Keypoints:
- Op-ed challenges New York Times reporting on Nigeria
- Argues US airstrikes followed years of documented violence
- Questions Nigeria’s lobbying priorities amid insecurity
THE New York Times’ recent report, How a Screwdriver Salesman Helped Fuel U.S. Airstrikes in Nigeria, published on January 18, 2026, is not merely flawed journalism. It represents a troubling attempt to rewrite a decade of violent history.
By reducing the complex and harrowing reality of mass killings in Nigeria’s Middle Belt to the supposed influence of a single activist in Onitsha, the newspaper prioritised narrative convenience over the lived experiences of thousands of victims.
A narrative built on selective scepticism
The article attempts to delegitimise the Christmas Day 2025 US airstrikes by asserting that President Donald Trump relied on ‘unverified’ data supplied by Emeka Umeagbalasi.
That suggestion is deeply misleading.
To claim that senior US lawmakers — including Senator Ted Cruz and Representatives Riley Moore and Chris Smith — were ‘hoodwinked’ by a shopkeeper is to insult the intelligence community and disregard congressional oversight processes.
Several of these lawmakers had already visited conflict-affected communities, including Benue State, where entire Christian villages had been razed years before the 2025 strikes were authorised.
Years of documented failure ignored
The New York Times article conveniently overlooks the role of Nigeria’s previous administration in laying the groundwork for today’s crisis.
For eight years under President Muhammadu Buhari, the state increasingly functioned not as a protector of vulnerable communities but as an enabler of mass displacement.
In my earlier writings — notably the 2021 essay Extolling Open Grazing in the 21st Century — I described the revival of colonial-era grazing routes as an aberration in modern governance and a direct threat to agrarian societies.
Official government messaging at the time effectively forced communities to choose between their ancestral lands and their lives.
The open grazing agenda
The conflict was never merely a misunderstanding over resources.
Through policies such as Ruga settlements and cattle colonies, the administration signalled that the safety of Middle Belt communities was conditional on surrendering their heritage.
This ‘occupation agenda’, explored in my article ‘Buhari’s Obnoxious Open Grazing Routes’, transformed land disputes into existential crises.
The displaced millions erased from view
To dismiss data on mass atrocities as ‘fallacious’ ignores the reality on the ground.
Benue State alone hosts more than 1.5 million internally displaced persons — citizens forced from their farms for refusing to give up land to armed herders.
Rather than attacking local activists, the New York Times should be questioning why these Nigerians remain trapped in dehumanising camps years after their displacement.
Reframing terrorism as sectarian politics
The article further mischaracterises counter-terrorism operations as an ‘attack on the Muslim North’.
This framing ignores that the Lakurawa group targeted in Sokoto is a recognised ISIS-affiliated terror cell that has killed Christians and Muslims alike.
Portraying anti-terror strikes as religious provocation risks inflaming tensions far more than the military response itself.
Nigeria’s lobbying scandal
If there is a true indictment of the current administration, it lies not in American newspapers but in Washington lobbying disclosures.
Reports indicate that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s government has committed approximately $9 million to US lobbying firms, including the DCI Group, through the Office of the National Security Adviser and private intermediaries.
At a time of collapsing domestic security, this expenditure represents a profound misplacement of priorities.
Image laundering versus citizen protection
Instead of paying roughly $750,000 per month to foreign lobbyists, those funds could have been redirected toward rebuilding security infrastructure and facilitating the return of displaced families in Benue, Plateau and across the Middle Belt.
No public relations campaign can substitute for the physical safety of citizens.
The administration must also explain why a private law firm — Aster Legal in Kaduna — was used to facilitate the contract, bypassing conventional diplomatic channels.
A crisis of credibility
The New York Times may pursue its own editorial framing, but Nigeria’s leadership is equally complicit through what can only be described as transactional propaganda.
National credibility cannot be purchased in Washington, DC. It must be earned through peace, accountability and citizen protection at home.
By dismissing local data and disregarding eyewitness evidence seen by US lawmakers, the newspaper risks becoming an accessory to the tragedy it claims to interrogate.
The Christmas Day strikes were not the beginning of this story. They were a delayed response to nearly a decade of silence — a silence the New York Times now appears determined to reinforce.
Erasmus Ikhide is a Lagos-based journalist and doctoral candidate in peace and conflict studies
