American Thinker | Raymond Ibrahim | April 21, 2020
Not only is Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari behind what several international observers are calling a “genocide” of Christians in his nation, but Barack Hussein Obama played a major role in the Muslim president’s rise to power. These two interconnected accusations are increasingly being made — not by “xenophobic” Americans but Nigerians themselves, including several leaders and officials.
Most recently, Femi Fani-Kayode, Nigeria’s former minister of culture and tourism, wrote in a Facebook post:
What Obama, John Kerry and Hilary Clinton did to Nigeria by funding and supporting Buhari in the 2015 presidential election and helping Boko Haram in 2014/2015 was sheer wickedness and the blood of all those killed by the Buhari administration, his Fulani herdsmen and Boko Haram over the last 5 years are on their hands.
Kerry’s and Clinton’s appeasement of Boko Haram — an Islamic terror organization notorious for massacring, enslaving, and raping Christians, and bombing and burning their churches — is apparently what connects them to this “sheer wickedness.”
For example, after a Nigerian military offensive killed 30 Boko Haram terrorists in 2013, then secretary of state Kerry “issued a strongly worded statement” to Buhari’s predecessor, President Goodluck Jonathan (2010-2015), a Christian. In it, Kerry warned Jonathan that “We are… deeply concerned by credible allegations that Nigerian security forces are committing gross human rights violations” against the terrorists.
Similarly, during her entire tenure as secretary of state, Clinton repeatedly refused to designate Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization, despite nonstop pressure from lawmakers, human-rights activists, and lobbyists, ignoring Boko Haram’s countless atrocities against Christians.
“Those of you that still love the evil called Barack Obama,” Fani-Kayode added in his post, “should listen to this short clip and tell me if you still do.” He was referring to a recent Al Jazeera video interview of Eeben Barlow, a former lieutenant-colonel of the South African Defence Force and chairman of a private military company hired in 2015 by Nigerian President Jonathan to help defeat Boko Haram.
“In one month,” Barlow said in the interview, “we took back terrain larger than Belgium from Boko Haram. We were not allowed to finish because it came at a time when governments were in the process of changing,” he said in reference to Nigeria’s 2015 presidential elections. “The incoming president, President Buhari, was heavily supported by a foreign government, and one of the first missions [of Buhari] was to terminate our contract.”
On being asked if he could name the “foreign government,” the former lieutenant-colonel said, “Yes, we were told it was the United States, and they had actually funded President Buhari’s campaign, and the campaign manager for President Buhari came from the US. And I am not saying the United States is bad — I understand foreign interests — but I would have thought that a threat such as Boko Haram on the integrity of the state of Nigeria ought to be actually a priority. It wasn’t.”
Fani-Kayode was quick to add in his Facebook post that it would have been the priority had Obama not been president: “I just thank God for Donald Trump,” the former minister said in the same post. “Had he been President of America in 2015 things would have been very different, Jonathan would have won, Boko Haram would have been history and the Fulani herdsmen would never have seen the light of day.”
Fani-Kayode and Barlow are not alone in accusing Obama of “heavily supporting” and “actually funding” a presidential candidate who, since becoming president, has been increasingly accused of turning a blind eye to — when not giving active support, which included jet fighters — the worsening slaughter of Christians at the hands of Muslims in his nation. In 2018, former president Jonathan revealed that,
On March 23, 2015, President Obama himself took the unusual step of releasing a video message directly to Nigerians all but telling them how to vote… Those who understood subliminal language deciphered that he was prodding the electorate to vote for the [Buhari/Muslim-led] opposition to form a new government… The message was so condescending, it was as if Nigerians did not know what to do and needed an Obama to direct them.