Tibor Nagy: Can U.S. forces protect Nigeria’s Christians? – Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

Spoiler alert: Is President Trump’s threat to use the U.S. military to protect Christians in Nigeria a realistic option?
Absolutely not!
But is there a major problem with Nigeria’s Christians feeling threatened in many parts of Nigeria?
Absolutely!
And those dismissing the threat as exaggerated are falling prey to either “both sideism” or treating this as yet one more ingredient in Nigeria’s soup of critical problems.
First, a quick overview of the nation and its crises. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation with around 230 million people, 300 ethnic groups; it is about one-and-one -half times the size of Texas.
It’s a vestige of British colonialism, and like most African countries, it’s an artificial creation whose borders were set to meet the interests of the colonizers, not the people. It’s also split about half-and-half between Christians and Muslims, with the North majority Muslim and the South majority Christian. The middle is mixed.
As with Christianity, Islam also has many variants in Nigeria, with fundamentalist tendencies growing in both faiths.
Nigeria is also a major oil producer and suffers from world-class corruption. And while Nigeria has the largest economy in Africa, it also has the largest number of people in extreme poverty.
Since independence in 1960, Nigeria has been horribly governed, suffering from several military coups and a major ethnically based civil war.
Civilians have been in charge since 1999 and the Presidency has alternated between Muslims and Christians, with an informal understanding that the President and Vice President would be from different faiths.
This was upended when current President Tinubu, a Muslim, followed another Muslim president, and his Vice President is also Muslim.
(To be fair, Tinubu’s wife is a Pentecostal Christian pastor, as mixed religion marriages are not unusual in Southwest Nigeria.)
While Nigerian governments and societies have historically been sensitive to not upsetting the Christian-Muslim balance, the nation has recently taken steps which alarm many Christians.
In 1986, it stealthily joined the Organization of Islamic Cooperative – a grouping of mostly Muslim majority nations – and in 1999 began introducing Sharia law in its northern states.
Today, 12 states apply Sharia, including some with significant Christian populations.
And while Christians are supposed to be immune from Sharia requirements – such as fasting during Ramadan or abstaining from alcohol – in practice in most Northern areas, everyone has to abide at pain of legal or physical harm.
This also has upset Christians.
Now for the major problem. It is true that in Nigeria overall more Muslims are killed from violence than Christians.
But that’s not the real picture; different regions of Nigeria suffer from different types of violence.
In the Northeast, two extremist groups – Islamic State-aligned Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) and Boko Haram (BH) – operate, targeting Christians and Muslims alike who do not share their radical ideology.
Since the great majority of that population is Muslim, many more Muslims are killed. In the Northcentral region, the problem is widespread kidnapping for ransom with victims routinely murdered.
Again, the population is mostly Muslim. In the Northwest, an al-Qaeda affiliated extremist group, JNIM, is starting to make attacks, and this is also a large-majority Muslim area.
Nigeria’s security forces are proving incapable of dealing with any of these threats.
The most acute danger for Nigerian Christians is the Middlebelt.
This is the nation’s most fertile farming area, and the great majority of farmers are Christian.
The area is also used by Fulani (Muslim) cattle herders who move their animals in search of grazing grounds.
In decades past, there was an uneasy understanding that the herders would come to the farms after harvest for the animals to eat the stubble and fertilize the fields.
This has broken down over the last 20 years as populations increased and fertile ground shrank.
Instead of bringing their animals after harvest, the Fulani now invade farmlands while crops are growing.
The herders are armed and aggressive and attack not just individual farmers but entire villages.
Christian communities have been wiped out and hundreds of thousands displaced by having to abandon their fields.
As for the numbers killed – Nigerian statistics are unreliable or nonexistent, but a credible estimate would place the fatalities this year alone in the thousands.
While local Nigerian and national officials issue statements of regret after attacks happen, not much has been done to prevent them, and even less to punish the culprits.
Therefore, Christian communities understandably believe the Fulani attackers have impunity in their violence and the State is either complicit or a bystander.
So those who say more Muslims are killed in Nigeria are technically correct when seen in the context of nationwide numbers.
But Nigerian Christians’ perception of their being persecuted is valid when examining the violence regionally.
This is why Nigeria’s Christian communities are grateful that this issue has finally risen to the highest levels of the U.S. Government, and that prominent U.S. Senators such as Risch, the Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Cruz, chair of the Africa subcommittee, have forcefully voiced their concerns. However, President Trump threatening a military solution is not realistic.
There is no way that a sufficient number of U.S. forces could be sent – even with Nigeria’s acceptance – to protect the thousands of farmers or their villages from Fulani attackers.
And simply attacking herders would result in innocents being killed and gaining more recruits for extremist groups.
So, is there a solution?
Yes – but it has two sides: political and economic. On the political front, President Trump could be helpful by personally pressuring Nigerian President Tinubu to take the situation much more seriously than he has.
Only Tinubu can apply pressure to the regional Governors, local officials, and his military to do much more to prevent the attacks, not just to respond after they happen. He also has to apply the lever of governmental power to provide resources for this.
But to bring real peace to the herder/farmer conflict, there also needs to be a win/win economic solution.
In this regard, during Trump 1 we proposed a novel approach whereby the farmers and herders could become economic partners.
We even brought a Nigerian delegation to Texas Tech in Lubbock, since West Texas also has had its share of herder/farmer violence in the past. The concept was that the farmers could grow crops for cattle feed, and Nigeria could introduce feedlots for the herders’ cattle. Unfortunately, the proposal never evolved past an initial visit.
So, there are possible solutions. But to really dispel the narrative that Nigeria is either promoting or tolerating violence against its Christian population, its own government must provide the solution.
And Nigeria’s international partners must truly understand the problem and dynamics before apply unrelenting pressure until it does so.
Ambassador Tibor Nagy most recently served as acting Under Secretary of State for Management in the second President Donald Trump administration. He also served as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa in the first Trump administration after serving as Texas Tech’s Vice Provost for International Affairs following a 30-year career as a U.S. Diplomat. Follow him on Twitter @TiborPNagyJr.

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