Nigeria after the echo of bombs by Eze Ogbu

Nigeria is drowning in fear, and the water keeps rising. From the villages of the Middle Belt to the crowded streets of the northeast, violence has become a constant background noise, so familiar that outrage now competes with exhaustion. Every attack blurs into the next, every funeral into another statistic. Yet in this grim landscape, one uncomfortable truth deserves to be said plainly, Trump’s bombs did not save Nigeria. They did not stabilize it. If anything, they poured fuel onto fires that were already burning and sparked new ones that no one seems prepared to contain.

The logic behind those bombings was seductively simple. Strike the extremists hard, crush their leadership and terror will retreat. It is a logic that flatters power and impatience, the belief that fear can be bombed out of existence. But Nigeria is not a chessboard, and its violence is not a single enemy that can be erased with airstrikes. It is a tangled web of ideology, poverty, corruption, ethnic tension, climate pressure, and state failure. Bombs can shatter buildings, but they do not untangle webs. They tear them wider.

In the short term, the explosions offered something that looked like progress. Militants scattered. Camps were destroyed. Headlines spoke of decisive action. But beneath that surface, something more dangerous was happening. Groups fractured rather than vanished. Fighters slipped across borders, blended into communities, or pledged loyalty to splinter factions even more radical than before. Violence did not end; it diversified. Nigeria did not become safer; it became more unpredictable.

Worse still, the bombings imported new terrors into the country’s already crowded nightmare. The global spectacle of foreign intervention gave local extremists exactly what they crave: validation. They reframed their cause as resistance against external aggression, recruiting not just the desperate, but the angry and humiliated. Each crater became propaganda. Each civilian death, whether acknowledged or denied, became a story whispered in markets and mosques, growing sharper with every retelling.

Nigeria’s tragedy is that it is constantly treated as a battlefield rather than a society. When bombs fall, nuance dies first. Entire regions become shorthand for terror, entire communities viewed with suspicion. The result is collective punishment by neglect. Schools close. Farms are abandoned. Young people grow up knowing soldiers more intimately than teachers. In that vacuum, extremism does not need to knock; it simply waits.

The irony is painful. The stated goal of the bombings was security, yet insecurity has metastasized. Armed groups now overlap with criminal gangs, bandits, and traffickers, blurring motives and multiplying threats. Kidnapping has become an industry. Villages pay taxes not to the state, but to whichever armed group passes through that week. Fear has been decentralized, franchised, and made resilient.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian state remains trapped in a reactive crouch, emboldened by foreign firepower but hollowed out from within. Bombs create the illusion of strength while postponing the hard work of reform. They distract from questions that truly matter: Why are security forces distrusted? Why do victims feel abandoned? Why does justice arrive late, if at all? No airstrike can answer those questions, and none was meant to.

Perhaps the most corrosive impact is psychological. When foreign bombs rain down, they send a message, intended or not, that Nigerian lives are a problem to be managed from afar. That sovereignty is conditional. That complexity is inconvenient. Over time, this erodes faith not only in government, but in the very idea that peace can be homegrown. Dependency replaces agency, resentment replaces hope.

Nigeria does not need more explosions echoing across its soil. It needs investment that does not arrive disguised as missiles. It needs schools protected as fiercely as oil interests, justice pursued as relentlessly as militants, and leadership brave enough to confront corruption with the same enthusiasm shown for war. Violence here is not a sudden infection; it is a chronic illness worsened by blunt treatment.

Trump’s bombs may be history, but their aftershocks are not. They linger in new alliances, new hatreds, and new graves. If Nigeria is to stop drowning, it will not be pulled to safety by foreign firepower. It will rise, slowly and painfully, only when fear is answered not with louder violence, but with dignity, accountability, and the radical patience that real peace demands. Until then, every bomb dropped in the name of security will continue to echo as a reminder of shortcuts taken, lessons ignored, and lives lost in a struggle that demands understanding more than destruction. And humility.