There has been a break between the time the first part of this article was written and the time this second part was written. And indeed, the guns are blazing.

As I write the second part of this article, there is breaking news. Early Monday morning, November 17, 2025, gunmen invaded Government Girls’ Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State, killed the Vice Principal, and abducted 25 students. That was after engaging police personnel on duty in a firefight.

Almost simultaneously, a similar abominable act was being perpetrated in the Kagarko Local Government Area of Kaduna State. There, according to the Kaduna Catholic Archdiocese, attackers invaded Kushe Gugdu village, stormed St. Stephen Parish, abducted the Parish Priest, Father Bobbo Paschal, abducted some villagers, and killed some others. Among those killed was a brother to another Catholic priest, Father Anthony Yero.

These two incidents add to the long litany, the unending narrative of instances of governmental failure in matters of security in Nigeria. For years, Nigeria has been witnessing heightened insecurity. While it is true that Christians and Muslims have been on the receiving end of terrorism, it is also true that these two incidents are shocking reminders of the abduction of the Chibok secondary schoolgirls, of Leah Sharibu held in captivity since March 2018 because of her Christian faith, of Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a young Christian woman and student of Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto, who was stoned to death and set ablaze on May 12, 2022 by some Muslim students who accused her of blasphemy.

Suspects arrested were charged to court, not for murder, but for “criminal conspiracy and incitement of public disturbance”. They were later discharged and acquitted because the prosecuting lawyers did not show up. Murderers of Deborah got away with murder.

Bandits are wreaking havoc in the states of the northwest of Nigeria. Boko Haram operates in the northeast. In the north, much of the violence bears the name of religion. Radical jihadists are killing Christians in northern Nigeria in genocidal proportions. They are also killing Muslims who do not agree with them. Herdsmen are killing in the states of the middle belt.

Violent separatists are killing in the states of the southeast. Kidnappers are on the prowl in states of the southwest. Terrorism wears the toga of federal character. And all this is happening while politicians, in preparation for the 2027 elections, are decamping from one party to another, fiddling while Nigeria is burning. Successive governments have acted as if lives of Nigerians mattered less than the political ambition of Nigerian politicians.

Some Nigerians find an attractive proposition in the guns-a-blazing solution of President Trump. But in fact, Nigerians are caught like a sandwich between the reckless rhetoric of a foreign leader patently contemptuous of international law, ceaselessly denigrating other countries, and our own government’s patent inability and or unwillingness to put an end to the killings of innocent Nigerians.

If President Trump’s threat to unilaterally intervene militarily in Nigeria were to be truly humanitarian, would it be consistent with the imperatives of international law? The pertinence of the question is rooted in the fact that, while it is one thing to wage a just war, it is another to wage a just war with just means. But what does international law say?

According to the United Nations Charter, Article 2 (4), “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.” That prohibition of threat or use of force flows from Article 2 (1), which states: “The (United Nations) Organisation is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.”

In international law, there is no absolute prohibition of military intervention in another country because there is no absolute adherence to the sovereignty of nations. However, such an intervention, even on humanitarian grounds, must meet strict conditions. The United Nations Charter provides a guide here. Such intervention can only be justified when a nation is compelled to act in self-defence, or when there is authorisation for such intervention by the United Nations Security Council.

Military intervention by one country in another country on humanitarian grounds is in fact a moral obligation because the international community is bearer of a moral responsibility. In this regard, President Trump, leader of the most powerful nation on earth as we speak, would be abdicating that moral responsibility if he were not to unilaterally intervene in Nigeria. Where, for example, there are cases of ethnic cleansing, genocide, war crimes, it would be immoral of a nation or nations that can put an end to these to fold their arms in an I-don’t-care attitude.

Nonetheless, such military intervention must be undertaken within the law. If it is not to be reckless, lawless and immoral, such intervention must respond to a number of criteria, namely, it must not be unilateral, all diplomatic means of resolving conflicts must have been exhausted, non-intervention would affect innocent lives of innocent, outcome of the intervention must not be a greater harm than the war it sought to prevent, and it must be authorised by the United Nations.

These criteria must be respected because sovereignty of nations matters even when leaders of nations fail to respect the sovereignty of their own people. Sovereignty of a nation is like dignity of a human person. Even if the person in question does not respect his own dignity, no one has the right to violate his dignity.

No one has the right to kill a man who wants to commit suicide. In the same way, even if political actors in Nigeria seldom respect sovereignty of Nigeria, that would not justify any act that disrespects her sovereignty. And, contrary to President Trump’s description of Nigeria as a “disgraced” country, the land called Nigeria might have been misgoverned, but Nigeria is not a disgraced country. If he were to carry out his threat to send the American military to Nigeria, “guns-a-blazing”, even on humanitarian grounds, he would be acting outside the law in the comity of nations. If he acted within any law, it would be the law of might is right.

Trump’s unilateral intervention might sit well with Thrasymachus’ definition of justice in Plato’s Republic.

Justice, according to Thrasymachus, “is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger.”

The implication of such a notion of justice for international relations would be this: if a superpower, with the advantage of superior military might, were to annex a weaker nation with meagre and inferior military might, the superpower would be just. However, there are clear examples in history, and indeed there is a clear and present danger that powerful nations could use humanitarian grounds as pretext for invading weaker nations.

The invasion of Lagos by the British in 1851 provides an example in distant memory about how a supposedly humanitarian motive led to other problems in the land around the Niger. The British might have put an end to slave trade.

But colonisation of Lagos opened the floodgates to imperial expansionism that would later culminate in the colonisation of a vast and diverse Nigeria, the forced amalgamation of disparate ethnic communities, an amalgamation that would lead to a land of inter-ethnic, inter-communal and inter-religious conflicts, a land of insecurity of today.

That is why authorisation by an international organ like the United Nations is a legal and moral prerequisite for military intervention even on humanitarian grounds.

Father Akinwale is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Augustine University, Ilara-Epe, Lagos State.