The Selective Outrage: Unmasking the Real Agenda Behind Calls for U.S. Intervention in Nigeria
The recent U.S. military strike in Nigeria, targeting a high-profile terrorist figure in the northwestern state of Sokoto, was a significant geopolitical event. It represented a direct foreign intervention in Nigeria’s complex and protracted security crisis, a move long advocated by a vocal contingent both within and outside the country. Logically, one would expect those who had campaigned most vociferously and ferociously for such an intervention to be celebrating. This, after all, was the tangible, kinetic action they had demanded. Yet, as Nigerian columnist Simon Kolawole astutely observed, the reaction from many of these quarters has been surprisingly deflated, even critical. Their dissatisfaction, rooted in the strike’s location—Sokoto, a historically Muslim-majority area—versus a region like the ethnically and religiously mixed Benue, unveils a profound and disturbing truth. It suggests that for a significant segment of this campaign, the stated goal of combating terrorism was a façade. The real, unspoken agenda was not to fight terror wherever it exists, but to weaponize foreign power to validate a specific, sectarian narrative: that Nigeria’s violence is a one-sided persecution of Christians, and that justice equates to the targeting of Muslims in Christian-majority areas.
For years, a powerful narrative has been propagated internationally, painting Nigeria’s multifaceted security collapse in starkly binary terms. This narrative asserts that the country is witnessing a systematic, religiously-motivated genocide against Christians, while glossing over the devastating toll on Muslim communities. This story is not without some basis in harrowing reality: the attacks by armed herdsmen in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, such as in Benue, Plateau, and Taraba states, have been particularly savage, often framed along farmer-herder lines that carry heavy ethno-religious undertones. Christian communities in these areas have suffered immensely, and the perception of a lukewarm or compromised federal response has fueled deep-seated grievance and fear. From this fertile ground of legitimate anguish, however, a more cynical and dangerous project has grown: the effort to wholly redefine Nigeria’s crises exclusively through this sectarian lens, erasing all other dimensions.
The campaigns for international intervention, often led by diaspora groups and amplified by certain media and political allies abroad, have been built upon this singular narrative. The call was not simply for “help against terrorism”; it was specifically for help against “the persecution of Christians.” This framing deliberately sidelined the fact that the single most deadly terrorist group in Nigeria—Boko Haram and its Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) splinter—has killed far more Muslims than Christians, viewing mainstream Muslims as apostates. It ignored the banditry in the Northwest, in states like Zamfara, Katsina, and indeed Sokoto, which, while having complex origins in economics, climate change, and failed governance, results in the kidnapping and slaughtering of predominantly Muslim populations. By focusing solely on the violence in the Middle Belt and attributing it solely to religious animus, these campaigners constructed a morally simple, media-friendly story designed to trigger Western interventionist reflexes, which are often more sensitive to narratives of religious persecution.
Therefore, the U.S. strike in Sokoto was a geopolitical event that crashed into this carefully constructed narrative. It was an operation against a terrorist threat in a Muslim-majority region, undertaken in cooperation (tacit or explicit) with the Nigerian state. This action contradicted the core tenets of the campaigners’ worldview. If the U.S. was intervening against a terrorist in Sokoto, it meant America acknowledged that terrorism in Nigeria was not a monolith targeting only one group. It legitimized the Nigerian government’s broader security claims and complicated the clean, martyrdom narrative. For those whose primary goal was to secure validation for the “Christian genocide” thesis, a strike in Sokoto was worse than no strike at all—it was an inconvenient truth delivered via Hellfire missile.
Kolawole’s sharp insight into their deflation is crucial. Their unhappiness that the strike was not in Benue reveals that their interest was never in the degradation of terrorist networks per se, but in the performance of a specific kind of justice: one that targets the “other” side in their sectarian map of Nigeria. In their desired script, a U.S. drone strike in a Middle Belt village, purportedly targeting a militant herdsman camp, would have been a triumphant vindication. It would have broadcast to the world that their narrative was correct, that the victims were exclusively one faith, and that the perpetrators were exclusively of another. It would have internationalized Nigeria’s internal conflicts along explicitly religious lines, a dangerous escalation that could ignite even wider conflagration.
This leads to the most chilling part of Kolawole’s commentary: the suggestion that this camp might now compile lists of individuals and addresses in Christian-majority areas for the U.S. mission to target. This is not mere hyperbole. It is the logical endpoint of a mindset that has replaced counter-terrorism with vendetta, and justice with sectarian score-settling. It transforms a call for international assistance into a bid to outsource a witch-hunt, using the world’s most powerful military as a tool for communal retaliation. Such an action would not only be morally grotesque but would catastrophically escalate tensions, potentially turning mixed communities into blood-soaked battlegrounds marked by foreign ordnance.
The tragedy in all this is that it hijacks and exploits genuine suffering. There are real victims in Benue and across the Middle Belt who deserve justice, security, and a government that protects all citizens equally. Their pain is real and their cries for help are legitimate. However, their plight is cynically used as a prop in a broader project that ultimately serves neither peace nor justice. This project thrives on the erosion of a common Nigerian identity, insisting on a divided nation where security is a zero-sum game. By demanding that U.S. power be applied selectively based on religion, these campaigners advocate for a path that leads only to further fragmentation and endless cycles of violence.
The deflated response to the Sokoto strike is, in a perverse way, a moment of clarity. It strips away the humanitarian pretense and reveals the sectarian engine underneath. It shows that for some, the goal was never to end terror, but to direct it. Nigeria’s path forward cannot be built on such a foundation. True security will come not from foreign powers taking sides in imagined holy wars, but from internal resolve to address the universal drivers of conflict—poverty, corruption, weak institutions, and access to justice—while protecting every citizen, of every faith, equally. The silence from the cheerleaders after Sokoto speaks volumes; it tells us that their fight was never for Nigeria, but for a narrative. And narratives, as we have seen, can be more dangerous than bombs.
