Trump, Nigeria and the Illusions of Yusuf Bangura – Abdul Mahmud

By Abdul Mahmud

I read Professor Yusuf Bangura’s article, ‘Trump threatens military action against Nigeria: Musings on his real intentions, with mixed feelings’. On one hand, it is an impressive display of historical recall and geopolitical curiosity. On the other, it reads like a time capsule from a bygone era, when left-leaning scholars believed that every act of American foreign policy could be explained by the simple formula of capitalism plus imperial greed. It is an elegant conspiracy theory wrapped in the familiar fabric of anti-American sentiment.

Bangura is a scholar of great intellect. His years of writing from Switzerland and the Nordic region have given him a certain distance from the ground realities of African politics. As it seems the distance has also created a problem of proportion. In the op-ed, he builds a grand narrative of Trump’s supposed desire to invade Nigeria, not for moral or humanitarian reasons, but for minerals buried beneath its soil. His argument is dressed in the language of Marxism. It speaks of “resource corridors”, “imperial ambitions”, and “hidden motives”. But, it fails to account for the basic fact that Trump’s politics, even in its most erratic form, is rarely about imperialism. It is about spectacle and sound.

This is where Bangura’s analysis loses its weight. The picture of Trump that emerges from his piece is that of a calculating imperialist, mapping out Africa’s mineral routes with a compass and a cigar. The typical Uncle Tom in his cabin. The real Trump is a creature of compulsive personal impulse, not ideology. He does not read maps. He does not read reports. He reads headlines and reacts to them. His statements, like the one threatening to wipe out Islamic terrorists, not invade Nigeria, are often provocations meant to serve the mood of his base at home. They are domestic theatre, not foreign strategy.

To imagine that Trump, in his second coming, is driven by a detailed plan to control Nigeria’s rare earths is to misread both Trump and the times. The global race for critical minerals is real, yes. The United States, China, and Europe are all seeking alternatives to Chinese supply chains. But, Trump’s brand of politics is not anchored in any long-term global thinking. It is transactional, populist, and chaotic. He is more interested in optics than outcomes. The threat to Islamic terrorists in Nigeria, as crude as it sounds, fits his pattern of dramatic pronouncements meant to rally a certain evangelical or conservative audience.

Bangura’s arguments hive off the old frameworks of dependency theory that shaped African leftist thoughts in the 1970s and 1980s. It was the period when every Western intervention was seen as a scramble for resources. The narrative had power then. It helped expose real patterns of exploitation by multinational corporations and Western governments. But, in 2025, that framework feels exhausted. Global capital is no longer uni-directional.

China, Russia, and India are now major players in Africa’s resource landscape. Nigeria itself has courted them all. If we are to discuss imperial competition, we must discuss the whole field, not just one actor. It is also ironic that Bangura invokes the historical record of CIA coups and Cold War interventions as evidence of what America might do next. The Cold War era cannot be projected onto the present with such pedestrian ease.

The world has changed and it is changing rapidly. America is no longer the uncontested superpower it was in the 1990s. Its economic leverage has declined. Its military overstretch has produced fatigue rather than confidence. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have scarred the American psyche. Even the most hawkish elements in Washington are cautious about new entanglements abroad.

Bangura’s fear that Trump might bomb Nigeria to secure access to lithium and cobalt is, frankly, pedestrian. The US has more efficient ways of engaging with African resources through trade, investment, and soft power. What Trump’s threat represents is a rhetorical outburst, not a policy blueprint. If there is one thing the Nigerian government must learn from such posturing, it is to avoid panic. Nigeria’s diplomacy must remain calm, rational, and self-interested. Knowing the bungling and bumbling character of Tinubu’s Presidency, base posturing would always be its default response as all the president’s men are currently making.

From a personal point of view, I did not know Bangura while he taught at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, nor did I ever meet him during his time there. But his name and reputation preceded him when I was active in the Nigerian students movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s as President of the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS. He was often spoken of with respect as a thinker of depth, a scholar committed to social justice, and an analyst who could distil complex ideas into simple, forceful arguments.

Those qualities still show in his writing. But, what is missing in this piece is nuance. The Nigeria of today cannot be explained by the vocabulary of the past. The global order no longer conforms to the binaries of North and South, capitalist and anti-capitalist, exploiter and victim.

Bangura describes Nigeria’s violence with accuracy and fairness. He notes that both Christians and Muslims are victims of terror and banditry. He rightly identifies the role of non-state actors and the state’s weakness in responding to them. But, he fails to connect that reality to the limits of his own arguments.

The violence in Nigeria is driven less by imperial design and more by internal collapse, by the corrosion of the social contract, by poverty, and by the failure of governance. The crisis of Nigeria is not the crisis of resource imperialism; it is the crisis of the Nigerian state itself. If Trump’s threat has any consequence, it is not in the minerals of Zamfara or Nasarawa but in the political theatre of Washington. It is meant to show his supporters that he is tough on the world, that he stands with Christians against “persecution”.

The narrative plays well in conservative American churches and rightwing media. It is an appeal to performance rather than an objective plan. The danger lies not in invasion but in rhetoric; the kind that distorts complex realities into moral crusades. In effect, Bangura’s op-ed belongs to that long tradition of left scholarship that views history as a repetition of past betrayals. There is beauty in that suspicion since it keeps power in check.

But, there is also blindness in it. Not every American act is an imperial plot. Not every global shift hides a capitalist conspiracy. Sometimes, chaos is just chaos. Trump does not need rare earths to be reckless. Recklessness is his political signature.

But, this, in the end, must not be lost to us, Nigerians: the real task for Nigeria is not how to give meaning to Trump’s motives but how to fix the problems in its own backyard. The problem with Nigeria is not the threats of others; but, its inability to secure itself and translate its resources into the wellbeing of its citizens. Professor Bangura’s op-ed reminds us that the ghosts of old ideologies still wander among us.

They haunt the imagination of those who once believed the world could be neatly divided between oppressors and oppressed. But the new world is more tangled, more fragmented, more confusing. It demands new theories and new courage. We must learn to read power without nostalgia.

The America of Trump is not the America of Eisenhower. The Nigeria of today is not the colony of yesterday. The global left must wake up to this truth.

Otherwise, it will continue to write elegant op-eds that mistake noise for strategy and confusion for conquest.