The President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is known for peddling conspiracy theories. Trump has promoted conspiracy theories against virtually any groups of people imaginable: countries, races, religions, ethnicities, genders, immigrants, scientists, etc. His 2016 run for president was built on the back of his prominent role in promoting the false claim that President Obama was born in Kenya, and, therefore, ineligible to be U.S president.
Worse than pushing conspiracies, Trump has taken presidential action or initiated government polices purely based on false claims promoted by himself or his allies. During his first term, for example, he mobilised supporters and repeatedly pressured state election officials, Republican politicians, and even his own vice president to find ways of overturning the 2020 election in his favour. Externally, in February this year, Trump issued an executive order cutting U.S development assistance to South Arica and offering fast-track refugee status to White South Africans purely on the basis of the false claim that there is a state sponsored genocide against white South African farmers and dispossession of their lands.
This is a useful case study for Nigeria, where in just about a month, similar accusations of a “Christian genocide” enabled by government if not sponsored by it, has rapidly escalated into American government policy. Over the weekend, President Trump designated Nigeria as a “Country of Concern” on religious freedom and threatened possible military action in Nigeria to “protect Christians”. Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio has endorsed and praised those moves by his principal, indicating that they are now State Department policy. How did we get to this point so quickly and so dangerously without any direct engagements between the governments of Nigeria and that of the United states, as anyone would expect?
The ferocious speed with which this issue has moved from social media posts by a handful of seemingly unconnected individuals to American government policies with very serious and unpredictable consequences for Nigeria is alarming, but still less so than the so far tepid, cavalier, and uncoordinated response of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his government. This is why South Africa is a valuable case study for Nigeria. Both are leading African nations. Both are also fringe U.S allies, who have nevertheless taken a principled stance against how Israel, a key U.S ally, has executed its war in Gaza, although South Africa’s position on that is incomparably more consequential. Both have been accused by Trump and his officials of committing state sponsored “genocide” against white South Africans and Christians, respectively. But the ways the two countries have responded could not be more different.
In South Africa, almost the entire society rejected the accusations of conducting or enabling white genocide in their country by Trump and his officials. Mainstream media and civil society organisations produced news stories and research data on crime in South Africa that emphatically refuted the U.S. claims. AgriSA, the country’s largest association of commercial farmers — a cohort that remains predominantly white — publicly disagreed with the claims. Christian churches warned against misleading narratives and condemned the preferential offer
of refugee status for only white South Africans as racist and divisive. Many white South Africans also publicly sided with the mainstream South African position of “no genocide”.
Above all, the opposition parties closed ranks with the government which then mounted a sustained communication and diplomatic campaign that culminated with the visit of the South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa to the White House in May. Early on, Ramaphosa forcefully denied any such charges against his country, condemned Trump’s racialised refugee policy, and insisted that violent crimes affect all South Africans. He and prominent members of his cabinet stressed this points to South Africans and the world in several public appearances, not just on social media, as his government all worked to mobilise public opinion in the same direction of “There is just no genocide in South Africa”, as Ramaphosa himself crisply put it. And when at the White House Trump confronted Ramaphosa with videos (of largely doctored Congolese dead bodies), the latter coolly but firmly rejected them as unfounded fake news.
In contrast, the Tinubu government has so far shown no more than bored interest. The President himself has not personally addressed Nigerians on an issue of such national security magnitude, other than a single social media post just two days ago. His National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu has not uttered a single word on an issue that relates directly to his office. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Yusuf Tugga has issued just a single statement on this issue, and even that through his ministry’s spokesperson. For an issue that has obvious political, diplomatic and reputational ramifications for Nigeria. not to mention serious economic implications in the case of sanctions, one would expect concerted and coordinated efforts by the presidency, the office of the national security, the ministries of foreign affairs and information to deal with it. But so far, only the Minister of Information and National Orientation has spoken out about five times on this issue, including to foreign media.
Therefore, my answer to the question of how we got to the dangerous point of receiving direct threats to our sovereignty from the U.S government is that President Tinubu underestimated the significance of this issue right from when it resurfaced under different global conditions a month ago. Accordingly, he has done almost nothing about it. Under U.S law, the “Country of Concern” designation entails reputational damage and diplomatic pressures, possible economic and security cooperation sanctions, as well as loss or reduction of development assistance for Nigeria. All of these are serious consequences, no doubt. But they pale in significance to the dangers of mutually destructive sectarian violence that the continuing rhetoric around “Christian genocide in Nigeria” could cause in a country with such delicate fault lines as ours.
In fact, the tone and toxicity of commentary on this issue on social media by Nigerians in recent weeks are dangerous enough by themselves. Even if the U.S doesn’t follow through with its threats against our sovereignty, the current toxicity in the public space over this issue directly constitutes a national security threat to Nigeria, and must be defused. And that does not mean we should downplay the threats because we still don’t know what exactly are their motivations, The dizzying pace and sequence of events on this issue in just under five weeks should compel President Tinubu into taking this matter seriously and acting accordingly.
As President, Tinubu is both Commander-in-Chief and Communicator-in-Chief, and there are a few issues where both roles would be more consequential for his presidency than this. Unfortunately, Tinubu has neither commanded nor communicated meaningfully to Nigerians and the world about what has evidently turned into the most serious governance challenge of his presidency yet, if not of the country altogether. Instead, Tinubu appears to have left the issue to lowly official and informal advisers like Daniel Bwala and Reno Omokri whose actions and comments so far, I need not repeat, have potentially made matters worse. The President needs to lead from the front on this to mobilise Nigerians and critical sections of the international community to defuse the rising situation both here at home and in Washington. It is a bit late, but not too late.
