Ahmed Yahaya-Joe
“The spider has no need to hunt; it simply waits for the next fool to fall into the web’s barely visible strands.” – The Controlled-Chaos Strategy, p.77 33 Strategies of War (2006) by Robert Greene.
According to William D. James, “A close examination of the history of statecraft reveals that grand strategy works best when competing ideas collide, and rigorous processes challenge prevailing orthodoxies.” – The Key to Grand Strategy (2025).
If so, why is there more gaslighting than enlightened debate resonating from the high-decibel “Christian genocide” babel of discordant voices?
Anyway, ESL is the United Kingdom acronym for English as a Second Language that formed the kernel of “Mind Your Language” an immensely popular bygone era British comedy series that ran from the late 1970s to early 80s on Nigerian national television.
For those old enough to remember, the program brilliantly captured the struggles of an assorted group learning the twists and turns, including the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the English language.
“Mind Your Language” featured memorable characters like the amiable Jeremy Brown played by Barry Evans who passed in 1997, the habitual parodist Ranjeet Singh (Albert Moses passed in 2017) and the utterly exasperating Ali Nadim (Dino Shafeek passed in 1984) not forgetting the racy French Danielle Favre (Francoise Pascal surprisingly from the African island nation of Mauritius) and the dry humoured stern Miss Courtney, a taciturn feminist and proud spinster played by Zara Nutley (1924-2016) among others.
But underneath all that entertaining laughter in that TV show the producers neatly camouflaged many prejudices including false dichotomies and selective framing.
Little wonder one gets a sense of déjà vu of that sitcom from our halcyon days against the background of the quantum of dissimulation recently in our public space concerning the raging “Christian genocide” narrative and counter-narratives.
By the way how imprudently different is the conditional military ultimatum of Mr. Trump to Nigeria with the kind of war mongering in President Bola Tinubu’s letter to the National Assembly read at plenary in the Senate chamber on August 4, 2025?
“Following the unfortunate political situation in Niger Republic culminating in the overthrow of its President, ECOWAS under my leadership condemned the coup in its entirety and resolved to seek the return to a democratically elected government in a bid to restore peace.”
Didn’t the Nigerian leader go even ahead to demand from the legislature the necessary approval for a Nigerian, “military build-up and deployment of personnel for military intervention to enforce compliance of the military junta in Niger should they remain recalcitrant”?
Curiously, Mr. Trump’s claims of “White genocide” in South Africa did not come with military threats. Or any grandiloquence. This is obviously because Pretoria’s Union Buildings atop Meintjeskop resorted to diplomatic proactiveness.
The Sarcastic Sunday offering of November 9, 2025 speaks presumptive volumes on the Villa’s template;
“With no ambassadors across 109 countries. Welcome to Nigeria’s foreign service where diplomacy is outsourced to Twitter spaces and YouTube channels.
“Other nations send ambassadors. We send prayers, acting officers, and PowerPoint slides. And yet, the Presidency insists there’s no diplomatic vacuum.
“Of course not. Abroad, we used to have envoys who wrote policy memos. Now, we have TikTok warriors who write threads.” – Mohammed Bello Doka
Discerning Nigerians wonder with consternation on the abysmal lack of continuum for a decade from 2015 to 2025 particularly against the background of Tinubu’s 2023 presidential campaign promise “We will continue with the developmental program of APC. It will not stop.”
How so?
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is the second largest circulating newspaper in the United States with an average of 4.1 million and 473,700 digital and print subscribers daily. Published 6 days a week in New York, WSJ has extensively covered international news, business and finance to a global readership for the last 134 years.
In its 20th December, 2019 edition the French public intellectual, Bernard-Henri Levy stated in his column;
“Nigeria’s Christians are under siege. And the world pays no attention. Few in the United States or Europe have reported on it.
Shall we wait, as usual, for the disaster to be done before waking up? These are the stakes behind my voyage to the heart of Nigerian darkness. This is the meaning of the campaign to save Nigeria’s Christians that I hope I am launching today.”
These same words were reproduced worldwide in various prominent publications including Levy’s own 2021 book entitled The Will to See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope pp. 93-104
Fast forward to the Truthsocial.com comments of President Trump of Friday, October 31, 2025 reportedly posted after watching a Fox News TV broadcast on the plight of Nigerian Christians.
Even if it is more than a coincidence that WJS and Fox News are both owned by the same News Corp conglomerate owned by the 94-year-old Rupert Murdoch, what if “when pigs fly” (apologies to one of my takeaways from Mind Your Language) and American troops eventually deploy to Nigeria?
While the question is more hypothetical than even the kind of diplomatic posturing embedded in our title by Churchill it remains more of political hyperbole than involving any strategic substance or even military relevance.
That notwithstanding the answer is obviously that Americans of Nigerian extraction would be deployed in various combat and non-combat capacities.
That is what should frighteningly worry each and every one of us irrespective of our polarized positions in the “Christian genocide” debate.
Back in 1993 when the US then under President Bill Clinton intervened in Somalia under the auspices of UNOSOM (United Nations Operations in Somalia) a certain artillery subaltern, Hussein Farah Aidid of the 2nd Battalion, 9th US Marine Regiment was among the first boots on ground “guns-a-blazing,” paradoxically the Somali-Born son of the main antagonist, General Mohammed Farrah Aidid.
How did the Americans get to pit a son against his father one of the major factional leaders?
A Somali adage speaks volumes;
“I and Somalia against the world. I and my clan against Somalia. I and my family against the clan. I and my brother against the family. I against my brother.”
Will the application of the immediate foregoing Horn of Africa dictum be any different when the boots of Nigerian-American service men and women hypothetically land in Nigeria?
The question is pertinent against the background of the open confession of US Marines Major-General Smedley Butler in his 1935 treatise entitled War is a Racket;
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
Who are the Nigerians reminiscent of Hussein Aidid likely to be deployed to Nigeria for by Pentagon for “fast, vicious, and sweet,” operations?
Between the Odocha siblings in the US Army as subalterns Chioma, Tochi, and Kelechi are US Marines Halima Hussein and Shamsiyya Jibo respectively from Imo and Kano States.
Elsewhere beyond the attached picture are also the very high ranking likes of Kelechi Ndukwe, Commanding Officer of a US Navy guided-missile warship now a Commodore and Amanda Azubuike a Brigadier-General in the US Army.
Reminiscent of the younger Aidid and Smedley are they not all also uniformed muscle men and women defending American big business interests in the overall context?
The designation of Nigeria first by the 45th President of the United States as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) in 2020 subsequently in 2025 as America’s 47th did not both just fall out of the sky.
It took “thinking strategically and acting tactically” completely missed by President Tinubu and his insiders perhaps why Senator Mohammed Ndume in not too complimentary terms describe Villa apparatchik as “kakistocrats and kleptocrats.”
Apparently, the current chief tenant of the Villa has increasingly become too distracted with the political build-up of 2027 to closely monitor the international dynamics around him.
The glaring contradiction between Levy’s 2019 “voyage to the heart of Nigeria’s darkness” and the “The slaughtering of Christian worshippers’’ post on President Tinubu’s verified handle dated 29th January 2014 in retrospect currently locates him between a rock and hard place not only in the international arena but also domestically .
The Nigerian Foreign Affairs minister’s recent embarrassing attempt to internationally roll back the “Christian genocide” narrative on Piers Morgan Uncensored has already produced an embarrassing blowback currently trending.
Though not a career diplomat albeit Nigeria’s ambassador to Germany 2017-2023, Yusuf Tuggar did not need to box himself into such a controlled-chaos corner on his X handle post-interview by co-guest Goldie Ghamari.
While the insults she heaped on the honourable minister need not be reproduced here there is need to nonetheless properly understand that all over the world;
“Grand strategy sits at the highest level of national security decision-making, where judgements over a state’s overarching objectives and interests, as well as its security environment and resource base, are made.”
If so, does Nigeria have any such template under Tinubu?
The Americans obviously do under Trump.
Continued in Part II
