By Lawan Musa Danlami (Baba Lawan)
December 28, 2025
If the United States were truly motivated by the protection of Nigerian Christians, its actions would follow the geography of human suffering. But they do not. Instead, what we see is a familiar imperial pattern: war waged selectively, morality applied unevenly, and suffering acknowledged only when it aligns with strategic interest. Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in northern Nigeria, where the states most devastated by violence—Borno, Yobe, Katsina, Zamfara, and parts of Sokoto—are overwhelmingly Muslim, and where Muslims constitute the majority of victims.
This is not a matter of opinion but of record. Scholars who have studied Boko Haram and banditry, such as Alexander Thurston and Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, have repeatedly shown that Muslims are the principal victims of insurgent violence in Nigeria. Entire Muslim villages have been destroyed in Borno and Yobe. In Katsina and Zamfara, rural Muslim communities have been emptied by kidnappings, mass killings, hunger, and displacement. Yet when foreign intervention is discussed, the suffering of these populations is either minimized or erased, while the language of “protecting Christians” is elevated as a moral justification.
This selective framing is not accidental. Mahmood Mamdani has argued that the global War on Terror depends on simplifying complex local realities into narratives that legitimize external power. In this logic, some victims are rendered visible and morally useful, while others are rendered invisible and politically inconvenient. Muslim suffering in northern Nigeria falls into the latter category. It does not fit neatly into a story that justifies bombing, so it is ignored.
The result is a dangerous distortion of reality. Nigeria’s crisis is not a religious war. It is a political and socio-economic catastrophe rooted in state failure, corruption, inequality, and decades of neglect. By presenting U.S. military action as a defense of Christians, the deeper causes of violence are concealed, and communal divisions are sharpened. As Achille Mbembe would describe it, this is necropolitics in action: the power to decide whose lives matter, whose deaths are mourned, and whose suffering can be tolerated.
The deeper motive behind such intervention lies not in faith, but in power and wealth. Kwame Nkrumah warned long ago that neo-colonialism would replace direct occupation with indirect control—through security arrangements, military dependence, and economic leverage. Today, that system has evolved further. Where colonial sugar barons once extracted labor and commodities, today’s “digital sugar barons” extract data, intelligence, strategic positioning, and profit from permanent insecurity. Drones, surveillance systems, arms contracts, and counter-terror budgets have replaced plantations, but the logic of extraction remains the same.
Noam Chomsky has consistently observed that U.S. military action follows interest, not compassion. Wars are fought where gains are measurable and risks manageable, not where suffering is greatest. This explains why regions like Borno, Yobe, Katsina, and Zamfara—despite enduring some of the worst humanitarian crises in Africa—do not attract decisive foreign intervention. Their pain offers little strategic return. Their graves do not translate into leverage.
Nigeria’s own history sharpens this tragedy. In 1999, Nigeria intervened militarily in Benin Republic to restore democratic rule, presenting itself as a regional power capable of defending political norms. Yet today, Nigeria struggles to secure its own territory without external interference. This contradiction exposes what many African scholars describe as hollow sovereignty: a state that retains international recognition but lacks the internal capacity to protect its people or resist imperial management of its crises.
Frantz Fanon warned that post-colonial elites often inherit the structures of the colonial state while surrendering its autonomy. When security becomes outsourced and violence is administered from abroad, sovereignty becomes conditional. The state survives, but its people bleed.
None of this is to deny the reality of terrorism or the need to confront it. Terrorism must be defeated. But it cannot be defeated through neo-colonial warfare driven by the pursuit of wealth, dominance, and global positioning. Bombs do not resolve injustice. Drones do not repair broken societies. As Mamdani reminds us, terrorism ends through political solutions: inclusion, accountability, economic dignity, and legitimacy rooted in the consent of the governed.
The uncomfortable truth remains: in Nigeria’s conflict zones, Muslims are suffering more than Christians, yet their suffering is ignored because it does not serve imperial narratives. U.S. intervention, framed as humanitarian concern, aligns instead with the interests of neo-colonial power and the profits of digital sugar barons who thrive on endless war.
This is not protection. It is selective morality in the service of empire. And history will remember not the slogans used to justify the bombs, but the silence that surrounded the graves of the forgotten.
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Opinion