Donald Trump and the White Man’s Burden in Nigeria

PRETORIA – On the eve of the American imperialist invasion of the Philippines in 1899, British poet and defender of empire Rudyard Kipling called on the United States:

Take on the white man’s burden:

The cruel peace wars.

Fill hungry mouths

And let the disease cease;

In the following decade, Kipling’s exhortation became the leitmotif of the West’s “civilizing” mission, justifying the imperial struggle to annex African and Asian territories. Under the pretext of stopping the wars of warlike savages and saving lost souls, the Western powers exploited the resources of their colonies. As the late political scientist Samuel Huntington noted, it was not the power of Western ideas but the brutality of their actions that made these imperial conquests possible.

However, the European colonization of Africa was based not only on weapons, but also on the Bible: the colonizers would transform pagan unbelievers into righteous Christians. US President Donald Trump appears to be following a similar scenario, threatening military intervention in Nigeria – an oil and mineral-rich country of 230 million people – to save the country’s Christian population from “genocide.” Echoing long-standing justifications for imperial land grabs, Trump recently posted on social media that the United States “could invade this now-disgraced country with weapons at the ready to completely wipe out Islamic terrorists.”

But, although The complex conflicts in Nigeria have claimed more than 100,000 lives since 2011With around 8,000 people killed in 2025 alone, Trump has shown no interest in saving lives in Nigeria, one of the “shithole countries” he denigrated in his first term. Eventually, his administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provided vital humanitarian assistance to 270,000 Nigerians and funded about 21 percent of Nigeria’s national health budget.

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In this context, Trump has three possible reasons for threatening to invade the country. The first is the mercantilist pursuit of rare minerals, about 30% of which are found in Africa. His broad proposal to the five African presidents who visited the White House in July focused on minerals, as did his abortive efforts to achieve peace between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.

It’s not the first time Trump has set his sights on another country’s natural resources. Starting in 2011, Trump proposed stealing Iraqi oil to “pay back” the United States for its interventions in the Middle East. More recently, their reckless military actions against oil-rich Venezuela, including the seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker in international waters, constituted a form of piracy.

Nigeria seems ready to plunder. Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a politician steeped in what political scientist Richard Joseph called prebendalism (the use of public office to generate material resources for those holding those offices and their clients and cronies), and previous Nigerian governments have conducted ineffective counterinsurgency operations. Their gross incompetence and misconduct, coupled with the greed of a kleptocratic elite concerned with the plight of their fellow citizens, have cast doubt on the future of democracy in Nigeria.

Raids on government coffers by profligate politicians have left the Nigerian military (once highly regarded for its peacekeeping efforts in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s) and police in a precarious position, posing a major obstacle to addressing security challenges. Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s national security adviser, has accused soldiers and police of selling and lending their weapons to “bad people”, while some government officials are suspected of working with terrorists. US sanctions against these people would be very popular in Nigeria.

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In such an unstable political environment, attackers often go unpunished and officials are rarely held accountable for failing to protect local populations. As a result, jihadist groups such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State’s West Africa Province have operated with impunity in northeastern Nigeria for years. But what Trump and many others miss is that these terrorists kill many more Muslims than Christians.

An equally explosive conflict has broken out in Nigeria’s fertile central belt between Muslim Fulani herders – backed by powerful political and business interests – and predominantly Christian farmers, which has claimed about 12,000 lives since 2010. But these disputes have more to do with land, grazing rights and water than with religion.

Meanwhile, kidnappings in northwest Nigeria, which have spread to other parts of the country, are largely motivated by banditry. Despite Tinubu’s claims to have eliminated more than 13,500 terrorists since he took office in May 2023, the death toll continues to rise: Amnesty International estimates there were at least 13,500 terrorists 10,217 terrorism-related deaths in the same period.

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Another possibility is that Trump is giving in to white evangelical Christians, who remain one of his strongest supporters. Nationalist and right-wing Christian think tanks in the United States, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Gatestone Institute, have promoted false narratives of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria, an approach recently reinforced by U.S. Senator Ted Cruz. By threatening humanitarian intervention in Nigeria, Trump can position himself as a strong defender of Christianity.

The third explanation is that Trump promotes racist stereotypes – playing on the “white savior” image – to strengthen his Make America Great Again (MAGA) base. Trump has long said loudly what others don’t say, encouraging white Americans to act on their most racist impulses. This year alone, he has falsely accused the black-led South African government of committing a “genocide” against white farmers, some of whom he invited to the United States as refugees, and he has expressed disgust at Somali immigrants, whom he has described as “trash” he does not want in the United States. The new National Security Strategy openly calls on Europe to stop immigration to ensure it remains “European”.

Any of these reasons, or a combination of them, suggests that Trump’s threats to invade Nigeria reflect an imperialist mentality. While some Nigerians are grateful to this insane would-be emperor for highlighting his administration’s security failings, for Trump and his MAGA base (and his ethno-nationalist allies in Europe), Nigeria is nothing more than part of a civilizing mission focused on reviving an era of white Christian supremacy.