Mike Arnold has submitted a further briefing to a man who advises President Trump on international security. The adviser circulates these briefings to the White House, the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other offices, and has told Arnold that they are received well. Arnold says this latest paper has drawn particular attention.
In the briefing, Arnold states that Bola Tinubu is gravely ill and that his government is concealing the condition badly. He points to a three week foreign trip that was extended twice, a third consecutive United Nations General Assembly that the president missed, a limp left arm, and difficulty remaining steady on his feet. He also notes an official broadcast so heavily cut and spliced that Nigerians counted the edits. Earlier this year, he writes, an image produced by Grok was issued as a genuine photograph of the president.
Arnold adds that for thirty days nobody in authority would say who was running Nigeria.
If Tinubu dies before 16 January, the briefing warns, an immediate grab for total control should be expected, together with violent resistance to it. Arnold argues that Washington is missing a central point. Kashim Shettima is Kanuri. The men who run Nigeria, he claims, belong to the Fulani caliphate and are present in every state, in the officer corps and in the civil service. That network, he writes, is how the north governs the country without occupying it. The Kanuri possess no equivalent structure. They could never win the presidency at the ballot box, so they built Boko Haram instead. A death would hand them what the vote never would, and a Kanuri president would have to seize the parts of the state he cannot inherit.
The briefing recalls January 2012, when Kabiru Sokoto, the alleged mastermind of the Madalla Christmas church bombing, was arrested at the Borno Governor’s Lodge in Abuja and later escaped custody. The police commissioner was dismissed. The convicted man received a life sentence. Shettima was governor of Borno at the time.
Arnold compares the present silence to 2009, when President Yar Adua was kept from public view and later died. In the political turmoil that followed, four months later Boko Haram broke open Bauchi prison and launched the insurgency that is still killing people today. The conflict tore the country apart.
Boko Haram’s caliphate is a blood enemy of the Sokoto Caliphate, the briefing states, and a terrifying threat to peaceful Nigerians. If the situation explodes, Arnold writes, the consequences could be cataclysmic.
The request he makes of American officials costs nothing. Establish how ill the president is. Then say plainly that the United States intends to see a stable Nigeria and an honest election, and that it is watching now. Nigeria votes on 16 January.
By John James
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- US and French authorities dismantle alleged Hamas fundraising network collecting money from America
- US lobby firm says Washington is already weighing a Nigeria without Tinubu
