A Word of Advice to All Who Seek Change in Nigeria

By Mike Arnold

I keep hearing the same plea: When will the United States or Britain recognize Biafra? When will they sanction Tinubu? When will they free Mazi Nnamdi Kanu?

The honest answer, from a man who has been inside the rooms where these decisions are made: they will not. Not now. Not without a campaign you have not yet started.

Here is the truth, based on deep knowledge of the system and the historical record of every liberation movement in the modern world: no begging, no court filing, no friendly politician, and no lobbying campaign will gain you anything at all if there is not a global awakening behind it. Without that awakening, every dollar spent on advocacy and every hour spent on social media tagging members of Congress is wasted.

This is not defeatism. This is realism. The work matters. But it only matters when the foundation underneath it exists.

The system, as it actually works.

Probably 990 of 1000 Americans cannot find Nigeria on a map. Probably 999 of 1000 have never heard the word Biafra. The stats for sitting members of Congress are not much better. Most of them know Nigeria as “that big country in Africa with the oil,” nothing more. They know nothing of the Sokoto Caliphate. They have never heard the names of the slaughtered villages. They cannot tell you what an IDP camp looks like or where one is.

And you are facing not just ignorance — you are facing sixty years of active propaganda against you. From the federal whitewash of the Biafran genocide, to the British arms shipments to Lagos, to the modern $9 million DCI campaign telling American op-ed readers there is no genocide, the field has been salted for decades. The default information any American official receives about Nigeria has been written by people paid to deny what is happening.

Even if you manage to find one or two sympathetic officials — and you do find a few real ones, Riley Moore and Chris Smith chief among them — you still face the legislative process. Filed resolutions need co-sponsors. Co-sponsored resolutions need committee hearings. Hearings need votes. Votes need floor time. Floor time needs leadership permission. Leadership permission needs political capital. And political capital is exactly what no member of Congress wants to spend on a country their voters cannot find on a map.

The recent resolution filed in the U.S. House calling for Mazi Kanu’s release is a start. It is not nothing. But, as best I can tell, it is not even co-sponsored yet. It carries zero institutional weight as it currently stands. The diaspora needs to hear this plainly: posts circulating online declaring “U.S. CONGRESS DEMANDS RELEASE OF NNAMDI KANU” are a fever dream built on falsehood. One congressman filed a resolution. One. That is a beginning. It is not victory. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a feeling, not a fact.

How politicians actually move.

Steve Bannon — one of the most effective political strategists of the modern era — says the only way to motivate a politician is with a bayonet at their back. They will not expend their hard-earned political capital for your cause unless they are forced to. They must feel that ignoring you costs them more than acting will.

How do you build that bayonet?

Look at how the global blood diamond trade was finally curtailed. Not by protest letters. Not by lobbying campaigns. Not by horror stories shared at conferences. Not by genocide survivors testifying before sympathetic committees.

It was Blood Diamond. One Hollywood film, with Leonardo DiCaprio, in 2006. The movie made every American consumer in a jewelry store ask the question. The retailers asked the suppliers. The suppliers asked the refiners. The Kimberley Process — which had existed quietly since 2003 — suddenly had teeth, because every diamond on every counter in every store now had a question hanging over it. No advocacy campaign produced what one film produced.

Look at how Rwanda became a moral landmark in global memory. Not in 1994 when 800,000 people were slaughtered. In 2004, when Hotel Rwanda hit theaters. The film made the genocide real to a generation that had been told nothing.

Look at Roots. Look at Schindler’s List. Look at 12 Years a Slave. Look at The Killing Fields. Every one of them changed how the world saw the atrocity at the center of the story — and shifted policy in ways no advocacy campaign had managed.

The pattern is consistent. Culture moves the people. The people move the politicians. The politicians move the policy.

You cannot skip the first step.

The posture every advocate in this fight must learn.

Here is the part I want every Nigerian, every diasporan, every Christian abroad, every freedom-loving person involved in this movement to read twice.

You must educate people. You must build relationships. You must tell your stories with patience and skill. And you must stop demonizing people who have no idea what you are talking about.

A congressional staffer who has never heard of Bokkos, a journalist who confuses Biafra with Bavaria, a pastor in Texas who thinks Nigerian Christians are mostly Catholic and mostly fine — none of these people are your enemy. They are your audience. They are the field you are planting. They are the people whose understanding will eventually become the bayonet at the back of the politician you need to move.

If your first instinct upon meeting one of them is to lash out at their ignorance, to complain that the West has abandoned you, to demand they immediately understand what you have lived with for two centuries — you have already lost them. They will close the door. They will move on. They will never come back.

The journey from darkness to light is long. It is your responsibility — not theirs — to walk them down that path, step by step. Patiently. Without bitterness. Without superiority. Without the assumption that what is obvious to you should be obvious to a person who has never been to Africa, never opened a Nigerian newspaper, never met a Berom widow, and never seen what 19,000 burned churches looks like.

There are no shortcuts. The educator wins. The complainer loses. The beggar loses. The lasher-out loses.

Educate. Do not lash out. Do not complain. Do not beg. Educate.

That is the work. That falls on every single person in this movement — every Nigerian, every diasporan, every Christian abroad, every donor, every pastor, every survivor, every journalist, every activist. Every one of us has to back up, reflect on our posture, and ask whether we are educating or whether we are venting. Whether we are building the audience the politicians will eventually have to obey, or whether we are screaming at strangers and calling it advocacy.

What this means for the Nigerian movement.

Until the world can find Nigeria on a map, knows what the word Biafra means, has been educated on the Sokoto Caliphate, and understands what is being done now to the Christians of the Middle Belt — you will get nowhere through politics alone.

That awareness is the foundation. The advocacy is the building you put on top of it. Build the foundation first.

A documentary that reaches American living rooms. A book that gets into the hands of every member of Congress, every staffer, every think tank fellow, every cable news producer. A song that gets played. A social media volume that cannot be ignored. Survivors on every podcast that will have them. Their stories printed on every page that will run them. Every Nigerian abroad becoming an educator, every encounter becoming a teaching moment, every dinner table becoming a small classroom.

That is the work. That is the foundation. Once it exists, every lobbying meeting that has gone nowhere for a decade will suddenly produce results — because the politician will finally have a bayonet at their back.

This is how every successful movement in the modern era has been built. Civil rights. Apartheid divestment. Soviet Jewry. Tibet. Darfur. Blood diamonds. The conflict-minerals provision of Dodd-Frank. All of them — without exception — started with cultural awakening, not with advocacy campaigns.

The Nigerian movement does not get to skip this step. The Caliphate has spent two hundred years building the propaganda that buries the truth. Our task is to break it. One conversation, one story, one mind at a time.

This is the way.

#EarthShaker