Opinion

How Nigeria Turned U.S. Pressure into Strategic Advantage

Published

2 months ago

November 29, 2025

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and United States President Donald Trump

How Nigeria Turned U.S. Pressure into Strategic Advantage – Sadiq Mohammed

If diplomacy were a chessboard, Nigeria has just moved from being the piece under attack to becoming the player with positional advantage. The same international community that once threatened sanctions, hinted at military intervention, and labelled Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern is now sitting across the table not as an enforcer, but as a partner. That shift did not happen by accident; it is the result of smart geopolitical recalibration, patient statecraft, and the emergence of a coordinated security leadership capable of converting pressure into power.

The constitution of the US–Nigeria Joint Security Working Group—coming shortly after Nigeria established its own inter-agency national working group—is the clearest signal that Abuja has turned an adversarial moment into a cooperative alliance. Typically, when a country is sanctioned, threatened, warned, or placed on watchlists, the next stage is isolation. Nigeria did the opposite. Rather than respond with defiance or panic, the administration transformed pressure into opportunity. It is akin to a boxer absorbing a heavy punch and using the momentum to corner his opponent. Pressure became leverage.

Geopolitically, Nigeria has achieved what many nations fail to do under scrutiny: turn forced engagement into equal partnership. The United States entered the conversation with hard-power posturing—from the CPC designation to veiled military rhetoric—but has now shifted toward joint operations, intelligence fusion, capability building, and co-designed security doctrine. The transition from “guns-blazing” rhetoric to a structured working group led by Nigeria’s National Security Adviser, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, signals a return to diplomatic equilibrium in which Nigeria is not the subject of intervention, but the architect of cooperation.

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This is a strategic win for Nigeria for one key reason: once a crisis is reframed as a shared challenge, the weaker party becomes stronger. Instead of standing alone before a global security establishment, Nigeria now stands beside a global security powerhouse. Instead of unilateral penalties, there is multilateral problem-solving. Instead of receiving lectures, Nigeria engages in collaboration. Instead of threats, there is structured coordination. It is the difference between being the patient on the table and becoming part of the surgical team.

Even the initial talk of sanctions—widely viewed as a diplomatic setback—has now evolved into a bargaining chip. In international relations, pressure weakens a nation only when it is internally fragmented. Nigeria responded with institutional consolidation: defence, intelligence, foreign affairs, interior, and police operations were aligned under one coherent structure within the Office of the National Security Adviser. That unified front presented the United States with a serious partner to work with—not a divided bureaucracy to dictate to. And in geopolitics, unity is power.

The optics matter as well. When a country that once considered dramatic intervention now opts for joint working groups, it is an implicit admission that Nigeria is indispensable to regional stability. Nigeria’s leverage lies not only in its population or economy, but in its geography. Without Nigeria’s cooperation, no counter-terrorism framework in West or Central Africa can succeed. Washington knows it. The world knows it. This new phase simply formalises that reality.

In the long run, Nigeria stands to gain the most because the partnership now aligns with Nigerian-led priorities. The coordination is anchored under the NSA. The agenda reflects Nigeria’s security needs. The operational synergy strengthens Nigeria’s institutions. And the knowledge transfer, technology sharing, and intelligence integration will continue to enhance Nigeria’s security capacity long after this administration.

At the beginning of the year, Nigeria was being cautioned. Today, Nigeria is being consulted. That transition is not merely a diplomatic success story; it is a geopolitical turnaround. What once appeared as pressure has become opportunity. What seemed like a threat has become the foundation of strategic advantage. And what many assumed was Nigeria’s weakest moment has evolved into the pivot for a stronger, smarter, and more globally integrated security framework.

This is how nations rise—not by avoiding storms, but by learning to turn the wind in their favour.

How Nigeria Turned U.S. Pressure into Strategic Advantage

Opinion

New York Times and Onitsha screwdriver sellers’ data, By Farooq Kperogi

Published

3 hours ago

January 24, 2026

Trends Admin

Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism

Farooq Kperogi

New York Times and Onitsha screwdriver sellers’ data, By Farooq Kperogi

The New York Times of January 18, 2026 published an explosive story showing how unverified and methodologically questionable data produced by a little-known Onitsha screwdriver seller who moonlights as an NGO activist, Emeka Umeagbalasi of Intersociety, traveled upward into US Republican politics and helped shape a narrative of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria, culminating in Trump-ordered airstrikes in Sokoto State.

Umeagbalasi, who runs Intersociety from his home and relies largely on secondary sources, assumptions, presumptions and Google searches, admitted that he rarely verifies deaths, often imputes victims’ religious identities based on his understanding of what I like to call Nigeria’s emotional geography, and inflates figures that conflict researchers and even church leaders dispute.

Despite these flaws, his claims were cited by Fox News, Senator Ted Cruz, Rep. Riley Moore and other Republicans, and echoed by the White House. It illustrates how fraudulent data, ideological advocacy and US culture-war politics converged to misframe Nigeria’s complex violence as a one-sided religious slaughter rather than a crisis of state failure affecting Christians, Muslims, traditional religious worshipers and nonreligious people.

But a certain class of Nigerians have chosen to either not read the New York Times story (instantiating my recent Facebook post about Nigerians’ fixation with forming opinions based only on headlines) or to read it but allow their preconceived biases to befog their comprehension.

Some low-information, high-ignorance Nigerians even claim that the New York Times report was bought with the reported $9 million the Bola Tinubu government paid to a conservative lobbying firm in Washington, DC. I will return to this point shortly.

Interestingly, a December 26, 2025 investigation by the BBC’s Global Disinformation Unit reached strikingly similar conclusions to those of the New York Times. The BBC investigation, which surprisingly did not gain traction in Nigeria when it was first published, also showed that the figures underpinning the “Christian genocide” narrative are unverifiable, internally inconsistent and sharply at odds with independent conflict-monitoring data.

It noted that groups such as ACLED document widespread killings across Nigeria but find no credible evidence of a coordinated campaign targeting Christians alone. Violence in Nigeria, the BBC observed, is better explained by state weakness, banditry, insurgency and impunity, dynamics that endanger Muslims and Christians alike.

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Crucially, the BBC report situates the persistence of the genocide framing within southeastern Nigeria’s political history. It highlights how some of the loudest voices amplifying the narrative are rooted in Igbo political grievances and are entangled with pro-Biafra networks that have long sought international sympathy by portraying the Nigerian state as genocidal.

Recasting Nigeria’s complex security crisis as a religious extermination campaign provides a morally powerful export narrative, particularly when targeted at US evangelical and conservative audiences.

The report quoted a Biafran separatist group as admitting to playing a major role in promoting the “Christian genocide” narrative in the US Congress. “The Biafra Republic Government in Exile, BRGIE, described it as a ‘highly orchestrated effort,’ saying it had hired lobbying firms and met US officials, including Cruz.”

That framing found fertile ground in Washington. Lobbying firms and advocacy networks tailored the message for American culture-war politics, where persecution of Christians abroad resonates strongly. Republican lawmakers, often unfamiliar with Nigeria’s internal dynamics, repeated the claims with little scrutiny.

In that sense, the genocide story was less the product of rigorous evidence than of ideological alignment, diaspora activism and a lobbying ecosystem eager for simple moral binaries.

This does not, by any stretch of the imagination, suggest that Christians are not being killed in large numbers in northern Nigeria or that victims are unjustified in framing their suffering in religious terms simply because many of the perpetrators identify as Muslims. My first column on this issue acknowledged this fact.

But the pushback is warranted because the narrative is built on false data and amplified to US lobby groups by people whose agenda is not primarily about Christian genocide. It is also warranted because Muslims are being murdered in large numbers by the same actors who are killing Christians.

On the surface, it may seem defensible to argue that since the people killing Muslims are also Muslims, only the killings of Christians matter. But that position is both morally and sociologically problematic.

First, every unjustified death should concern us. Second, human beings inhabit a multiplicity of identities. Being Muslim is not the sum total of the lives of people murdered by bandits and terrorists.

To suggest that the murder of Hausa and sedentary Fulani by bandits and terrorists does not matter as much as the murder of Christians simply because the villains and victims share the same faith betrays a lack of humanity.

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In my part of Nigeria, broadly speaking Borgu, which stretches across parts of Kebbi, Niger and Kwara States, scores of our people are murdered regularly. To imply that those deaths do not matter because most people there are Muslims cuts deeply. And that is where the “Christian genocide” narrative has led.

The internationalization of this narrative in the service of separatist advocacy makes it particularly jarring. That is why independent international media have been drawn to interrogate it, and why the story is now crumbling under sustained scrutiny.

Now, back to the conspiracy theory that the New York Times story was spurred by the Nigerian government.

There is no relationship between the Nigerian government’s reported payment to a conservative lobbying firm in Washington and the New York Times investigation that dismantled the Christian genocide narrative. None. The two events merely occurred in the same news cycle, and coincidence is being mistaken for causation.

To begin with the basics, there is no credible historical record of the New York Times ever accepting monetary inducement to write or slant a story. Not from governments, not from corporations, not from foreign lobbies.

In more than a century of operation, the paper has been sued, criticized, corrected, embarrassed and sometimes wrong, but it has never been shown to have sold its news judgment for cash.

The Times is not a fragile outfit scrambling for influence money. It is a multibillion-dollar publicly traded company whose value runs into the low tens of billions of dollars, whose brand is widely regarded as America’s newspaper of record and whose reporters earn, on average, six-figure salaries.

Its institutional power flows from credibility, not access fees. Destroying that credibility for a $9 million foreign lobbying contract, money that would not even pass through its books, would be commercial and reputational suicide.

Just as importantly, the lobbying payment itself is being misunderstood. Lobbyists in Washington influence government policy, not news coverage. They target lawmakers, executive agencies and regulatory processes.

They do not buy front-page investigations at elite newspapers, especially not papers that routinely antagonize conservative politicians and administrations. The idea that a conservative lobby would bribe a liberal newspaper to undermine a conservative narrative is internally incoherent.

The contrast with Nigerian media practices is uncomfortable but unavoidable. In the United States, mainstream news organizations do not accept bribes to write stories. Paying journalists to publish or suppress coverage is a career-ending offense. Newsrooms are legally exposed, aggressively scrutinized and professionally policed in ways that make such conduct extraordinarily risky.

That does not mean American journalism is perfect or bias-free. It means its failures are not transactional in the crude cash-for-coverage sense that some Nigerians assume or know.

So why does the bribery explanation feel plausible to some Nigerians? The answer lies not in evidence but in cognition and experience.

People rely on the availability heuristic, drawing on what they know best. If influence at home is often bought with money, money becomes the default explanation everywhere else. This is reinforced by analogical overreach, that is, the assumption that foreign institutions must function like local ones despite radically different incentive structures and accountability systems.

There is also institutional opacity. When people lack procedural knowledge of how elite Western media operate, they substitute a simpler question for a harder one. Instead of asking how a newspaper verifies sources or decides newsworthiness, they ask who paid whom. Add correlation-as-causation bias, the temptation to connect two adjacent events, and a narrative writes itself.

Layered onto this is monocausal populism, the belief that complex outcomes must have a single villain, usually money, and epistemic provincialism, the assumption that local moral failures are universal features of power.

In low-trust environments like Nigeria, conspiracy rationality becomes an ordinary mode of explanation rather than a fringe pathology. It supplies coherence where institutional trust is absent.

Finally, there is what in media studies we call narrative closure bias. The bribery story feels complete. Institutional independence feels abstract and unsatisfying. Closure beats accuracy.

Put plainly, the claim that a conservative lobby bribed a liberal American newspaper to publish an investigation that undercut conservative politicians tells us far more about how Nigerians make sense of distant power than about how American journalism actually works.

The New York Times story stands or falls on its evidence and methods. So far, critics have attacked neither. They have simply imagined a transaction that never happened.

Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based professor of Journalism.

Views expressed on this opinion are personal and do not reflect the thoughts and beliefs of newstrends.ng or its owners.

New York Times and Onitsha screwdriver sellers’ data, By Farooq Kperogi

Opinion

Farooq Kperogi: Celebrating ASUU-FG’s historic reset with caveats

Published

1 week ago

January 17, 2026

Trends Admin

Farooq Kperogi

Farooq Kperogi: Celebrating ASUU-FG’s historic reset with caveats

After sixteen years of stalemate, serial strikes and ritualized brinkmanship, the Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have finally signed a renegotiated agreement that replaces the moribund 2009 pact. This is at once historic, consequential and praiseworthy.

For the first time in a generation, Nigeria’s public universities have a framework that promises industrial harmony, predictability of academic calendars and an end to the cruel cycle in which students lose years of their lives to shutdowns that have nothing to do with them. If implemented faithfully, the agreement will allow students to graduate on time, restore confidence in public universities and begin the long task of rebuilding Nigeria’s battered higher education system.

Credit is due to the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, and to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for pushing this through. In fact, the ASUU agreement is about the only major promise Tinubu made in the poetry of campaign that he has clearly kept in the prose of governance.

The symbolism is even more striking when contrasted with the immediate past. The Muhammadu Buhari administration presided over one of the most destructive eras in the history of Nigerian university education.

This was made all the more tragic by the presence of Adamu Adamu as Minister of Education. Before his appointment, Adamu, for whom I had enormously unconditional respect, was a well-known public defender of ASUU in his intrepid newspaper columns in the Daily Trust. Once in office, however, he turned out to be one of the most hostile ministers Nigerian academics have ever encountered.

On October 9, 2022, at the height of that administration’s war with ASUU, I wrote on social media: “Adamu Adamu, an erstwhile ASUU ally, is turning out to be the deadliest foe ASUU has ever had. With help from Ngige, he’s dealing the union one crushing blow after another…. Lesson: the fact that someone is your friend today doesn’t mean they can’t be a murderous foe tomorrow.”

The Tinubu administration has, at the very least, reversed that posture of antagonism and replaced it with negotiation, compromise and a willingness to reset the relationship between government and academia.

At its core, the new pact addresses the three issues that have driven nearly two decades of conflict: pay, welfare and the structure of university funding.

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First is a 40 percent salary increase for lecturers, effective January 1, 2026. Someone rightly remarked that it’s the single largest upward review of academic salaries in over a decade. It’s a long overdue correction after years of erosion by inflation and currency collapse.

For professors, this comes with a new professorial cadre allowance of about 140,000 naira monthly, while readers (roughly equivalent to associate professors) receive about 70,000 naira. Earned academic allowances have also been restructured and tied more clearly to actual academic labor such as postgraduate supervision, fieldwork and research coordination.

Second is a major reform of retirement benefits. Professors who retire at the statutory age of 70 are now guaranteed pension benefits equivalent to their full annual salary. This provision alone is transformative. It ends the shameful tradition of professors retiring into poverty after decades of service and sends a powerful signal to younger academics that a life devoted to teaching and research will not be punished at the end.

Third is the institutionalization of research funding through the proposed establishment of a National Research Council, funded at not less than one percent of GDP. For the first time in Nigeria’s history, research financing is being embedded in national planning rather than left to donor whims and sporadic government interventions.

If implemented properly, this could anchor doctoral training, strengthen laboratories and libraries and finally position Nigeria as a serious knowledge producer.

Fourth is a new funding structure for universities that links capital funding, infrastructure development and staff development to long-term planning rather than emergency interventions. TETFund remains central, but funding is now part of an overarching reform framework.

Fifth is a recommitment to university autonomy and academic freedom, including protections against political interference in hiring, curriculum and internal governance. If faithfully implemented, which is never a guarantee but noteworthy nonetheless, vice-chancellors may not be the glorified political appointees that many of them are now, and universities may cease to be extensions of the civil service.

Finally, the agreement formally buries the 2009 pact that haunted the system like a zombie document. The new framework, produced by the Yayale Ahmed Committee after fourteen months of negotiations, is structured, phased and subject to periodic review. This gives ASUU leverage and gives government predictability.

Yet it is important to separate celebration from illusion. The new agreement is a noteworthy improvement on the living and working conditions of Nigerian university lecturers. But it is not yet competitive by continental standards, and it is unlikely, on its own, to halt academic brain drain.

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Before the agreement, a full professor in a federal university earned roughly 525,000 naira to 630,000 naira monthly. With a 40 percent raise and the new 140,000-naira professorial allowance, a senior professor will now earn in the range of 1 million naira to 1.1 million naira per month, depending on rank and allowances.

That sounds impressive in naira terms. In continental terms, however, it remains deeply uncompetitive.

In South Africa, professors earn the equivalent of about $4,500 to $5,000 per month. In Kenya, professors earn around $1,300 monthly. In Uganda, the figure is about $1,100. In Ghana, professors earn roughly $700 to $800 monthly. In Egypt and Morocco, senior academics earn well above Nigeria’s new scale.

At current exchange rates, a Nigerian professor earning 1.1 million naira a month makes roughly $700. That places Nigeria near the bottom of Africa’s academic pay ladder, ahead of only a handful of fragile economies.

This is why Nigerian universities continue to hemorrhage talent. Professors are leaving for South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Botswana, the Gulf, Europe and North America not because they dislike Nigeria but because Nigeria does not value academic labor competitively. A Nigerian professor now earns in a month what a South African professor earns in a week.

The salary increase is therefore a necessary correction, not a strategic solution. It slows the bleeding. It does not stop it.

There is also a potential booby trap embedded in the agreement that deserves sober reflection. The guarantee of full-salary pensions for retired professors has been widely welcomed, and rightly so. But pension experts have warned that this provision resembles a return to the old defined-benefit pension system that Nigeria abandoned two decades ago because it was fiscally unsustainable.

A January 16, 2026, report by TheCable highlighted the controversy sparked by the Director-General of the National Pension Commission, who defended the ASUU deal amid fears that it could undermine the contributory pension scheme. Critics argue that guaranteeing pensions equivalent to full salaries without a clearly defined funding mechanism risks recreating the very problems that forced Nigeria to reform its pension system in the first place.

If the new pension promise is not carefully structured, transparently funded and legally insulated from political manipulation, it could become a future flashpoint for industrial conflict that unfairly punishes students and parents.

Expectations will rise. Budgetary pressures will mount. Regulators will resist. And another round of industrial disharmony could follow.

There is one more omission in the agreement that deserves attention. My friend Prof. Moses Ochonu and I have long argued that the federal government should not simply accede to ASUU’s demands, however legitimate, without also insisting on mechanisms for instructional accountability, research productivity, service delivery and innovation.

Without a system to institutionalize accountability and transparency, students will always be shortchanged, and the nation will be betrayed by lecturers who show little commitment to their craft or to genuine knowledge production and dissemination.

It has become a disturbing culture in Nigerian universities for lecturers to show up in class whenever they please without consequence. In my undergraduate days, I took courses where lecturers appeared only twice in the entire semester, first to introduce themselves and last to set an exam on material they never taught. My conversations with today’s undergraduates suggest that this still happens.

Of course, not everyone is guilty of this. Many Nigerian academics are dedicated teachers and serious scholars working under brutal conditions. But not even one person should be allowed to get away with such negligence.

University lecturers should also not be allowed to publish in substandard, pay-to-play, predatory journals simply to climb the academic ladder. Promotion should reward intellectual rigor, not transactional publishing.
If Nigeria is going to invest billions in salaries, pensions, and research funding, it must also demand excellence in return. Anything less is a betrayal of students and of the country’s development aspirations.

This agreement gives Nigeria a chance to rebuild. Whether it becomes a renaissance or another chapter in the long story of squandered opportunity will depend on what happens next.

Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.

Opinion

Where’s Kano’s former SSG Bichi? By Farooq Kperogi

Published

2 weeks ago

January 11, 2026

Trends Admin

Farooq Kperogi

Where’s Kano’s former SSG Bichi? By Farooq Kperogi

In late 2024, it came into the open for the first time that the relationship between Dr. Rabiu Kwankwaso and his protégé, Gov. Abba Kabiru Yusuf, had fractured. But it was quickly papered over and dismissed as mere noise, a distraction engineered by enemies of Kwankwasiyya.

Then a few people in Gov. Yusuf’s government, accused of standing in the way between Dr. Kwankwaso and Gov. Yusuf, were fired. The most prominent of such firings was that of Prof. Abdullahi Baffa Bichi, the Secretary to the Government (SSG).

Prof. Bichi’s firing shocked me, so I reached out to a friend of mine who seems to be deeply inserted into, or at least close to people who are denizens of, the Kwankwasiyya power structure to seek explanations for why Bichi was let go.

He confided that Prof. Bichi was one of the arrowheads of the people who were goading Gov. Yusuf to assert his independence from Dr. Kwankwaso. That shocked me.

It shocked me because when Dr. Kwankwaso called me sometime in late 2023, he was with Prof. Bichi. He introduced Bichi with a lot of enthusiasm and asked if I knew him because we are both professors who graduated from Bayero University.

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I said Bichi graduated before me but that I knew him by reputation because of his service as the Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) from 2016 to 2019. He had a major falling out with former Education Minister Adamu Adamu, which caused his unceremonious firing, about which I wrote at the time.

Kwankwaso spoke very highly of Bichi and said he wanted me to get close to him. We never did. Kwankwaso did not remember to send me Bichi’s phone number as he promised, and I never reminded him.

But they seemed to have a great chemistry, and I got the impression that Bichi was one of Kwankwaso’s metaphoric eyes in the government, a trusted sentinel planted at the nerve center of power.

You can imagine my shock when I was told that he was one of the engineers of a political divorce between Yusuf and Kwankwaso.

But now that the divorce between Yusuf and Kwankwaso appears to have happened even after Bichi has been sacrificed in the service of signaling the indissolubility of the political bond between them, what do we make of this?

Where is Bichi? What is he saying about all this? Is he having the last laugh?