The United States has no business meddling in Nigeria

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Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation. He has written books on Africa.

U.S. President Donald Trump, after watching an imperfect Fox News documentary and listening to misplaced comments from Texas Senator Ted Cruz, has threatened Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, with military assault.

Nigeria’s crime is supposedly its persecution of Christians and its enabling of Muslims who allegedly target Christians.

But what is occurring is equal-opportunity mayhem. Both Muslims and Christians are being targeted throughout the nation. The problem is that Nigeria is a failed state and its leaders have long been unable to stem or even to mitigate the waves of violence that cascade across the out-of-control nation.

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Nigeria holds at least 220 million people, and the population will soon swell to 400 million and then to 500 million at the end of this century. Muslim women tend to have many more children than their Christian counterparts.

In the northern half of the country, where many of the country’s Muslims live, the population is exploding. Nigeria as a whole is teeming with young people. The median age now and for many coming decades will be around 19, eventually shifting upward to 21 and 22. As many as 100 million Christians live in Nigeria, often without fear and happy with their Muslim neighbours.

The real issue for Nigeria in this century, and therefore for the United States, is not religiously motivated killings. It is whether Nigeria can achieve a plausible demographic dividend. Can Nigeria provide meaningful employment to the significant proportion of its young people who want work and cannot find jobs?

It is from these running packs of unemployed and largely unemployable people (for they often lack exposure to formal secondary schooling or have failed their school examinations) that the various militant groups plaguing today’s Nigeria are recruiting. The longest running is Boko Haram, a fundamentalist Islamic quasi-religious jihadist movement that has attacked northeastern Nigeria relentlessly since 2006. The Islamic State of West Africa operates in the same area. Both target Christians and Muslims.

In the two decades since both jihadist enterprises began to rampage throughout the region south of Lake Chad and across the southern reaches of neighbouring Chad and Niger, plus the northwestern borderlands of Cameroon, their warriors have largely targeted and attacked fellow Muslims who were deemed insufficiently Islamist in their beliefs and practices. Boko Haram and the Islamic State have shot up mosques and schools, kidnapped Muslim girls and boys from secondary schools, then betrothed the girls and turned the boys into soldiers.

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Boko Haram and the Islamic State are not anti-Christian crusaders. Nor is the contemporary attempt in southeastern Nigeria to resuscitate the Biafra secessionist state that warred with the rest of Nigeria from 1967 to 1970. The 21st-century Biafranists are Christians fighting Christians.

Southern Nigeria is traditionally Christian, with a very heavy Pentecostal penetration. Some of the biggest and wealthiest Pentecostal churches in the world are in Lagos and other southern cities. But Muslims also reside in the south, and Christians and Muslims respect and honour each other’s faiths and live peaceably side by side. Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is Muslim, and Oluremi Tinubu, his wife, is a leading Protestant pastor.

Those calling for U.S. military action against Nigeria simply do not understand how a place like Nigeria functions. Its key problems overwhelmingly stem not from religious intolerance and persecution, but from incomplete educational accomplishments, health deficiencies exacerbated by Mr. Trump’s evisceration of USAID and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, as well as the corrupt dealings that infect many Nigerian institutions.

About the only part of Nigeria where Muslims may be attacking Christians, and sometimes (but not always) winning, is the Middle Belt. This is the vast region north of Abuja, the political capital, and south of the great Muslim-majority states of northern Nigeria. Here, Muslim Fulani herdsmen have for years been battling settled farmers, most of whom are Christian. The struggle here is over land, not belief – the result of rising populations and the movement of Fulani southward.

Mr. Trump is both uninformed and allowed by his sycophantic staff and the hollowing out of U.S. State Department expertise to remain ignorant. Just as white Afrikaners are hardly being targeted by criminal South Africans more often than Black South Africans are targeted (and killed in much larger number), so Christians and Muslims in Nigeria are similarly subject to discrimination, unwanted attacks and high rates of crime.

The U.S. has no business meddling in Nigeria based on false assumptions, just as it has no legal basis blasting small boats allegedly bringing drugs toward the U.S. when Mexican-produced fentanyl is the real scourge. Ignorance is no excuse for bad governance.