By Luka Binniyat
“America only cares about its personal interest… any country they invade is left worse.” That’s the new hymn of social media patriots and half-informed commentators who believe repeating clichés equals wisdom and hindsight.
“Look at Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran and see how the U.S messed them up! … it’s all about Nigeria’s oil, Solid minerals and envy” they scream, beating their chests online as if hashtags could resurrect the thousands of dead killed by Islamists. Some, probably high on something, swear they’ll defend Nigeria from any “invading ‘imperialist’ force”, with what?
Nonsense!: Whoever has seen American Corporations dropping by parachutes anywhere and start drilling resources!
To me, these scare mongering and bravados are not just empty; they are insults. I take it as deep, stinging insults to the survivors of genocide I’ve covered since 2012. They reek of persons of privilege untouched and immuned of the pains the millions whose lives are being wasted in affected areas of the on going genocide in Nigeria.
Yes, there is Genocide against ethnic Chritians in Nigeria Middle Belt by Islamists! I am a witness to that evil.
So, come closer. Let’s leave Twitter. Let’s walk through what’s left of the parts of the Middle Belt, through the smoke, ruins and the silence where laughter once lived.
If your father and mother were slaughtered like rams before your eyes, killers screaming “Allahu Akbar,” your siblings cut down, your home torched, and your village erased, folks, what the heck do you care about sovereignty? If you’ve ever buried the charred remains of toddlers and grandmothers whose only crime was to be Christian, to be native, to be alive, then maybe, just maybe, the sound of an American helicopter hovering over to terrorists camps might not strike you as ‘imperialism’ but as overdue justice.
From Southern Kaduna to Plateau, from Benue to Niger, from Southern Kebbi to Kwara, and down to Southern Borno — I have covered stories of blood and betrayal. These are areas I can speak for having been on ground there.
I’ve walked through bubbling communities that exist now only on old maps. I’ve interviewed mothers clutching photos of daughters still missing after mass abductions. My team was in Chibok. We heard it all!
What of cases where entire communities were flattened, their ruins claimed by the bush and their ancestral lands now owned and occupied by the terrorists. If it’s in the Middle Belt, Nigeria Press called it “Banditry.” But, to God be the Glory: The world calls it by its real name today: Ethnic cleansing; Christian genocide! – selective elimination of a people as a result of their faith, race, ideology et al.
And what of the survivors? Visit the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps — those unending rows of misery in the Middle Belt. There you’ll meet children who were six when the first attacks came in 2010. They are 26 now, still uneducated, still in tents, still watching politicians fly over their heads to campaign rallies. Their memories are sharp as blades: the night raids, the gunfire, the screams, the running barefoot into the dark. They have become adults in a country that forgot them.
You think they care about sovereignty?
Now imagine the final insult: the Nigerian government spending billions of naira to “rehabilitate” the same terrorists who wiped out their families. Men who emerged from forests, tired of killing, are cleaned up, dressed up, and declared “repentant.” They are given homes, trained, and paid monthly stipends — all while their victims rot in forgotten camps. I saw it myself in Maiduguri, May 2023, with my colleague Mike Odeh. Government officials smiled for the cameras as “former” Boko Haram fighters were reintegrated into society – sometimes to the same communities they once burned. Some of these “repentant” men now live with the Christian girls they kidnapped, raped, converted by force, and impregnated and raise a family with in government provided homes in Maiduguri. The parents of the girls, scattered to the four directions of the winds, can do nothing. The story is even more heartbreaking than this. Can there be a greater mockery of justice?
Even our gallant troops — the true patriots — feel betrayed. Many of them fought in the forests and mountains, losing comrades in battles against the same terrorists now embraced by the state. Soldiers have whispered to me in bitterness and disbelief: “We watched our friends die fighting these killers. Now the government calls them good guys and pays them maybe as much as we earn.” Their morale bleeds. The army’s honour is humiliated by a system that rewards terror and punishes sacrifice. The have an annoying phrase for it – Non Kinetic! Imagine facing gunfire in Zamfara or Borno, only to see your enemy pardoned, housed, and celebrated at a “peace talk.” Some of these killers even flaunt their weapons at government-sponsored parley events, strutting before police, DSS, and politicians who dare not raise a finger. What message does that send to the soldiers risking everything on the frontlines? What do the civilians that the most vulnerable think of their country. They are not thinking of it as sovereign. It’s captured! and by rag-tag illiterate Islamists fighters, not the U.S Army!
So tell me — if you were a survivor, a displaced farmer, a widow, or even a disillusioned soldier — how would you receive the news of America declaring Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” and hinting at intervention? Would you beat your chest in defence of sovereignty? Or would you whisper a prayer that someone, anyone, might finally bring order, justice, and peace to this bleeding land?
Because here’s the truth: Nigeria has failed millions of its citizens. The state has become a spectator to its own disintegration. When governors in the North West hold peace talks where mass murderers attend fully armed with the approval of Office of the National Security Adviser; when killers and génocidiars become celebrities of “repentance” and “rehabilitation” — sovereignty becomes a cruel joke in the psyche of all men and women of conscience.
Those shouting “no foreign boots on our soil” should first visit the ashes of Gwoza, mass graves in Bokkos, the tragedy of Guma, the mass waste of human and material in Wasagu/Danko, the cruel living conditions of our IDPs Cameroon; in the FCT.
Let them stand among these ruins, conjure the wailing souls of the innocent and ask themselves: whose soil is left to protect?
What is sovereignty worth when it shelters genocide and rewards impunity?
Make no mistake: when I say survivors will welcome the Yankees, it’s not a cry for colonisation. It’s a cry for help. It’s the plea of people abandoned by their own nation. For them, the U.S. flag on terrorists sites would not symbolize imperialism — not exploitation, but the faint hope of justice.
Nigeria must wake up!.
It must choose to defend its citizens, not their killers. If it doesn’t, the cracks in our national wall; in our hearts, will widen until foreign powers walk right through them — not with necessary with armour tanks, but with moral authority that traumatized citizens approve.
As someone who has walked through the smoke, heard the wails, and seen the graves, I can tell you this without hesitation: the survivors — millions of them — and millions more who stand in solidarity, will not cry over lost sovereignty. They will whisper, “At last, someone came.”
And when that happens, don’t be surprised if they stand at the roadside, waving at the incoming foreign troops — not as conquerors, but as deliverers — and say with quiet relief, “Welcome, Yankees
