…Rejects US designation of our Nigeria as “country of Particular concern” and the proposed military invasion.
By Ayo Thomas
Higher Education Leadership and Policy Project, HELP. Has strongly rejected the recent designation by the United States [USA] listing Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” over alleged systematic persecution of Christians.
This assertion is not only misleading, inaccurate and unjustified, but it also raises serious concerns about the intent and timing of such a declaration and poses questions about the underlying motives and concealed hidden interests masked beneath the veil of international law and human rights advocacy. The strategic troubling undertone is therefore a threat to Nigeria’s sovereignty and the professional reputation and integrity of its Armed Forces.
Today, Nigeria has consistently maintained unwavering constitutional commitment to religious freedom and the protection of all faiths and of worshippers across its diverse population. Our diverse population—comprising Christians, Muslims, and traditional worshippers—continues to coexist under the principles of tolerance and mutual respect the protection of law and the vigilance of our Armed forces. While Nigeria faces complex internal security challenges, these are rooted in decades of historical, ethnic, socio-economic, expanding underground criminal enterprise, regional political dynamics—not religious persecution. To simplistically reduced these issues to a narrative of religious genocide conclude and frame them as such is a distortion of reality and a disservice to the efforts of our committed Armed forces working to preserve national unity.
To us at Higher Education leadership and Policy project [HELP], a research and Policy based advocacy group, it is more troubling, however, to note the pattern of external commentary and intervention that appears to align with long-standing strategic studies and forecasts commissioned and issued by U.S. military institutions. These studies,
some dating back over a decade, speculated that Nigeria’s internal crises could escalate to a point where the military would be weakened and the nation fractured by 2030. The current designation appears to echo these forecasts, casting doubt on its neutrality and suggesting a deeper geopolitical agenda aimed at undermining Nigeria’s sovereignty and destabilizing its core institutions.
Again, the timing and tone of this designation also raise serious questions about whether it is a precursor to deeper interference—including the possibility of a long-term orchestrated device to explore the nation’s insecurity to fully label the country a terrorist nation so as to enforce their enabling law for foreign military intrusion masked as
humanitarian concern.
Yet, it also suggests more than mere concern, it echoed a deeper geopolitical script that seeks to delegitimize Nigeria’s sovereignty and destabilize its core institutions, particularly the Armed Forces and the Army in particular. Yet, the Nigeria’s Armed Forces has remained undaunted and continue to make immense sacrifices to preserve national unity and protect all citizens, regardless of religious or any other affiliation.
To target the nation under the guise of human rights concerns, while ignoring the broader socioeconomic and political context and the efforts being made, is both unfair and counterproductive Higher Education leadership and Policy project [HELP] firmly reject any attempt, direct or indirect, to undermine the authority, morale, or operational capacity, integrity and reputation of the Nigerian Armed Forces. Our military remains the backbone of national unity and territorial integrity.
We call on the military leadership to remain resolute, vigilant, and undistracted by this external provocation. The military has the support of Nigerian citizens not to tolerate any form of foreign military presence or influence that risk inflaming tensions that may undermine the nation’s fragile regional stability or one that erode trust and compromises our national sovereignty or destabilizes our democratic institutions.
The military and the citizens will therefore not be coerced into narratives that serve external strategic interests but will remain resolute in our commitment to national cohesion, religious harmony, and the strengthening of our democratic institutions under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu GCFR.
While we acknowledge and appreciate the concern of the United States [USA] for all the support and encouragements of the past and present, we call for constructive engagement, genuine cooperation, respectful dialogue and mutual understanding, rather than unilateral declarations and speculative narratives that may put diplomatic relations at risk and that may deepen mistrust and misrepresenting the realities on the ground. Unilateral declarations that misrepresent facts and fuel mistrust do not serve the interests of either nation or risk undermining regional stability.
Nigerians remains open to sustainable socioeconomic, political and diplomatic partnership—but only on terms that respect our independence, our people, and our Armed Forces.