Why This Matters
A nation is the sum of its citizens.
When citizens normalize shortcuts, defend wrongdoing, celebrate false assertions, inflame divisions, or spread unverifiable information, they inadvertently strengthen the hands of those who deliberately undermine the nation. This is why the social saboteur is still part of the fifth column — not just the ones acting innocently, but also those who do it deliberately. Some citizens amplify misinformation, distort narratives, or stoke tensions not out of ignorance, but because outrage brings engagement. Views bring money. Sensationalism brings followers. And in today’s digital economy, trending has become a business model.
They know exactly what they are doing.
They know fear spreads faster than facts.
They know division generates more clicks than unity.
For them, national stability is a distant concern; virality is the goal.
So at the social level, the fifth column sits on a spectrum:
- the genuinely misled,
- the emotionally reactive,
- the weary and disillusioned,
- the social media influencers and wannabe activists chasing relevance,
- and the fully conscious actors who weaponize outrage and misinformation for profit, engagement and virality.
And this is the painful truth: the collapse of nations is rarely caused by one great betrayal; more often, it is caused by millions of small compromises, some innocent, many intentional. Until we confront this truth, we will keep fighting external battles while the internal ones continue to multiply in broad daylight.
“The single biggest threat to our democracy is the notion that we don’t have to believe in facts.”
Barack Obama
4. THE BUREAUCRATIC GATEKEEPERS — KILLERS OF POLICY AND PROGRESS
Every nation has its political class and its business elite, but there is a third layer that quietly determines whether a country works or fails, the bureaucracy. In Nigeria, this layer is often overlooked, yet it is one of the most powerful internal forces shaping national outcomes.
Here lie the people who do not run for office, do not appear at political rallies, do not court public attention, but who hold the levers that determine whether policies live or die. These bureaucratic gatekeepers are the custodians of files, processes, approvals, permissions, data, and institutional memory. And because they sit deep inside the engine room of government, their influence is rarely challenged and often underestimated. Their sabotage does not come through protests or open confrontation.
- It comes through delays.
- Through silence.
- Through procedural ambush.
- Through selective interpretation of policy.
- Through “missing” documents that suddenly reappear after the price is right.
- Through committees that never meet.
- Through memos that “did not reach the table.”
- They have mastered the art of slowing down progress until it suffocates.
We have seen this pattern repeatedly in Nigeria’s history.
During the post-oil boom reforms of the early 1980s, many of the modernisation efforts championed by technocrats were quietly frustrated by bureaucrats who feared losing control over existing systems. Records were withheld, processes disrupted, and key agencies resisted changes that threatened entrenched interests.
During the banking consolidation reforms of the mid-2000s, insiders repeatedly noted that some of the strongest resistance did not come from the banks themselves, but from within parts of the bureaucracy responsible for implementing the reforms. For many career civil-service actors, greater transparency and simplified oversight meant fewer opportunities for discretion, influence, and rent-seeking. As several analysts observed at the time, the challenge was not only technical, it was cultural and institutional.
Even today, across ministries and agencies, many well-intentioned reforms fail not because they lack political backing, but because mid-level and senior bureaucrats ensure they never fully take off. A contractor who refuses to “cooperate” suddenly discovers that his file has gone missing. A reform-minded appointee finds themselves stonewalled by staff who were in those offices before them, and who will remain long after they leave. Procurement becomes more complicated when transparency threatens established networks. Digital reforms struggle when manual processes are more profitable for those who control them.
This is not incompetence. It is a system of quiet self-preservation.
These actors operate beneath the political radar but influence everything from budget releases to project planning, licensing, customs clearance, recruitment, and regulatory enforcement. They know the bottlenecks because they built them. They know how to stall progress without ever appearing rebellious. They protect old structures because those structures protect them. In a sense, the bureaucracy becomes a nation within a nation, insulated from elections, public opinion, and, too often, accountability.
And this is what makes them part of the fifth column. Not because they are ideological enemies of Nigeria, but because they defend a system that slows down the country’s development. They are the custodians of the status quo — and the status quo is dysfunction. A visionary leader may come into office. A strong policy may be written. A budget may be approved. A reform may be announced with fanfare. Yet everything grinds to a halt in the hands of bureaucrats who have perfected one subtle but deadly skill: blocking progress without leaving fingerprints. They do not shout. They do not fight. They simply ensure things do not move.
It is difficult to build a nation when those who hold the administrative machinery are invested in keeping things exactly as they are. Until this layer is reformed, protected, and modernised, Nigeria will continue to drag its feet — not because of a lack of ideas, but because of an internal machinery designed to frustrate execution.
5. THE ROLE OF FOREIGN POWERS — BUT NOT WITHOUT INTERNAL ALLIES
It is tempting to place the weight of Nigeria’s troubles on foreign governments. But the truth is more complex. Nations, especially powerful ones, do not operate on morality. They operate on interest. They protect their strategic corridors, their economic leverage, their ideological reach. That is the real currency of geopolitics. The deeper danger lies elsewhere: in the local actors who willingly open the gates.
Foreign interference only becomes effective when internal collaborators, political actors, lobbyists, civil society influencers, social media influencers, wannabe activists, and even security insiders, create the cracks through which external influence flows. History is clear on this point: no nation collapses purely from external assault. Collapse begins from within. Weak institutions, fragmented societies, compromised leaders, and citizens who become foot soldiers for agendas they do not fully understand — these are the true entry points.
This is not theory. This is history.
Across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, we have watched powerful nations, the United States, France, Britain, Russia and others, quietly shape political outcomes in countries that refused to align with their interests, often under noble labels: “democracy promotion,” “counter-terrorism,” “protecting minorities,” “defending human rights.” From coups engineered during the Cold War, to destabilisation efforts masked as “support for civil society,” to covert alliances with rebel groups and armed factions, the playbook is well-established.
Nigeria is not exempt.
The Trump Threat — Compassion Wrapped Around a Loaded Gun
In November 2025, the U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered the Pentagon to prepare “options” for possible military action in Nigeria, citing an alleged “Christian genocide” and an “existential threat” to Christianity in our country. He coupled this with threats to cut off U.S. aid if Nigeria did not act the way Washington wanted. On paper, it sounded like a moral crusade: defend persecuted Christians; punish those who ignore their suffering.
In reality, the picture is more complicated.
Data from independent conflict monitors and reporting by global media have repeatedly shown that while Christians have suffered brutal violence in Nigeria, Muslims and other groups have also been killed in large numbers, especially in the northeast where Boko Haram and ISWAP have wiped out entire Muslim communities. The African Union, Nigerian officials, and several analysts have publicly rejected the “genocide” label as inaccurate, warning that this kind of simplification does more to inflame tensions than to solve them. Nigerians have not been silent either. Protests broke out in places like Kano with placards reading “There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria” and “America wants to control our resources,” rejecting both the label and the coercive tone of the threat.
Yet, instead of nuance, the world got a soundbite: “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. We may have to go in.”
In Washington, some lawmakers eagerly lined up behind this framing. A resolution was introduced in the U.S. Congress that not only condemned the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, but also explicitly declared readiness to “support President Donald J. Trump in taking decisive action”, language that many Nigerians read as political cover for some form of intervention. To many of us watching from here, it felt less like sober diplomacy and more like theatre: our trauma turned into talking points, our complexity reduced to a neat narrative that fits a domestic political script.
The Nicki Minaj Moment — When Celebrity Platforms Carry Lopsided Stories
Into this already charged atmosphere stepped an unlikely actor: Nicki Minaj. In November 2025, the American rapper addressed a United Nations event, speaking emotionally about what she described as “Christians being targeted” in Nigeria, churches burned, families displaced, communities living in fear. She thanked Trump for “prioritizing the issue” and used her huge platform to demand urgent action. On one level, her empathy is genuine and admirable. It is true that Christians in Nigeria have suffered massacres, kidnappings, church burning and terror attacks. Those lives matter. Their pain is not imaginary. But again, what was missing was the rest of the story.
The same conflict data and human-rights reports that document attacks on Christians also show that Muslims have been killed in even greater numbers in some regions, and that much of the violence is driven by a toxic mix of jihadist insurgency, banditry, land disputes, failed governance and criminal opportunism, not a single, neat campaign of one religion exterminating the other. Yet the global clip that trended was simple: “In Nigeria, Christians are being targeted.” Full stop.
To make matters worse, Nigerian officials were reportedly barred from the room during that UN event at the specific request of the organisers and their U.S. hosts, a move that fed the perception here that our country was being tried and sentenced in absentia. This is how modern fifth-column dynamics work in a globalized world:
- Local actors feed selective or exaggerated narratives to foreign lawmakers, lobby groups and faith networks.
- Those groups frame Nigeria to their audiences as a simple morality tale: righteous victims, evil persecutors, cowardly government.
- Politicians and celebrities, some genuinely moved, others clearly responding to well-organized lobbying, amplify the story on platforms like Congress, the UN and cable news.
- Before long, a foreign president is threatening to send troops “guns-a-blazing,” and our complex security crisis is reduced to a campaign slogan.
A UN podium carries moral weight. A viral celebrity clip carries emotional weight. A congressional resolution carries diplomatic weight. When all three are built on a partial picture, truth struggles to breathe. The real tragedy is that while these narratives trend, many of the actual victims of Nigeria’s violence, Muslim communities erased in the northeast, Christians attacked in largely Christian southeast states, farmers and herders killed in reprisal cycles in the Middle Belt, become invisible if they don’t fit the script. Once again, the point is not to deny suffering. The point is to insist that our story will not be told for us, around us, and against us.
Foreign Powers, Local Mouthpieces
Foreign powers have always behaved like foreign powers. That is not new. The tragedy is when citizens become the mouthpieces of external ambitions, knowingly or unknowingly. Some internal actors:
- feed foreign agencies distorted data,
- exaggerate local conflicts to attract funding or asylum,
- curate “genocide” language for Western ears while downplaying the suffering of groups that do not fit their chosen narrative,
- lobby against their own country in foreign capitals because personal victory matters more than collective peace.
Foreign politicians and influencers, while sometimes sincerely moved, are not neutral. Some are clearly being courted and lobbied to press a particular line, as we have seen with prominent U.S. legislators pushing “Christian genocide” resolutions and publicly cheering Trump’s threats of military action.
This is what fifth-column activity looks like in the age of soft power: not just bombs and spies, but reports, hearings, think-tank papers, NGO briefings, faith-based lobbying, celebrity speeches and emotionally charged narratives tailored for Western consumption.
Nigeria must be alert.
In a world where narratives move faster than facts, misinformation is the new weapon of intervention , and influencers, lawmakers and even pastors can become instruments of a fifth column that begins inside our borders.
To be continued
samaderibigbe 