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Foreign intervention never begins with airplanes, sanctions or soldiers. It begins with stories. It begins with how a country is described, framed, understood and judged by powerful nations.
Iraq did not begin with missiles. It began with a narrative about weapons of mass destruction. Libya did not begin with bombs. It began with a narrative about protecting civilians. Syria did not begin with airstrikes. It began with a narrative about humanitarian responsibility.
The same pattern is now forming around Nigeria, and the speed is alarming.
The life sentence delivered to Nnamdi Kanu on November 20, 2025 is a perfect example. A Nigerian court, after years of legal proceedings, found him guilty on seven terrorism related charges, including directing violence, issuing sit at home orders, caused hundreds of deaths, and guiding bomb making. The court described him as an international terrorist and chose life imprisonment instead of the death penalty.
Within hours, a US lawmaker declared that the conviction was evidence of religious persecution.
A terrorism judgment became a faith narrative in a single step. This did not happen randomly, it is structural and it is how congressional narratives are built.
A legal event happens. American lawmakers interpret it through a moral lens that suits domestic politics. The narrative becomes a talking point. Talking points become resolutions. Resolutions become sanctions or conditions. And at the end of that chain lies the justification for foreign intervention.
This is the architecture we are watching being built around Nigeria.
What makes the situation even more concerning is that this narrative did not start yesterday. It has been shaped for years, intentionally and deliberately, through structured lobbying.
Foreign Agents Registration Act filings in Washington show that IPOB and its affiliates hired American lobbying firms to promote a narrative of Christian persecution in Nigeria.
The message was clear: Nigeria is killing Christians, the Nigerian state is complicit, and the South East faces genocide. These claims were crafted to appeal to the American evangelical and conservative network that sees global Christian victimhood as a core political issue.
This lobbying created a permanent narrative frame. Even after contracts ended, the impression remained inside congressional offices, in briefing notes, in staff memory and in committee debates. Lobbying does not disappear when the cheque stops. It leaves a shadow.
This is why the same Congress that invokes Christian persecution rarely mentions certain facts.
It ignores that Boko Haram has killed more Muslims than Christians. It ignores that banditry in the North West is driven by economic motives, not religion. It ignores that many Christian communities in the Middle Belt are attacked, but Muslim communities across the North and Middle Belt also suffer the same fate in even larger numbers. It ignores that IPOB and ESN splinter groups killed over 700 Christians in the South East and enforced violent sit at home campaigns. It ignores that Finland, a Western nation, convicted a key Biafran agitator for terrorism in September 2025. It ignores that the Nigerian court conviction of Kanu was based on evidence, not on faith.
And it ignores the deaths of Muslims who are also victims of the same terror networks. Only days before some US lawmakers repeated the Christian genocide narrative, terrorists abducted and murdered the Ameer of the Muslim Students Society of Nigeria in Kebbi State, Alqasim Uthman Ibrahim. He was kidnapped and killed in captivity, without media attention, international outrage or congressional concern.
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