The Team Lead of The Tattaaunawa Roundtable Initiative (TRICentre), Prince Charles Dickson, has invited his readers to step back and interrogate not only America’s motives in the intervention threat by President Donald Trump of the United States, but also Nigeria’s own fractures.
The article “Nigeria vs USA vs Us: The Genocide” captures with piercing eloquence the tangled web of politics, morality, and national identity that defines Nigeria’s current moment in the global spotlight.
Prince Dickson’s piece is less an editorial on foreign policy than a mirror held up to both nations—revealing how each struggles with its own contradictions, hypocrisies, and internal wars.
In the wake of President Trump’s inflammatory remarks about launching attacks on terror groups in Nigeria to “protect Christians”, Dickson opens with a vivid television image: America’s threat to strike in Nigeria framed as breaking news, its fonts “loud, the pundits louder.”
He immediately grounds the discourse not in Washington but in the streets of Nigeria—Jos, Lagos, Aba, Gombe—where ordinary citizens confront the absurdity of the headline. “Na who wan fight who?” they ask, because Nigeria is not a monolith.
It is a cluster of competing loyalties—ethnic, religious, economic, and psychological—held together by fragile threads.
Divided empire masquerading as unified states
In such a nation, Dickson warns, war cannot be a simple confrontation between two countries; it is “a choir of contradictions singing off-key.”
At the heart of the essay is the notion that both Nigeria and the United States are internally divided empires masquerading as unified states.
America, Dickson writes, would never intervene as a single entity but as “Americas”: the Pentagon’s strategy, the State Department’s diplomacy, the church lobby’s prayers, the defense industry’s profit spreadsheets, and the humanitarian sector’s acronyms.
Each represents a version of “US”—fragmented by competing interests but bound by a mythology of moral authority.
Nigeria, likewise, would not respond as one people but as “Nigerias”: the soldiers, the vigilantes, the bureaucrats, the clerics, the social media warriors, and the opportunists who weaponize ideology for gain.
The second “us” in the title refers to this multiplicity—the quarrel Nigerians keep having with themselves.
Through this structure—“Nigeria vs USA vs Us”—Dickson weaves a tapestry of three interlocking conflicts: between nations, within nations, and within ourselves.
His diagnosis of Nigeria’s internal disorder is both scathing and compassionate.
The violence ravaging Nigeria’s regions, he reminds readers, is not a single insurgency but a collection of crises including:
- herder–farmer conflicts in the Middle Belt,
- banditry in the North West,
- insurgency in the North East, and,
- separatist agitation in the South East.
Each feeds off state failure, inequality, and impunity.
“Drop a smart bomb on a symptom,” he warns, “and you get a smarter symptom.”
Nigeria’s complexity
The futility of foreign intervention lies in mistaking Nigeria’s complexity for clarity.
The victims, as always, would be the poor; the beneficiaries, those with “the right phone numbers.”
Dickson does not spare the Nigerian government. He argues that the state has failed in its most sacred duty: the protection of citizens.
“Ask the mass graves that have no speeches,” he writes.
The metaphor of governance as “a generous uncle who attends weddings with envelopes but never pays school fees on time” underscores the tragic unseriousness of Nigerian politics.
Real security, he insists, should be “boring”—so reliable it becomes invisible.
Yet, the author resists easy cynicism.
He recognizes the paradoxes on all sides:
- America’s self-appointed role as global policeman, its habit of creating emergencies it later seeks to solve;
- Nigeria’s habit of invoking sovereignty to shield incompetence while begging for international aid.
The tragedy, he suggests, is that both nations are “noisy arguments in search of a shared sentence.”
“May Nigeria win!”
The essay’s closing paragraphs deliver a call to introspection.
Dickson insists that the true battlefield is not geographic but moral—the “inner grammar that says nothing can change here.”
Genocide prevention, he writes, is not about military might or international noise but about institutions that work:
- policing that arrives before the funeral,
- courts that punish before the mob, and,
- schools that absorb before the gangs recruit.
The antidote to Nigeria’s crisis lies not in Trump’s drones nor Abuja’s slogans, but in citizens reclaiming responsibility for their country’s fate.
In the end, Dickson’s piece is an indictment of spectacle politics and a plea for sincerity.
It asks Nigerians to scrutinize foreign motives, demand accountability from their leaders, and, above all, reject the fatalism that nothing can improve.
“Change isn’t a missile; it is a budget honestly spent, a law honestly enforced, a neighbor honestly seen,” he concludes.
His final line — “May Nigeria win!” — is both prayer and challenge: that the real victory will come not from America’s intervention or Abuja’s rhetoric.
Rather, the real victory will come from the quiet courage of citizens determined to build a country no longer in need of rescuing.
Until then, the drama will continue, and the poor will continue to suffer, lament and die.
