Nigeria’s Washington moment deserves more sobriety than either side is currently offering
There is a version of this week’s news that reads like triumph, and another that reads like scandal, and, tellingly, both come from the same building on Aso Rock.
On one hand, President Bola Tinubu received a letter from Donald Trump, dated July 6 and released to the public more than two weeks later, in which the American president praised Nigeria’s “decisive leadership” against terrorism and reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to the two countries’ security partnership. Presidential aides have understandably wanted the letter read as validation, proof, in Daniel Bwala’s words, that months of joint operations, intelligence-sharing and the 2026 Defence Cooperation Roadmap are “yielding results.” A senior ISIS commander killed in a joint Lake Chad operation is a concrete, verifiable outcome, and it is fair for the government to want credit for it.
On the other hand, barely a day later, the same presidency was in full battle mode against Atiku Abubakar, accusing the former vice president’s American lobbyists of petitioning Trump, the State Department and members of Congress with a decades-old civil forfeiture case tied to Tinubu’s past. Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga’s statement, provocatively titled “When Will Atiku Abubakar Report Himself to President Trump?”, was less a rebuttal than an indictment, accusing Atiku of everything from “diplomatic immunity”-seeking to complicity in a 2010 US Senate corruption inquiry to responsibility for job losses during Obasanjo-era privatisation.
Put the two stories side by side and an uncomfortable irony emerges: the presidency wants Washington’s attention taken seriously when it flatters Nigeria, and dismissed as illegitimate foreign meddling when it doesn’t.
The sovereignty argument has real weight
Onanuga’s core objection, that Nigeria’s internal political contests should not be litigated before foreign governments, is not a frivolous one. There is a long, uncomfortable history of African political actors seeking validation or leverage from Western capitals rather than from their own electorates, and it is reasonable for any government, of any stripe, to bristle at a domestic rival paying foreign lobbyists to press a case abroad rather than at home. If the reporting is accurate that Atiku’s team spent significant sums pursuing this course, that is a legitimate subject of scrutiny, not just a talking point invented by his opponents. A sitting president’s opponents have every right to attack his legitimacy, but the venue matters, and “before the US Congress” is a very different venue from the Nigerian courts, INEC, or the ballot box, all of which, it should be said, already adjudicated the underlying forfeiture matter in the 2023 election cycle and its litigation.
