Donald Trump’s strike, tax reforms and elite conspiracy, by Rotimi Fasan

In ‘Nigeria’s problem comes from the north’, this column’s commentary of November 26, 2025, I dwelt on the issue of mass kidnappings and attacks on worship centres following the terrorist attack on the Christ Apostolic Church in Eruku, Ekiti Local Government Area of Kwara state. I examined that incident against the responses of northern, particularly Fulani leaders’ denialism, within the larger context of their responses to Nigeria’s geo-politics.

The section of the piece that is relevant to the point I wish to make at this moment comes from the fifth paragraph: “Let us face it: Nigeria has a problem of the north which can only be resolved once the dominant strand of the northern political establishment, which includes its religious elite, decides it is time to do so….There is no way the rest of us can provide a solution to a problem the north freely brought upon itself and is not prepared to resolve.’ 

The complicity of the northern, specifically Fulani, elite in the problems plaguing Nigeria has again been made obvious from the responses of most of them to the Christmas day bombing strikes against ISIL elements operating from within the Caliphate. The details of the strikes in Sokoto are now so well-known they need not detain us any further. Granted that Donald Trump has, since his intervention in the kidnapping discourse, misleadingly framed it as genocide against his self-described cherished Christians (Although I say this, as an aside, that many of the attacks reductively called herders-farmers conflicts across the middle belt easily fit the description of what is in common parlance called genocide). The point however is that Trump’s framing does not necessarily play out as attacks on ordinary Muslims as opposed to those who propagate anti-human doctrines at gunpoint in the name of Islam. 

What we must always remember is that Nigerians are all agreed that an end should be put to the activities of these terrorists that are on record to have killed, perhaps, more Muslims than Christians. At least that is the rhetorical posturing- that we all want the terrorists eliminated. But the angry and disappointed reactions of the northern establishment have made clear to the rest of Nigerians what their convoluted rhetoric that simultaneously applauds and excoriates efforts aimed at ending terrorism has for long occluded or being too shy to admit. As if with one voice, they have condemned the attacks that have been as uncompromising as they have been unambiguous in their messaging to both the terrorists and their sympathisers. But being the double-mouthed dissemblers that they are, they have while hiding behind a finger exploded in self-righteous outrage against what they claim is a breach of Nigeria’s sovereignty. 

They threaten retribution and launch attacks at President Bola Tinubu, accusing him of pushing Nigeria back into colonial bondage. Obviously, the many years Boko Haram and its affiliates killed and maimed, sacked communities across several states of the north-east, hoisting their flags and imposing taxation on the people, are expressions of Nigeria’s sovereign will. The same people who randomly hold a president that has spent less than three years in office responsible for a problem they consciously created across decades they wielded power without accountability- that same people now condemn and point fingers at everyone except themselves. It is now they remind us that the north-east, not the north-west, is the epicentre of sectarian insurgency. They may also want to tell us from where the insurgents draw inspiration for their activities in the name of Islam. Symbolically or otherwise, the Caliphate is or postures as the centre of Islam in northern Nigeria, if not the rest of the country. 

No one can deny its status as the ground zero of those acts of terror sympathetically called banditry. Nor is anyone, except those on the side of the terrorists, parroting self-serving sovereignty claims, blind or deaf to the recent engagements between the US and Nigeria in both Washington and Abuja, that heralded the strikes in Sokoto. Whether perpetrated in the name of religion, economic amelioration (joblessness) or cultural hegemony, and executed in the form of murders, targeted mass abductions for ransom or not, rape, land grab and sacking of communities, terrorism is terrorism and it should be so treated in total disregard of any mitigating claims. Now there are no collateral damages they could meaningfully hide behind to voice their opposition, the Fulani elite grab at straws. What is the point in lamenting to the point of distraction where counter-insurgency action begins? If common wisdom or supposed intelligence told us it’s Maiduguri or Southern Borno as we’ve been led to accept for many years but current intelligence says otherwise, why should we not go where the latest knowledge leads us? 

These people cannot see or are finding it too hard to accept that the game is almost up, that Nigerians are wiser and will no longer be misled by people who prescribe fake medications for ailments they created. Let us see just how far an ambush built on leaked intelligence can fare against laser-guided missiles travelling from nearly one thousand kilometres across oceans and landmass into grassland forests we were only recently told could not be penetrated by bombs. Let the renegade professors and mullahs of snake oils, appeasers and spokespersons of terrorists, make their way into the forests as they have been doing in the name of engaging and seeking amnesty for common murderers. It is their luck should one of Trump’s gifts make its landing at such hour. All that talk about compromising Nigeria’s sovereignty is part of the deflective activities of a drowning elite to direct attention away from their visceral anger at and opposition to the Bola Tinubu administration, an administration whose actions have rendered most of them, including those who had vowed to retire the President, irrelevant in the present scheme of things. 

Many have lost while others are losing relevance. They are desperate to wind back the hands of the clock and will do anything to gain attention. It is in that spirit that Nigeria’s political elite across regions and party lines are also joining the bandwagon to badmouth four tax bills/laws on the eve of their implementation. It does not matter to them that the provisions of these bills, some of which became part of Nigeria’s statutes since June 26, 2025, are largely in favour of the poor majority. They are rather quibbling over nondescript administrative details while ignoring substantive issues in the provision. But this coach has since left the station and, except God wants it so, their threats to prevent Tinubu’s re-election is a puff of hot air. Ultimately, the fate of the defeated awaits them. 

Happy New Year!

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