinated, allowing terrorists to flee and regroup, and our road safety records will scarcely improve after this one. Worse accidents have happened and nothing has changed. Nigeria would rather hemorrhage its reputation than bother to put in place functional systems that would help the country live up to its potential. That is the tragic reality of this week’s incidents. Somehow, I hope Nigeria proves me wrong.