Donald Trump’s Christmas Day airstrike on terrorist targets in Sokoto did not merely drop bombs; it detonated a long-suppressed national contradiction. Predictably, Abuja recoiled in ritual outrage, clutching at the rhetoric of sovereignty. Yet beneath the noise lies a far grimmer truth. Nigeria has failed catastrophically in its most basic duty—the protection of life—and that failure has finally invited external force.
In announcing the strike, Trump was characteristically blunt. He said the operation was ordered to “eliminate terrorist elements threatening innocent lives,”. He went further, dwelling extensively on what he described as the “systematic and horrifying killing of Christians in Nigeria.” He warned that the United States would no longer look away while christians were hunted, villages erased, and faith turned into a death sentence.
That emphasis was not incidental. Under Trump, the persecution of Christians in Nigeria became a recurring theme in U.S. policy pronouncements, reports, and diplomatic pressure. From massacres in southern Kaduna to attacks on churches and Christian farming communities across the Middle Belt and North-West, Washington repeatedly flagged Nigeria as a country where religious violence was spiraling out of control.
Nigeria’s descent into this abyss began in 2009 with the emergence of Boko Haram, but it did not stop there. What started as an insurgency in the North-East metastasized into a nationwide security cancer. Terrorists splintered, bandits flourished, kidnapping became an economy, and criminality fused seamlessly with ideology. The result has been a country at war with itself.
For more than a decade, the North has not known peace. Christians have been slaughtered in their places of worship, Muslims murdered in mosques and markets, entire communities wiped out with chilling efficiency. No faith has been spared, but the targeted killing of Christians has been particularly brutal, persistent, and poorly addressed by the Nigerian state.
It is this sustained bloodletting that pushed Washington from concern to action. Under Trump, the U.S. designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern over religious freedom violations, imposed visa restrictions on Nigerian officials, and issued sharp warnings about the state’s failure to protect vulnerable populations. These were not random punishments; they were responses to mass graves and unanswered cries.
Those now shouting about violated sovereignty must confront an uncomfortable question: where was this passion when sovereignty was being auctioned daily to bandits in forests and on highways? What does sovereignty mean to villagers forced to pay levies to gunmen, or to worshippers murdered for their faith while the state issues condolences?
Successive Nigerian governments have had ample time and resources. From Jonathan’s cautious half-measures, through Buhari’s heavy militarization without decisive outcomes, to Tinubu’s inherited paralysis, the results have been the same. Operations are announced, terrorists retreat briefly, then return stronger, richer, and more confident.
The cost has been devastating. Homes burned to the ground. Families shattered beyond repair. Thousands widowed, orphaned, displaced. Nigerian roads converted into killing fields where kidnappers decide who lives and who dies. Entire regions live under siege, abandoned to their fate.
Against this bleak backdrop, the Sokoto airstrike reads less like an affront and more like an indictment. It exposes how far Nigeria has fallen that a foreign power feels compelled to act where the Nigerian state has repeatedly failed. If targeted strikes degrade terror networks and disrupt the machinery of mass murder, they are not sacrilege—they are necessity.
The argument that Nigeria must “handle its problems internally” collapses under the weight of fifteen years of bloodshed. Handling it alone has delivered cemeteries, not security. National pride cannot continue to be financed with innocent lives, especially when the victims are known, named, and targeted.
Commending Trump is not about romanticizing foreign intervention. It is about acknowledging that sustained pressure and decisive force work when excuses do not. More international scrutiny, more coordinated action, and yes, more strikes should follow if they save lives and dismantle terror infrastructure.
Nigeria cannot continue like this—oscillating between denial and disaster while citizens are butchered. Trump’s Christmas bombs over Sokoto are a warning shot, not just to terrorists but to a state that has lost control of its territory and credibility with its people. If it takes blunt American force to force a reckoning, history may yet record the strike not as a violation, but as a grimly necessary intervention.
