America Wonder!

We retrieved a whole aircraft of arms and communications gadgets from killed terrorists in Nigeria. We haven’t ever recorded such a weapons haul since the recoveries from Al Qaeda after the September 11 attacks on the USA,” declared Dr Sebastian Gorka, United States Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

It was meant to sound like triumph. Yet to many Nigerians, such pronouncements echo the old schoolyard charade of America Wonder – dazzling sleight of hand that enthralls the crowd while masking the emptiness beneath.

I remember the con artists who used to wander into our schools in the days of yore, plying their curious trade. They would dazzle us with sleight of hand: coins vanishing into thin air, handkerchiefs turning into birds, and the kind of abracadabra that made children gasp in wonder.

And just when the trick reached its fever pitch, they would command us to sing that refrain: “S’oye wa (Do we understand?)… Koye wa (We don’t understand)… America Wonder!” It was theatre, a 419 drama staged for innocent eyes, a ritual of deception disguised as entertainment.

I do not know if primary schools still allow such charades to play out before their pupils, but the memory lingers – an allegory of how spectacle can mask swindle, and how wonder can be manufactured to distract from the truth.

That was what came to mind when the news broke about the US Army’s exploits – arms mopped up and insurgents either nabbed or neutralised – on our soil last week.

The Yoruba say that the loudest drum does not always carry the deepest rhythm. That proverb feels painfully apt as Washington celebrates the “largest cache of terrorist equipment seized since 9/11.”

To the Western eye, this is a triumph of intelligence, a victory for the “rules-based order,” and a cinematic achievement in the Global War on Terror. To the Nigerian citizen, however, it is another episode of America Wonder – a grotesque spectacle staged for foreign applause while our own soil bleeds unseen, and our sovereignty is treated as a mere backdrop for a superpower’s vanity.

Nigeria is not a movie set. Our villages are not props, and our people are not extras in someone else’s heroic narrative. Insecurity here is not a headline; it is a lived, breathing agony that spares neither the lowly nor the high-born.

Major General Rabe Abubakar, once the distinguished spokesman of the Defence Ministry, was abducted alongside his wife in Katsina. The world saw the video – a frontline officer, a man of grit and command, pleading for help with a voice trembling with the dignity of a soldier undone. He eventually died in captivity, a loss cloaked in the murky shadows of official mystery.

Brigadier General M. Uba, a commander who stood at the edge of the abyss in Borno, was captured and killed by ISWAP. If terror can stalk our defence lines and snatch generals, what hope is offered to the farmer in Kwara or the trader in Zamfara by a “spectacle haul” of confiscated electronics?

Beyond the barracks, the terror is communal. Traditional rulers have been abducted, mosques and churches raided, imams and pastors shot, and teachers and pupils dragged from classrooms. In Ogbomosho, the trauma of mass kidnappings has left scars that will take generations to heal. Parents live in perpetual dread, children are robbed of innocence, and communities hollowed out by fear. These are not anonymous tragedies; they are the rhythm beneath the loud drum of foreign heroics.

Since the Chibok girls were taken in 2014, the West has promised support. We remember the hashtags, the convoys of dignitaries, and the pledges of assistance. Yet many of those girls remain unaccounted for.

The Dasukigate scandal revealed how billions meant for arms procurement were siphoned into private pockets, leaving soldiers under-equipped and citizens unprotected. America branded Nigeria a “country of particular interest,” and some Western voices even called the violence here a “Christian genocide.” Yet these pronouncements have yielded little tangible relief. All fury, signifying nothing. Who have they helped?

The hypocrisy of this First World–Third World relationship is as thick as harmattan haze. We are told that 199 jihadists were neutralised; yet for every fighter extinguished in an American press release, another is born from the dark womb of poverty, systemic corruption, and despair.

The man who fetches water with a basket is only entertaining the crowd. These grand declarations of “largest hauls” are baskets dipped into a rushing river; they make a magnificent splash, but they do not quench Nigeria’s parched thirst for lasting peace.

The United States continues to deny Nigeria critical military hardware, wagging its finger like a schoolmaster citing human rights concerns. Yet American-made weapons flood the hands of the very militants we are fighting, smuggled through shadowy networks that the world’s most sophisticated intelligence apparatus somehow cannot disrupt.

This duplicity is not new. America once helped Osama bin Laden’s ascendancy, funding and arming him in Afghanistan before he turned his guns on them. They have long befriended enemies of democracy in the Middle East while preaching democracy elsewhere.

Their national interest is the only compass, and in Nigeria’s case, we do not even know what that interest is. Worse still, with Donald Trump back in the saddle, the “America First” mantra is elastic and infinite, stretched to fit whatever he as the global policeman wants to do.

We saw the “Tangaza Lesson,” where SEAL Team 6 descended like vengeful angels to rescue a single American citizen. It was a masterclass in precision that proved the forest is only “impenetrable” when the victim speaks with a local accent.

Why was it so easy to trace and recover Americans captured in Zamfara, yet the Ogbomosho teachers and their pupils – whose local government name, Oriire, translates to “good luck” – are this luckless?

Unfortunately, the lads and lasses remain in captivity nearly two months later. The same satellites that can read a number plate from the edge of space seem unable to track motorcycle convoys carrying 50 Nigerian children through the open savannah of the New Oyo Forest Reserves. What that means is that while a blue passport is a shield of invincibility, a Nigerian birthright is treated as a target for abduction.

As 2027 approaches, insecurity is already being weaponised as an electoral tool. Politicians will exploit it, foreign powers will use it to maintain a dependency architecture, and Nigeria will remain the grass beneath the feet of dancing elephants.

Our sovereignty, it seems to me, is nothing but a flag and a border. It should be more: it is the sole right and ability of a nation to defend its own. When our leaders outsource our dignity to foreign applause, they concede that our sovereignty has become a play thing. If the US could not pacify the deserts of Afghanistan after twenty years, why should we trust their sudden saviour complex today?

Homeland security cannot be air-dropped from the Potomac. It must be grown in Nigerian soil – through community trust, institutional integrity, and leadership that refuses to be dazzled by America Wonder.

If foreign support must come, let it be tangible and transparent, not theatrical and self-serving. But the real solution must be homegrown, anchored in regulated community-led policing and professional security frameworks where state institutions fail, so that accountability is rooted in Nigerian hands.

Dr Gorka may hail the seizure of a full aircraft of arms as the greatest haul since Al Qaeda’s spoils after 9/11. But for Nigerians, the true measure of victory is not in the size of a cache paraded abroad; it is in the safety of classrooms in Ogbomosho, the freedom of abducted imams, and the dignity of generals who should never fall captive to insurgents.

True wonder will not come from a confiscated plane-load of arms cache celebrated in Virginia. It will come when teachers and pupils in Oriire, Ogbomosho walk back to their classrooms with the same confidence as a diplomat in Washington.

Until that day, we must look past the loud drum of foreign heroics and demand a rhythm that belongs to us – a rhythm of true sovereignty where peace is not a headline but a lived reality. America Wonder, indeed; but it is time for Nigeria to stop wandering or wondering and start acting.