Tinubu for all Nigerians

Last week, Africa Confidential, a geopolitical intelligence newsletter, reported an unusual foreign lobbying contest between the Nigerian federal government and the so-called Biafra Republic Government in Exile (BRGIE) over the vexing false claims of Christian genocide and persecution. Our newspapers quickly took up the story, reporting that diplomats, opposition parties and others are against the government’s move. For me, however, the federal government is right to defend Nigeria against disinformation campaigns by treasonable entities. The real issue is how the government goes about it.

First of all, there is no question that the government’s action is correct. It is now clear that this whole sad business is a targeted and well-coordinated disinformation campaign against Nigeria, but with real political and national security consequences for us all. If this issue is allowed to fester on, it has direct potentials to continue to influence our domestic politics and foreign policy for the foreseeable future, and in ways that risk tearing the country further apart. Any Nigerian government is right to do everything in its power to bring it to rest.

Secondly, the United States is practically a country of hustlers, a strategic arena for all kinds of interests. Virtually any issue can be monetised, politicised or can become government policy. In the U.S., the White House and its sprawling executive machinery, Congress, the media, policy think-tanks, civil society and faith-based organisations are all strategic narrative spaces for influencing concrete government policy action. This is not theory. We have seen it already on this very Christian genocide claim which started like a prank but rapidly morphed into unprecedented missile attacks by an America that now appears intent on gobbling up other countries’ resources by naked force, as we are also seeing elsewhere also.

Given all these, it would be irresponsible of any Nigerian government to simply fold its arms and watch Biafra non-state actors go about orchestrating destabilising influence operations against Nigeria among powerful constituencies in the U.S. without the government doing something to counter them. None of this is an argument for substituting formal diplomacy with foreign lobbying firms, of course. If anything, this issue has demonstrated the strategic importance of Nigeria’s foreign missions, and it is a wonder that the process of appointing their formal structures in most countries is still in slow motion. But formal diplomatic engagement is neither the only nor always the best means of solving problems in international affairs. The use of lobbying firms, public affairs specialists, and strategic communications to advance specific objectives is standard practice and legitimate statecraft among states worldwide.

However, strategic engagement with foreign publics alone, however influential they are, would not go far enough to bring this issue to rest. The federal government must also strategically engage Nigerian publics, to use the register of strategic communications. In today’s Nigeria, there is a direct ideological and rhetorical alignment between the very publics the government is seeking to influence in the U.S. and some communities right here at home. This is why the claims of Christian genocide and persecution, though false and factually baseless, still quickly caught fire among millions in this country, regardless of its source.

That linkage, therefore, is the key to any strategic engagement, and means that external lobbying is likely to be most effective if government’s official line on the issue goes in tandem with domestic popular narratives. Otherwise, positive effect will be limited, which has already played out in recent weeks. A significant portion of Nigerian Christians believe this narrative of Christian genocide, including, unfortunately, among crucial sections like media and civil society. This, in turn, implies that the problem is not merely misinformation or that people are misinformed. Rather, it reflects the failure of state-citizen communication, and more broadly our retrogressive political socialization, both of which are longstanding problems in Nigeria.

Nigerian governments have always regarded strategic communication with citizens as an unnecessary burden or afterthought, which tends to leave the rhetorical vacuum for all manner of parochial voices to fill. And where the government bothers to engage citizens at all, the approach tends to be direct or combative, rather than through the more effective subtle mechanisms. There are exceptions to this general picture, of course, but the main point is that the notion of state capacity also includes the ability of the state to effectively channel the communicative energies of its citizens into speech that affirms individual level disagreements without threatening national security. Therefore, the government must engage meaningfully with Nigerian Christians who believe the genocide narrative in a way that simultaneously helps to reduce national political temperature, but also enables more critical reflection on foreign events.

Moreover, for much discussion on this issue so far, the concerns and feelings of Nigerian Muslims tend to be overlooked. It now appears taken for granted that all Nigerian Muslims are terrorists, terrorist sympathisers or terrorist financiers. This is a dangerous narrative blind spot, but even the most superficial look at our mainstream and social media will indicate it. This narrative is gaining ground perhaps because Muslims and Muslim leaders have been largely silent on this issue. That silence has helped us all avoid an all-out religious confrontation in a volatile context such as ours. But the silence of Muslims is not an admission of guilt by association, and thus cannot be taken for granted by the government or media pundits.

In short, the federal government must also engage meaningfully with Nigerian Muslims and reassure them of their religious freedom and rightful place within the Nigerian federation too. There is increasing apprehension among Nigerian Muslims right now that they are being suppressed merely to please their Christian compatriots. In many Muslim-majority states, the general feeling is that the government is discriminating against them through policy bias, symbolic exclusion and president whose body language presents him as being overly attentive to Christian anxieties at their own detriment. Like the Christian genocide claims, such Muslim apprehensions need not be true to be a threat to national security.

Besides, the origins of such apprehensions are not far-fetched. In Nigeria’s religious political psychology, there is a general tendency of binary oppositions such that doing something for one religious group generates a feeling of taking something away from the other group. For example, when the government helped to subsidise Hajj operations for Muslims a few years ago, it was criticised by Christians as favouring Muslims against them with federal funds, even though it was government policy that raised the costs in the first place.

Likewise, engaging one group only on such a controversial issue could generate feelings of exclusion in the other group, and the narrative pendulum of exclusion will simply swing in the opposite direction while the problem remains. What is required is a tactful balancing act that many feel has, unfortunately, been lacking with this government so far. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu needs to handle this effort as a president for all Nigerians, as it should be.

Finally, and for me most importantly, it is not enough for the federal government to engage strategic publics at home and abroad. The federal government must go further to assert its sovereign power and authority. The attempt by Biafran non-state actors to lobby foreign governments to sanction, isolate or otherwise intervene in Nigeria just in order to promote their own narrow secessionist agenda is neither peaceful political dissent nor benign advocacy. The federal government must do everything in its power to bring any members of the group who holds a Nigerian passport to trial because their actions amount to treason under Nigerian law and must be treated as such. The government must draw this line because that too is a message.

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