Prologue
I don’t know about you, but I have no plans whatsoever of partaking in ‘blood money’, in any shape or form. That is mostly because, like you, I watched a whole lot of Nigerian movies in my formative years. From ‘Billionaire’s Club’ to ‘Blood Money’, and the countless films of their kind having the term ‘blood money’ explicitly contained in their titles and/or exploring this theme of occult wealth and sudden riches, it should come as no surprise to you that many a Ghanaian, and African for that matter, like me, is very wary about this whole concept of dancing with the devil.
This is because as Pete Edochie declared in Part 2 of this blood-curdling movie ‘Billionaire’s Club’: “You want to be millionaires; this is only part of it!” And by “this” he was literally referring to turning humans into vultures. Tell me, who, in their right mind, would agree to such a bargain? I am tempted to narrate the entire plot of the movie to you under the guise of expedient exposition, when in actuality masking my own urge to satisfy this nostalgia I feel. But I must exercise constraint and zoom right into the matter at hand.
The wahala at hand
Why did Nigeria, a nation well-acquainted with this age-old tale of the immense repercussions associated with ‘dancing with the devil’, invite the United States of America into its territories just a few months back – during December last year? As we are all aware, by the very first day of November 2025, Trump had issued a warning to the sovereign nation of Nigeria, alleging an ongoing series of coordinated attacks being carried out along religious lines – against Christians in the country. First, America would “immediately stop all aid and assistance” to Nigeria. Second, the United States would “go into that now disgraced country, guns-a-blazing to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists” alleged to be committing these crimes.
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These are his words not mine. And true to his words, on 25th December 2025, Santa Claus came as the Grim Reaper – spreading himself all across a forest camp in the Tangaza local government area within the Sokoto state in Northwest Nigeria. The targets? The Lakurawa fighters, a group admittedly designated by the Nigerian government as terrorists earlier that same year – a group responsible for a series of abductions and outright killings in the country in recent years.
The American government was quick to congratulate itself – and the Nigerian government… A joint effort, the Trump administration dubbed this operation. A strike “carried out in coordination with the Nigerian authorities,” they called it.
Many have been quick to dismiss this “collaboration” alleged to have occurred between these two sovereign nations – the US and Nigeria – choosing instead to read between the lines, unmasking the clear, classic neo-imperialism at play – one where colonialist-inclined nations of the West assert their will at whim over nations of the Global South – their former colonies. And let one not be too quick to dismiss such an assertion as the Global South crying wolf because…
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By mid-December of last year, Trump had, out of the blue, said something so blatantly imperialistic that many Western pundits chose to brush it off as uneducated blabber from a rustic, uninformed man. After weeks of attempting a justification for his arbitrary strikes on Venezuelan boats and lives, alleged by him to be trafficking drugs, and then dangling, ever so sanctimoniously, a feigned concern for the human rights violations being committed by President Maduro against the good people of Venezuela, he, out of nowhere, declared boldly and wrongly, “They took all of our oil – not that long ago – and we want it back!”
I beg your pardon, but whose oil are we talking about here? The oil formed under the soil of this sovereign nation called Venezuela belongs to this other country called the United States of America?
Interesting…
Things weren’t “interesting” and obfuscatory for long though… I mean, this is Trump we are talking about here… He, unlike his many predecessors, cannot be coy to save his life – at least not for long. Because having spent only a few weeks going through the three stages of imperialism – i.e., from feigning benevolence to unmasking the centuries-old saviour complex, then right to outright despotism… Just a few weeks after making this erroneous and imperialistic statement – on the 3rd January this year, to be precise – Trump followed up this blatant imperialistic assertion with a blatant illegal, imperialistic act – very on brand with the Western approach: Nicolás Maduro, President of the sovereign nation of Venezuela, was unilaterally and arbitrarily arrested by the United States of America.
After weeks of being cunning with the ultimate aim of a regime change and consequent unimpeded access to Venezuelan oil, the Trump government, much like its many predecessors, caved under the weight of its own pretence, and gave in to unapologetic imperialism.
On this matter of ‘dancing with the devil’, eyes naturally turn to the many Venezuelan emigrants who took to the streets of their host nations – notably the United States– to congratulate Trump and celebrate the overthrow of Maduro, a man who had overseen a regime which had brought to them human rights violations and their consequent fleeing.
And really, who can fault them? What is geopolitics and broader national freedoms to a person if they cannot be guaranteed their personal freedoms in their own home countries? So then, celebration it was for these involuntary Venezuelan emigrants for this outright infringement of their nation’s sovereignty – for it meant to them, immediate relieve from the infringement of their personal freedoms.
But this is all so interesting, is it not? Then again, because like the nation of Nigeria and much of the rest of the Global South, the people of Venezuela have had their fair (unfair!) share – historically and presently – of the consequences that come with engaging in this dance – this dance with the devil.
The Dance – Personal Freedom v. National Freedom
A person shouldn’t have to be made to choose between their personal freedoms and national freedoms… A person shouldn’t have to choose between these two rights, as though they are mutually exclusive. That’s a Sophie’s Choice never presented to the West; why then should it be, the rest of us? Indeed, for much of the Global South, such dilemmas have remained an ongoing struggle – and it’s a dilemma that the West is always ever ready to settle for us, with or without our consent.
Never mind the fact that these nations of the West, themselves, tend to be the root cause of these state of affairs – these state of endemic violations of personal freedoms – prevailing in these very same countries to whom they enjoy cosplaying as saviour. But that’s a discussion for another day.
Take the case of Nigeria and the Trump-orchestrated strike, for instance. Whether these attacks complained of were religiously motivated or not, one cannot deny the fact that there have been recurrent, coordinated attacks in the African country. In 2025, there were, among others, reports of gunmen taking the lives of over 30 people in Niger state and kidnapping an undetermined number of people. There were also reports of kidnappings of about 300 students and teachers in a Catholic school in November that same year. Just a few weeks ago, there were reports of mass kidnappings – over 170 people were abducted in churches in Kaduna state in Northern Nigeria.
How does one, in instances like these, successfully argue imperialism and neo-imperialism to a Nigerian jubilating on the streets over this US-orchestrated strike committed in their country? Because imperialism or not, to that Nigerian jubilating, the strike by the US was a much-needed relief, was it not?
Again, the same goes for these emigrant Venezuelans celebrating the illegal abduction of their nation’s leader by another nation. The same goes for Iranian protestors presently calling on the USA – on Trump – to “please help”; to come ‘save’ them from what they indicate, are targeted killings being committed against them by their government, the Khamenei regime.
“He doesn’t care about us!” these Iranians are currently bitterly accusing Trump from walking back on his promise that “help is on its way” – that military intervention, regime toppling, and their consequent freedoms are on their way. Because as we are aware, completely out of the blue, just days into making this promise, Trump decided not to proceed with this intervention. So, which is it? Imperialist on the one hand, traitor on the other – for this very same act of “invasion” and “intervention”?
But you are right in asking, why invite tyranny into one’s home – one’s country? Don’t the people of Iran remember…? This hasn’t been their nation’s first dance with the West – with the US for that matter, has it? But these modern Iranians taking to the streets to seek redemption, and finding none in their government, turning to the US, to Trump, they will retort with, “Do you not see the violations being committed to our fundamental human rights right now?!” What is geopolitical precedent to a drowning person? Drowning people, they are known to oftentimes go about clinging to straws, aren’t they?
The Straw – International Law or War
It is for these reasons that this whole international law system was instituted – well, at least, on the face of it. International law, when taken at its face value, is a system instituted by so-called sovereign nations of the world to help them watch each other’s backs – to be the straw to which the drowning person clings.
By the 20th century, the West had spent over four centuries subjecting a great deal of the world – notably the continent of Africa – to barbarism and monstrosities never before witnessed across generations. Their imperialistic campaign having slavery and colonialism as its main ingredients, was to cause human rights violations on a scale never before witnessed in world history.
Yet, it took Hitler, with his heinous genocide of the Jewish people beginning in the early 1940s for the world to sit up and for the West to decide, very decisively, that human rights violations were indeed abominable acts, thereby causing to be established, the world’s first international criminal tribunal – the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg Tribunal). Its mandate? To prosecute these Nazi officials – the orchestrators of the Holocaust.
Never mind the fact that the West’s own colonialist campaign – rife with human rights violations against the continent of Africa and much of the Global South – was still ongoing at this point. But with Hitler, the West agreed there and then, human rights violations were not isolationist, national issues; human rights violations, they “trampled under foot the laws of God and man”; they hurt one and all – they are not merely national matters but the entire world’s concern.
So, after the ‘success’ of the Nuremberg Tribunal came the conscious effort to concretise and institutionalise the international law system. And here we are now, with this multilateral system fully fledged – with the United Nations placed at the helm of it all, serving as the ultimate watchdog of a sort, making sure that if, heavens forbid, the government of Ghana and any nation of the world for that matter, should go haywire, and set about ripping the fundamental human rights of their citizenry right out of their hands, these citizens would, in many ways, have a whole other system of government to turn to for help – i.e., this multilateral international system.
But there is a clear problem here, isn’t there? This utopia I have just narrated – there is something flawed about it, don’t you see? Especially when juxtaposed against the reality on the ground – the reality as has been narrated in the opening paragraphs of this very article, with the cases of Nigeria, Venezuela, and Iran as notable examples. And these, I must quickly note, are only a few of the most recent examples of this flaw.
Historically and presently, the world has had to witness this situation where on the one hand, we preach the utopia of multilateralism and international law; yet on the other hand, what we find are glaring instances of Western neo-imperialism and international law’s complicity and inefficiency. We will discuss the matter of international law’s complicity in a later article. For now, let us briefly touch on the ‘inefficiency’ bit.
‘Inefficiency’ is the absolute right term to describe this decades-long state which multilateralism/international law continues to find itself in, because why are the people of Iran’s first call, in their moment of despair, to a country, to a person – to the US, to Trump – and not to the UN? The same goes for Nigeria…
How is the leader of another country able to unilaterally diagnose such human rights abuses, issue threats of ‘invasion’, and carry out such threats – under the guise of ‘consent’ – a consent which the international community is able to easily read in between the lines to determine as coercive? Why are the Venezuelan people’s human rights – the violations thereof – unilaterally decided by a President of another country (the US), with so-called prosecutorial action unilaterally taken by the government of this other nation?
Because, arguably, this is not the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle at play here. (And we will delve into this principle in a later article). And through it all, this system established to ensure international peace and security – the United Nations and its network of institutions – often sits helplessly by and watches on.
“Like Air” – The West’s track record of human rights violations
Because, then again, if human rights protection really is a reason to launch worldwide tyranny, impede on national sovereignties as one pleases, invade and breach national territories at whim, then one would argue that the US, together with much of the rest of the West, has ‘deserved’ its own territorial invasion for decades and even centuries now, has it not? Let’s not travel too far back; let’s scan modern history – the era immediately preceding and succeeding this multilateral global system… I kid you not, as I am presently writing this piece – it’s Saturday, 24 January, 2026, 4:07pm – there has been another shooting in the US…
The ongoing ICE raids in the country, targeting “aliens” – attacks which resulted, just about two weeks prior, in the killing of a civilian, Renee Good, by “militant” ICE agents, has just resulted in yet another civilian killing in Minneapolis. This time around, a civilian (Alex Pretti) attempting to help an immigrant heckled by these “paramilitary” personnel.
If it isn’t law enforcers committing these heinous acts, it is fellow American civilians themselves – albeit under different settings and with different motives. In the US, mass shootings are “like air” – they are everywhere, committed by everyone against everyone. Committed by children, teenagers, grown men and women against children, teenagers, grown men and women.
Australia, for instance, witnessed a targeted mass killing on 14 December last year at Bondi Beach, resulting in the deaths of 35 people. And what did the Australian government do right afterwards? Just a few weeks after the attack, they enacted, among others, restrictive gun laws – ones decisively couched to ensure that these deadly weapons do not get into the wrong hands. It’s as simple as that, really.
Notably, in April 1996, a mass shooting in the same country which had resulted in the death of, coincidentally, also 35 people (and wounded 23) – dubbed the Port Arthur massacre – had led to sweeping reforms and the enactment of the strict National Firearms Agreement (NFA), banning, among others, rapid-fire rifles and shotguns. This 1996 reforms helped to drastically reduce gun violence, including mass shootings, in the country. This recent 2025 reform is expected to achieve a similar goal.
Now take a look at the USA, a country ranked first worldwide when it comes to mass shootings. Having only 5percent of the world’s population, the US has recorded a mind-boggling 31percent of the world’s mass shooters since 1966. A 2016 study found that nearly one-third of the world’s public mass shootings recorded between 1966 and 2012 occurred in the US.
Other countries in this ranking – such as the Philippines, Russia, Yemen, and France – are nowhere near the numbers recorded by the United States. And even with these countries, the primary targets of these attacks have been military bases and checkpoints, not civilian populations. For the US, targets of mass shootings have largely been, and continue to be, civilians – schools, churches, social centres and events, factories, offices, etc. This – these studies find – is as a result of among others, the astounding ease of access to guns in the country.
In 2017, a 64-year-old gunman killed 60 people and injured approximately 867 people during a Las Vegas music festival. Just one month later, a 26-year-old guy shot and killed 26 people and injured 22 people in a church in Texas. The year before (2016), a 29-year-old man opened fire in a nightclub in Florida killing 49 people and injuring approximately 59. In 2018 – 14th February – a 19-year-old boy opened fire in a high school in Florida, killing 17 and injuring 18 people, many of whom were teenagers.
Just three months later, there was another high school shooting, this time around, by a 17-year-old student, killing 10 people and injuring 13 in Texas. Five months later, another shooting – now in a synagogue in Pennsylvania – committed by a 46-year-old man, killing 11 people and wounding 6. Just a month later, yet another shooting by a 26-year-old guy – this time around, at a bar frequented by college students in California, killing 12 people and injuring 9.
In 2022, an 18-year-old gunman opened fire on a Texan elementary school killing 21 people (many of whom were children) and injuring 18. Just a few days before, another teenager, an 18-year-old gunman had opened fire on shoppers in a supermarket in New York, killing 10 people and injuring 3. The year prior, 2021, had witnessed such a mass shooting targeting a supermarket – one which occurred in Colorado, perpetuated by a 21-year-old man, killing 10 people. The year 2023 saw yet another mass shooting, this time around, targeting a bowling centre in Maine, with a 40-year-old man gunning down and killing 18 people and injuring 13. Months prior, a 72-year-old gunman had attacked a dance studio in California and killed 11 people, injuring 9.
You know what, it was absolutely senseless of me to attempt listing examples of mass shootings in the US – it’s like chasing the wind. It goes on and on – it never ends! If the targeted abductions occurring in Nigeria are acts of terrorism, these endless acts occurring in the USA are hyper-terrorism!
But what has the American government – successive governments upon successive governments – done to root out this morbid cultural phenomenon of theirs? What have these American governments done, in terms of effectual gun reforms, to – like a country such as Australia – root out these acts of terrorism persisting in their country? It’s safe to say, “nothing concrete.” All that has effectively been done has been to keep this gory issue as a highly politicised matter in the country – with no decisive, effective solutions in sight.
So, on and on these violations to the American’s basic right to life goes; their existence constantly threatened – be they in a bar or church, in school or at home, in a shopping centre or at work – just like Trump himself was, on July 2024, barely an ear away from getting his brains blown out. His supporter, Charlie Kirk, as we know, wasn’t so lucky.
We shouldn’t even attempt getting started on how the country has treated its Black population – right from, as early noted, slavery, to the segregationist Jim Crow era of the 1870s to the 1960s, one characterised by racial terrorism on an unprecedented scale, to the mass lynchings of the 1880s to the 1960s, to the mass Black incarcerations of the 20th century to this very modern era, and the police brutalities, again, of modern-day.
There has been a long list of Black victims of police brutalities in the country – even just counting from the 2010s to the 2020s. Names such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd – just to name a few. Human rights abuses of the African American have been so prevalent and ingrained in the American national fabric that is treated as inevitable, thus dismissible. And remember, these are only a few examples – and this is only the context of America, not the broader West.
Who is saving the “Saviour”?
So, you tell me, what is the verdict? Judging from the USA’s – and much of the rest of the West’s – precedent of invading nations for the sake of “salvation” and human rights protection, do we, all other nations of the world, mobilise our troops, go into their territory and go bam-bam! wham-wham! in the name of reciprocal salvation?
Because, surely, we these other nations – especially of the Global South – have suffered more for less in the hands of countries like America, haven’t we? So do we get to undertake some “salvations of our own?”
Regrettably, I sense a latent, “no” coming from the universe – and perhaps even from you. And that is indicative of this one fact:
We are in a global jungle.
The bully takes it all. The bully can invade your territories, attack your people willy-nilly in the name of pseudo-benevolence – in the name of salvation – and you cannot be so kind as to repay this “kindness” – no matter how badly you may want to – when they are found to be committing such, and even worse versions of such human rights abuses, sometimes to their own people.
This multilateral system has given the powerful West free range to do with the rest of the world as they please. And not even the UN can do anything about it. Indeed, the institution’s track-record on this front has been woefully and heart-wrenchingly discouraging. But there is a way around this quagmire of imperialism and systemic abuse orchestrated against those of us in the Global South. There is a way of forestalling and defeating this centuries-old onslaught of imperialistic abuse. The answer? Regional multilateralism. Let’s delve into this in the next article.
-About the Author-
>>>the writer is an International Law scholar and Co-founder/CEO of Nvame, a premier African consultancy and publication firm. She can be reached via makafuiaikins1@gmail.com, www.nvame.com and or LinkedIn: Kafui Akutor (Makafui Aikins)
