Nigeria sits on a mountain of wealth and yet behaves like a pauper in a hostile marketplace. Few countries on earth combine oil, gas, gold, bitumen, coal, iron ore, limestone, tin, zinc, bauxite and lithium in one territory. Lithium alone is rapidly becoming the new oil of the 21st century. Nigeria has billions of dollars worth of it and China has not been slow to move. Since 2013 Chinese firms have invested over 1.3 billion dollars in lithium with an estimated national reserve valuation exceeding 34 billion dollars. Lithium is the lifeblood of electric vehicles, battery storage grids and the renewable energy transition. Whoever controls lithium controls the future of energy.
On top of that China has secured over 20 billion dollars in investment commitments spread across automotive manufacturing, mining, steel, agriculture and energy. This is not philanthropy. It is strategic. China is securing markets, supply chains, minerals and ports. To Washington this is a red flag. China moving from trader to manufacturer to partner to military actor in Africa is the nightmare scenario. China today is not the China of 2008. It builds ports, installs fiber cables, finances rail, produces industrial equipment and increasingly offers arms and military technology transfers. Nigeria recently signed a deal for military hardware production and defense technology sharing with China. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has also pledged military aid to West African nations. For Washington this looks like a creeping beachhead on the Atlantic flank of Eurasia.
The United States understands what ECOWAS pretends not to understand. Infrastructure equals power. Currency swaps equal power. Ports equal power. Rare earth minerals equal power. Belt and Road is not about photo ops or ribbon cutting. It is about building the logistical spine of the century that supersedes Bretton Woods. Nigeria is talking to ECOWAS and the West with one mouth and talking to China with another. On the one hand ECOWAS has been serving as a policeman for Western neoliberal order in West Africa. On the other hand Nigeria speaks of Belt and Road synergy and continental free trade objectives with China. It is a schizophrenic positioning that no serious power can sustain.
The Trump administration has decided there will be no more Chinese ports, no more Chinese rails, and no more Chinese debt diplomacy without pushback. Hence the Blue Dot Network. Hence tariffs. Hence narrative warfare. Hence Panama being forced to withdraw from BRI days after Trump took office. Trump declared openly that BRI threatens US trading partners and that more hard moves are coming. This is not foreign policy as usual. It is chess. Access denial. Chokepoints. Critical minerals. Friendshoring. The new game is resource capture and resource denial.
Nigeria is unprepared for this world. When China invests, Washington hears the engines of its own decline. When Nigeria diversifies trade, Washington hears strategic defection. When Speaker Abbas declared that Nigeria must diversify towards China after US tariffs on Nigerian exports, Washington did not hear domestic policy. It heard betrayal.
Forget the sentimental nonsense about protecting Nigerian Christians or humanitarian outrage against narcoterrorism. These are fig leaves. The real theatre is resource control and geopolitical containment. Trump himself has not hidden it. He openly advocated stealing oil from Iraq, Syria, and Venezuela. He said it on television. He said Venezuela should have been taken over to secure oil. He said he could not believe the United States left Iraq without the oil. He declared that the United States would decide the fate of Syrian oil fields. This is the language of a gangster empire. It is not unique to Trump. It is simply more honest.
Venezuela nationalised its resources under Chavez and was economically strangled for years by every US administration from Clinton to Biden. When sanctions failed, narrative warfare intensified. When narrative warfare failed, the military option was introduced. Maduro was indicted. Opposition was armed. Parallel governments were recognised. When that stalled, Trump struck militarily. This is how resource denial looks when diplomacy fails.
Nigeria is now entering that danger zone. The US knows China is entrenching in Nigeria. The US knows Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso have already shifted into the China Russia orbit. The US knows uranium from Niger is now off limits. The US knows that Rare Earth minerals from the Sahel are slipping beyond Western reach. The US knows that Russia is building security contracts where France once ruled. The US knows that a Chinese foothold on the Gulf of Guinea would be catastrophic for Atlantic dominance. So it is not surprising that Trump ordered Pentagon planning for potential military action in Nigeria. And then Sokoto happened.
The strike on Sokoto was not to save Christians. It was not to fight ISIS. Washington has a long history of using jihadists as proxies, spoilers and pretexts. Afghanistan. Libya. Syria. Chechnya. Yemen. HTS in Syria was rebranded and then quietly removed from the terrorist bounty list. Western intelligence has always understood the value of extremists as geopolitical tools.
Sokoto was a footprint operation. A probe. A test balloon. A soft insertion. And it only worked because Nigerias leadership is compromised, distracted, fractured and insecure. The Nigerian state has no counterinsurgency framework worth the name, no strategic doctrine, and no national psychological unity. Its military is starved by corruption, its intelligence infiltrated by politics, its leadership obsessed with party intrigue, its governors playing landlord, and its politicians stealing federal allocation as if the country is eternal. The Americans saw weakness and moved. They will move again.
Nigeria is sitting on strategic minerals with no military shield. It is in a resource war with no industrial policy. It is in a geopolitical contest with no diplomatic doctrine. It is in an imperial confrontation with no national elite consensus. It is facing China and the United States while unable to manage Kaduna to Kano. It is dreaming of elections in 2027 when the imperial clock is set to 2026.
Nigeria is in the position of a deer on the highway. Headlights approaching from East and West. No time to jump. No agency. No strategy. No institutional spine. And worst of all, no leadership that even understands the size of the board. China wants access. America wants denial. Europe wants stabilization. Russia wants security corridors. The Sahel wants sovereignty. ECOWAS wants relevance. Nigeria wants to pretend nothing is changing.
What makes Nigerias situation tragic is not the scarcity of resources but the scarcity of state capacity. A country with the mineral wealth to negotiate with superpowers from a position of strength is instead reduced to subcontracting its security and begging for aid. A country that should be setting the terms of extraction is being positioned for extraction. A country that should be shaping ECOWAS will soon be shaped by it. A country with 200 million citizens, nuclear grade minerals, continental leverage, and global relevance is behaving like an ungoverned protectorate waiting for external arbitration.
Nigeria has become a prize. And prizes are not asked for. They are taken.
By Chima Nnadi-Oforgu
Duruebube Uzii na Abosi
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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