Alleged Christian Genocide and the U S's Designation of Nigeria as a 'Country of Particular Concern': A Legal Reflection and its Implications for Nigeria and Africa

The prolonged insecurity situation in Nigeria eventually led to the alleged Christian genocide by the United States President Donald J. Trump, and the classification of Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern”. This was immediately followed by a threat of unilateral military intervention to save Christians from the terrorists. The threat of invasion generated a lot of debates and interests among Nigerians and international partners which is capable of tearing the fabrics of national unity with its attendant adverse effects on the nation’s pluralism and national security. This paper examines the legality of the proposed invasion of Nigeria and argues that, U.S.A lacks power to intervene militarily without recourse to international laws and conventions. Consequent upon that, the debate further generated conspiracy theories with diverse perspectives on the subject matter. Thus, the paper analyzed its economic, security and political implications for Nigeria and Africa. The paper relied on secondary sources of data collections from published articles, newspapers, press release from verified accounts, and other unpublished materials. Power realism and dependency theories were adopted as a framework of analysis, the analysis shows the U.S. threats further deepens and exposed the deep-sited mutual suspicion and mistrust among the Christians and Muslims in Nigeria exposed how weak Nigeria foreign policy strategy is, and how dependent Nigeria is to among others. To this end, the paper recommended that, there is need for Nigerian government to re-engineer its combat strategies against the terrorists group, address the underlying factors that breeds insecurity such as unemployment, economic pressure, poverty out of school children etc, adopt inclusive governance to accommodate the religious and ethnic diversity of Nigeria, and to engage foreign partners constructively with the aim of averting the threats of US military intervention in Nigeria