Valentine Obienyem
As I was returning from Mass this morning, I found myself reflecting on the recent pronouncement by the President of the United States concerning Nigeria. My only quarrel with his comment is the simplification that daily deaths in Nigeria are merely “Christians being killed.” What we witness in Nigeria is far more complex. In the process of attacking Christian communities, perpetrators, through collateral damage, kill many others. The truth is that Nigeria has become a vast killing field.
Ordinarily, when the president of one sovereign nation threatens military action against another, citizens of the threatened nation rise instinctively in patriotic defence of their sovereignty. In normal circumstances, I too would have stood firmly against the United States and stirred Nigerians with stories of noble resistance – recalling Leonidas at Thermopylae, where men chose annihilation over surrender, believing that honour and homeland were treasures worth the ultimate sacrifice.
However, in our case, almost everyone, quietly, including many within government, would rather whisper a prayer that such intervention should indeed come. It is a tragic paradox: a people who ought to rise in defence of their sovereignty now look outward for rescue, not from disloyalty, but from deep fatigue and disillusionment.
As I reflected on this strange reversal, I remembered an old tale of a broken realm where fear had so subdued the souls of men that the father whose innocent son had been shot before his eyes by the king merely complimented the monarch on his excellent archery; offenders bastinadoed by the royal order thanked His Majesty for keeping them in mind. Such was the abasement of a people who had learned to praise their own suffering, mistaking oppression for benevolence and cruelty for care.
As for those circulating President Tinubu’s letter insisting he is “doing enough,” shame on you. Doing enough, yet in Nigeria today people sleep with one eye open; communities are wiped out in silence; families search for loved ones who never return; and whole regions live under the shadow of fear. If this is what you call “enough,” then what would failure look like?
When I survey reactions online, my reflection deepens. The very voices that lament insecurity in the country suddenly grow hesitant when decisive measures are proposed. Why, then, can known criminal hideouts not be dismantled? Why can the same security instruments deployed elsewhere not be applied here? How does a nation become paralysed before those who torment it daily? There are moments, I must confess, when I truly struggle to comprehend this country.
If I were President Tinubu, I would seek an immediate audience with the U.S. President, not in protest, but with the tact of a statesman who understands the mood of his people. Instead of feigned outrage, I would diplomatically reframe the moment as an invitation to partnership in restoring peace, a gesture in sync with the very sentiments Nigerians appear prepared to applaud. Leadership is not merely about asserting sovereignty; it is about recognising when a nation’s spirit is so drained that even the prospect of outside help looks like salvation this is where we are.
His aides should help him. I truly do not understand why they – Bayo Onanuga and the rest – so often carry on with a kind of “degenerative Èmilókàn looseness,” as though governance were a street quarrel and not a solemn national duty. The President needs them now, not for the tired and juvenile skirmish against an imagined “common foe” in Peter Obi, but to assist him in framing, with courteous elegance, the language befitting an approach to the American President. This is not a moment for chest-thumping or borrowed bravado; the man in question, POTUS, as we say, na ewe-ewe oku. But in truth we need his righteous indignation in the Nigeria of today.
This is not the time for “bala blue,” nor for careless jesting/ Iyaloja debate. In moments such as this, sobriety is required. Nations weigh words by counting guns, and in that regard, the President of the United States commands more than any other leader on earth.