The Venezuela Blueprint: A clear and present danger to Nigeria’s future

Let us be blunt. The United States’ military capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela has sent a tremor through the foundations of international order, but here in Nigeria, we should feel it as a quake. This is not abstract geopolitics; it is a live demonstration of a new, ruthless doctrine that directly threatens our sovereignty, our stability, and our already fragile economic future. While the world debates the legality of executing a foreign arrest warrant via invasion, we must analyse the precedent through the prism of Nigeria’s own fraught dynamics. The uncomfortable truth is that the parallels are too stark to ignore, and the implications for our business climate are catastrophic.

First, consider the structural similarities that make this precedent so dangerous. The American justification rests on targeting a resource-rich nation with profound internal divisions, an embattled leadership, and security challenges deemed a threat to American interests. Sound familiar? The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy’s “Trump Corollary” explicitly sanctifies intervention in the hemisphere against “drug cartels” and “illegal migration.” With a simple find-and-replace, substituting “terrorist factions” and “regional instability,” the same doctrinal logic can be retrofitted to the Nigerian context.

When powerful foreign actors persistently frame our complex, multi-faceted crises—rooted in governance, poverty, and historical grievance, through a reductive lens of “religious genocide,” they are not just misunderstanding us. They are constructing a narrative, brick by brick, that could one day be used to justify “kinetic” action. The Christmas Day strikes in Sokoto, for all their official coordination, were a potent signal: foreign powers will unilaterally set the timeline and the publicity for operations on our soil, turning our national security into their political theatre.

This reality fundamentally poisons Nigeria’s business climate. Investment, particularly the long-term, capital-intensive kind we desperately need, is a creature of predictability. It thrives on calculable risk. The invasion of Venezuela has introduced an incalculable new variable: the sovereign risk premium associated with foreign military intervention. Why would any serious investor commit billions to developing our oil fields, mineral deposits, or critical infrastructure if the ultimate threat is not just local regulatory shifts or instability, but the potential for a foreign power to invoke a new doctrine, freeze assets, or worse? Overnight, Nigeria’s cost of capital would skyrocket. Projects on the drawing board would be shelved. The fragile confidence keeping the naira and our bonds afloat would evaporate. We would face capital flight on a scale that would make previous episodes look like a gentle trickle, not because of our internal failures alone, but because of an externally manufactured, existential risk.

Read also: Why the United States wants Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro

Furthermore, this dynamic will exacerbate our most damaging internal divisions. Our political landscape, already polarised, would fracture under the pressure. One faction would inevitably align itself with the foreign power, seeking patronage and legitimisation, while another would rally around a defiant, nationalist banner. This would not be a healthy political debate; it would be a fight for survival that paralyses governance and deepens social fissures. The very notion of a unified national interest, already under strain, could shatter. In this environment, coherent economic policy becomes impossible. Reforms stall, corruption finds new avenues amid the chaos, and the government’s capacity to provide basic security, the primary contract with the citizenry, is further eroded, creating a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle of decline that external actors would then cite as further justification for their “concern.”

The path forward requires a cold, pragmatic reassessment rooted in fierce self-interest. We must cease our naive, reactive foreign policy. The goal is not to pick a fight with America, but to dramatically reduce our vulnerability. This means an urgent and genuine diversification of our economic and security partnerships. We must look beyond traditional, paternalistic allies and build strategic ties with other middle powers, in Asia, the Middle East, and within Africa itself, based on mutual benefit, not charity. More critically, we must get our own house in order with a wartime mentality. Fixing the power sector, streamlining a predatory regulatory environment, and addressing the root causes of insecurity in the Niger Delta and the North are no longer just domestic agenda items. They are acts of national defence. They are what make us less of a target.

The United States has shown its hand: a belief in power over rules, and in transaction over partnership. Nigeria cannot afford romanticism or outrage. We must respond with a hard-nosed, uncompromising focus on building a sovereign, resilient, and less exploitable nation. Our business climate and our very sovereignty depend on it. The world has changed; our strategy must change with it, or we will be its next casualty.

Cheta Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence, a geopolitical risk advisory

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