Zainab Tunkara Clarkson: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 29 December 2025:
As global attention cautiously drifts back to West Africa, a troubling narrative is beginning to take shape. Shifts in rhetoric from Western political figures including U.S. President Donald Trump’s blunt foreign-policy worldview are reviving familiar anxieties about Nigeria’s political future. For those who remember Libya and Iraq, the warning signs feel uncomfortably familiar.
The comparison is not new, but it is growing more urgent. The descent into chaos in both Iraq and Libya was paved with language about instability, corruption, and the need for decisive intervention. In each case, externally driven solutions dismantled state authority without building durable alternatives. The result was prolonged violence, weakened institutions, and regional destabilisation.
Nigeria today stands at a critical crossroads
With more than 200 million people, vast oil reserves, and one of the most dynamic youth populations in the world, Nigeria is not merely another fragile state. It is Africa’s economic and political anchor. Yet the country is under undeniable strain: persistent insecurity in the North, secessionist agitation in the Southeast, economic hardship, and deep public distrust in political leadership.
But do these challenges justify external interference?
Libya in 2011 was destabilised under the banner of humanitarian intervention. Muammar Gaddafi was removed, but the state collapsed, creating a power vacuum that continues to fuel instability across Africa and the Mediterranean. Iraq, framed as a mission to end tyranny, remains deeply scarred by sectarian conflict and foreign entanglements two decades later.
Like Iraq before 2003 and Libya before 2011, Nigeria is strategically important, resource-rich, and internally diverse, ethnically, religiously, and politically. Corruption allegations, insurgencies in the North, secessionist movements in the East, and eroding public trust echo the pre-collapse conditions of both Middle Eastern nations.
What is most alarming is the increasingly casual discussion in some policy circles of a possible military-led intervention, framed as restoring order or combating terrorism.
Nigeria, despite its shortcomings, remains a functioning democracy. Undermining its sovereignty would unleash consequences Africa and the world cannot afford. West Africa is already grappling with a resurgence of military coups.
Further destabilisation in Nigeria would send shockwaves through the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), disrupt critical trade corridors, and risk triggering a regional refugee crisis of historic proportions.
If Nigeria becomes the next experiment in foreign-led regime change, the fallout will not stop at its borders. Economic collapse, security vacuums, and political fragmentation would undermine African continental integration and reverse decades of development gains.
The harder questions must be asked. Is there an emerging playbook for weakening powerful African states under the language of rescue and reform? Are we once again viewing Africa through the outdated lens of intervention rather than partnership?
There is, however, a viable alternative one grounded in policy reform rather than force.
First, international partners should prioritise institutional strengthening over regime engineering. This means sustained support for judicial independence, electoral integrity, and anti-corruption bodies not short-term security partnerships that empower coercive forces without accountability.
Second, Nigeria’s security crisis requires a community-centred approach, not militarisation alone. Investments in intelligence-led policing, regional cooperation to disrupt arms flows, and rehabilitation programmes for former combatants would be far more effective than foreign boots or expanded airstrikes.
Third, addressing Nigeria’s youth crisis must be central to any stability strategy. With over 60 per cent of the population under 25, large-scale investment in job creation, vocational training, digital entrepreneurship, and green industries is not optional it is existential. Idle youth remain the most vulnerable recruitment pool for extremist and criminal networks.
Fourth, international financial institutions should align debt relief, development financing, and trade access with governance reform benchmarks, not political loyalty. Conditionality must incentivise transparency, service delivery, and inclusive growth not austerity that deepens public resentment.
Finally, Nigeria’s federal system must be strengthened through meaningful decentralisation. Empowering state and local governments with fiscal autonomy and accountability would ease centre-periphery tensions, reduce secessionist sentiment, and bring governance closer to citizens
History offers a clear warning. When foreign policy becomes a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel, it leaves nations broken long after the headlines fade.
Nigeria requires reform urgently, but reform must come from within. Strengthening democratic institutions, expanding economic opportunities for its youth, investing in local governance, and addressing inequality are the only sustainable responses to its challenges. Military solutions have consistently failed to resolve complex socio-political crises.
As someone who has spent years researching governance, development and diversity in Africa, I urge restraint, caution and responsibility.
Nigeria must be allowed the space to reform, stabilise, and rise not be pushed toward the edge in the name of democracy. (Author: Zainab Tunkara Clarkson).
Be the first to comment