Follow Us on Google
The recent U.S. airstrikes on Boko Haram and ISWAP enclaves in Sokoto were not merely a military operation. They were an indictment of hesitation, hypocrisy, and the dangerous romance Nigeria’s ruling class, particularly in the North, has sustained with terror under the guise of kinship.
For years, Nigeria has buried its dead while pampering its killers. Villages burn, churches collapse, worshippers are slaughtered, travellers are abducted, and schoolchildren vanish into forests, yet the national conversation remains trapped in euphemisms. Terrorists are called misguided brothers. Murderous bands are rebranded as repentant youths. Massacres are explained away as farmer–herder clashes, as though AK-47s sprout from maize stalks.
Then Donald Trump arrives, blunt, unapologetic, unburdened by Nigeria’s culture of excuses, and does what the Nigerian state has consistently refused to do: hit terrorists as terrorists, not as estranged relatives.
Before now, there were moralists who cried sovereignty while bandits were being coddled and paid off. Elites insisted dialogue, amnesty, and rehabilitation were superior to force. But the clarity of embarrassing explosions has provoked uncomfortable questions. If outsiders can identify and bomb terrorists, why can’t the Nigerian state? Or worse, why won’t it?
This hypocrisy lies at the heart of Nigeria’s tragedy. Northern political and religious elites have perfected a double speak. They condemn terrorism in one sleight but in practice, they negotiate with it. They attend peace meetings with men whose hands are still wet with blood, AK-47s still slung across their shoulders. They oppose decisive military action while the country burns, preferring to preach restraint, to the victims.
Entire communities in Southern Kaduna, Plateau, Benue, Niger, Zamfara, and across the Middle Belt have become open graveyards. Christians are slaughtered in churches. Even Muslims are not spared. Farmers are driven off ancestral lands. Each time, a familiar script follows: condemnations without consequences, panels without prosecutions, arrests without convictions.
Trump’s bombs did not consult panels. They did not ask whether the terrorists were “brothers.” They identified enemies and eliminated them.
For years, terror in Nigeria has enjoyed cultural immunity. Killers wrapped themselves in ethnicity and faith, and the state timidly looked away. This was never peacebuilding; it was national self-harm.
The Nigerian state has been unwilling to confront terror decisively because terror became politically useful. It was excused, instrumentalised, and sometimes quietly protected. Too many powerful interests benefited from chaos: budgets grew, security votes multiplied, accountability vanished into smoke.
American bombs have cut through this romance with “brother terrorists” and forced a brutal reckoning. You cannot cuddle killers and expect peace. You cannot negotiate with those who understand only violence and then act surprised when violence escalates. You cannot build a nation while defending the indefensible.
What makes the hypocrisy more grotesque is the selective outrage. When terrorists slaughter Nigerian civilians, the response is caution. When foreign forces strike terrorists, the response suddenly becomes philosophical, process, sovereignty, optics. The lives of Nigerians murdered in their sleep never inspired such depth.
Trump’s welcome bombing mission, crude as it may appear to delicate sensibilities, has done Nigeria an unintended favour. It stripped the mask. It revealed that the real divide is not North versus South, Muslim versus Christian, or farmer versus herder. It is between those who want terror defeated and those who have learned to live with it, profit from it, excuse it, and spiritualise it. A country cannot survive this duplicity.
Nigeria must choose. Terrorists are either enemies of the state or misunderstood relatives. They cannot be both. You cannot condemn them in Abuja and accommodate them in the forests. You cannot preach unity while tolerating mass murder. You cannot claim leadership while outsourcing courage.
Trump’s bombs will not save Nigeria. No foreign power can. But they have exposed Nigeria’s moral paralysis. They have reminded us that states exist to protect citizens, not pamper killers. And they have embarrassed a ruling elite that has grown comfortable watching the country burn, so long as the fire does not reach their living rooms.
The bombs have roared. The question is whether Nigeria will finally listen, or return to hugging arsonists while the house collapses.
There are moments in a nation’s life when leadership stops performing politics and starts performing duty. Nigeria, long trapped in the theatre of excuses, has stumbled, almost unexpectedly, into such a moment. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s decision to decisively designate the killers terrorising Nigeria as terrorists, and his tacit support for the U.S. airstrikes on Boko Haram and ISWAP camps, deserves recognition. It marks a rare rupture with the culture of cowardice that has defined Nigeria’s security response for over a decade.
For years, Nigeria danced around terror like a nervous host afraid to offend a violent guest. Armed groups rampaged, yet the state hesitated to name them. Terrorists were softened into bandits. Jihadists rebranded as misguided youths. Ethno-religious killers excused as victims of climate change or poverty.
In this fog of euphemisms, the Nigerian state abdicated its most basic responsibility: moral clarity.
Tinubu’s posture disrupts that tradition. By affirming the terrorist designation and aligning, however quietly, with Washington’s renewed muscular response, he has drawn a line many before him refused to draw. He has said, in effect: there are enemies of the Nigerian state, and we will stop pretending otherwise.
This is no small thing in a country where political survival has long depended on indulging dangerous hypocrisies, particularly in the North.
Let us speak plainly. Nigeria’s terror crisis did not metastasise because the state lacked intelligence or capacity. It grew because terror was negotiated with, romanticised, and ethnicised by powerful political and religious blocs.
Tinubu’s stance threatens this old consensus. That is why it is risky.
Supporting Trump’s bombing mission, even indirectly, cuts against years of carefully curated narratives about sovereignty and dialogue. It exposes the lie that decisive force was impossible. It reveals that the real obstacle was never strategy, but politics, specifically, fear of alienating indulgent voting blocs.
Tinubu knows this. He also knows the arithmetic of elections.
To endorse a hard line against terror when northern sentiment remains conflicted is to gamble with re-election prospects. It invites labels Nigeria’s political class deploy carelessly: anti-North, anti-Muslim, foreign puppet.
Yet leadership is not the art of permanent appeasement. At some point, the state must choose whether it exists to win elections or to survive.
For now, Tinubu has chosen survival.
His alignment signals a president willing to endure elite discomfort for national clarity. It marks a break from paralysis, where every security decision was filtered through appeasement. This is not warmongering. It is realism.
A state that cannot name its enemies cannot defeat them. A government that treats terrorists as negotiating partners forfeits moral authority. Tinubu’s designation restores that authority—at least in principle.
But this moment will collapse if it remains symbolic. Designations and airstrikes are beginnings, not conclusions. Nigeria’s security architecture remains compromised by corruption, poor coordination, and political interference. Moral clarity is the first weapon, not the last.
Consistency will be the test. The state must dismantle terror financing, prosecute collaborators, reform intelligence, and end the shameful habit of rewarding violence with amnesty.
For the first time in a long while, Nigeria has heard its president say, without euphemism, that killers are killers and terrorists are terrorists. If this resolve holds, Nigeria may yet rediscover the dignity of a state that takes itself seriously.
Yet there is a quieter danger Tinubu must confront: the indiscipline of his own megaphones.
A president speaks with policy; aides speak with noise. And noise erodes meaning.
Each time garrulous aides descend into uncouth rhetoric—insulting opposition figures or framing security choices as partisan triumphs—they sabotage the moral clarity of state action. They blur duty into vendetta.
This is perilous. A hard line against terror requires national legitimacy, not partisan bravado. When aides replace sobriety with swagger, they hand critics an easy weapon: the claim that this war is about politics, not protection.
The bombs have spoken, and must speak again. What remains is discipline, of action, of language, and of intent.
Nigeria has burned too long for this moment to be squandered by loose tongues while the house is still on fire.
NB: As the calendar turns, may the New Year gift us clearer vision, braver conversations. Here’s to a year of truth told plainly. Thank you for keeping faith with Men-o-pulse. Happy New Year!
