While I am delighted that President Bola Tinubu appears to be taking security more seriously than he previously did (signaled by the appointment of General Christopher Musa as the new Minister of Defence, and hopefully this isn’t just a change in personnel without a substantive change in the approach to stamping out blood-sucking bandits and terrorists), I am sad that it took America instructing him to do this or risk untoward consequences.
I detest and resent foreign interference in the affairs of another country and would have taken a firm, unequivocally patriotic stand against Donald Trump’s threat of military invasion to “save” Nigerian “Christians.” I didn’t for two reasons.
One, in the matter of life and death, as I pointed out in a recent column, people don’t care about the motivations of the person who offers to save them.
Our instinct for freedom from needless death is way stronger than our pride. Anyone who truly saves Nigerian Christians from “genocide” will inevitably also save Nigerian Muslims, atheists, agnostics and traditionalists from “genocide” since the same beasts who murder Christians also murder others.
The second reason is that, as I have repeatedly pointed out in past columns, Nigeria’s political elites have an inescapably infantile thirst for an exogenous paternal dictatorship and see the United States as that all-knowing, all-powerful, all-sufficient father-figure to whom they must bow in duteous awe.
The shake-up of Nigeria’s security structure and the seeming renewed earnestness in fighting the monsters that kill our people for sport and money are clearly the product of American pressures on Tinubu.
Even Tinubu’s appointment of ambassadors after more than two years in power is the consequence of Trump’s threats.
It’s obvious that sovereignty is a giant myth. Let’s face it. In the community of nations, there are children and there are parents, unfortunately.
Well, if it takes the infantilization of Nigerian leaders by the US for them to feel compelled to do the right thing, it is sadly welcome. I wish it wasn’t that way.
Perhaps that’s why Buba Galadima recently said we might as well beg the British to come back and recolonize us. But that’s a bridge too far. Even our self-debasing cultural cringe should have a limit.
