— Brino Kumwenda
The audio version of this article is available here: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Christians in Northern Nigeria have been facing perennial persecution. According to a report by Intersociety, over 52,000 Christians have been murdered and 18,000 churches and 2,200 Christian schools have been attacked by Islamist militants in the last 14 years. In 2025, Donald Trump, the president of the most powerful nation on earth, the USA, threatened to deal with the jihadists if they did not stop killing Christians.
On Christmas day in 2025, Africa woke up to the news from Donald Trump on Truth Social “Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!…”
How should Christians in Africa react to Trump’s intervention in Nigeria? In this article, I propose two reactions.
Firstly, we should view it as God’s sovereign intervention. God alone controls and directs the affairs of the world. The Bible says in Proverbs 21:1, “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will.” God stirred the heart of Donald Trump to help the persecuted Christians in Nigeria.
No world or African leader in history has shown as much interest in the crisis in Nigeria as Trump has, and none of them has been as defiant and aggressive against the Islamist bandits there as Trump. It is as if he is the Nigerian president and a Christian, but he is neither! However, he is God’s creature, and God uses His creatures however He wills.
This is no strange occurrence at all. In 538 BC, God stirred the heart of Cyrus, the King of the World’s superpower, Persia, present-day Iran, to decree that the Jews should go back to their homeland after 70 years of captivity under Babylon. Cyrus was a gentile king, and he was not saved, yet he was used by God to release his covenant people, the Israelites, to fulfil His plan.
The Bible says in Ezra 1:1-4:
In the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing:
“Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem.
Reading this, you may think Cyrus was saved. But he was not. He was only implementing his empire’s policy of religious tolerance. He honoured all gods. But through his policy, God used this unbelieving ruler to release His people.
God ordained Cyrus before the foundation of the world to conquer Babylon, and send His people to their land. Through Isaiah, 150 years before Cyrus conquered Babylon and made the decree, God spoke of Cyrus, even mentioning Cyrus by name in Isaiah 44:27, “who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd, and he shall fulfill all my purpose’; saying of Jerusalem, ‘She shall be built,’ and of the temple, ‘Your foundation shall be laid.’”
The second reaction is that we should be ashamed of ourselves as Africans. While the US strike against the Islamic terrorists in Sokoto, Nigeria, is a huge relief to the persecuted Christians and to Christians throughout the world, Trump’s decisiveness and intervention have not only exposed the indecisiveness and weakness of the Nigerian leadership but also that of African leaders.
In all this crisis, where was the anger in Tinubu and company and the African Union against the Islamic Jihadists who have been slaughtering Christians and Christian-friendly Muslims? They’ve appeared as little boys trying to scare lions with sticks! It took somebody from outside both Nigeria and Africa to rescue fellow Nigerians and Africans. Yet we celebrate and shout in defiance, “independence from the West!”
And what a confusing irony that the Nigerian government could send efficient military support to help fight a coup d’etat in Benin during the same period, while it failed to fight the jihadists who were terrorising its own citizens on its own soil. Wouldn’t it have been better to do nothing at all in the coup in honour of its citizens who lack such intervention from their government?
Also, contrast Trump’s and the Nigerian leadership’s celebration of the airstrike. The airstrike should have attracted instant open jubilation from the Nigerian government. But they couldn’t even openly celebrate it, assuming they were celebrating at all.
Neither the state president nor a senior official came out openly to announce the news. They only released a communique through a secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that smells of political correctness and cowardice. They were cowardly even in celebration.
On the contrary, Trump and several other senior US officials were celebrating openly and defiantly as if he had rescued his own people.
We should be ashamed as Africans because the crisis shows that we have cowardly, apathetic and politically correct leadership. This kind of leadership is dangerous because it encourages enemies of the state to freely rain terror on citizens, while the leadership begs for negotiations with terrorists, even when the line of negotiations is crossed. We lack competent, courageous, compassionate and committed leadership, which is a terror to criminals and brings confidence and relief to its citizens.