06/11/2025
This week’s episode on Boulevards with Gbolahan Badru
When Global Saviours Manufacture Local Demons: Nigeria and the Theatre of Western Imagination
The President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, and his bedridden, shallow-psyched apologists must either be drunk, schizophrenic, or on a wild goose chase. Madness! To sit roughly 10,650 kilometres away from Nigeria and pontificate against a nation that prides itself on having some of the most educated Africans is either feebleness, idiocy, or sheer imbecility. Who does he think he is?
This is not even when his own country is grappling with some of the most monumental crises in its history, yet his preoccupation is with a nation whose plights he neither shares nor understands. How did we get here?
And what does his rant have to do with alleged “targeted killings of Christians,” when Muslims have borne an even larger share of this cruelty? Are we collectively hallucinating?
To claim that Christians alone are under existential threat in Nigeria, and that radical Islamists are solely responsible, is misleading. Yes, extremist groups such as Boko Haram, ISWAP, and radicalised Fulani herdsmen feature in many attacks, but Nigeria’s violence is multi-causal: insurgency, communal land/edge conflicts, herder-farmer clashes, banditry. To frame it as a one-sided religious massacre is not only reductionist, it distorts reality for political grandstanding.
Nigeria is still emerging from the horrors Trump’s rotting-in-hell ancestors inflicted upon it, yet he chooses this moment to deodorize his ancestral sh*ts? Utterly laughable. And what is more embarrassing is his eagerness to trample on the sovereignty of a nation in a way even the President of Tanzania would be chided for if found wanting of the same. As the self-styled “policeman of the world,” Trump and his goons remain trapped in a 1970s hallucination, when the world excused U.S. hyperactive disorderliness, aggression, and violations of sovereignty under the guise of “civilising missions” or imagined threats to humanity. Are we mad or something?!
But the deeper tragedy is that these foreign interventions are now emboldening local secular crusaders like Ted Cruz and a chorus of confused “moderate Muslims” who, in their quest for the West-inspired Ballon D'Or of “moderate” muslims, believe their newfound heroism lies in demanding the abolition of blasphemy laws in Northern Nigeria. Their argument, wrapped in the cosmetics of liberal absolutism, insists on an unrestrained freedom of expression, brandishing the 1999 Constitution as a shield for speech regardless of its moral or religious consequence.
Yet to examine this issue outside the philosophical compass of utilitarian equity is to adjudicate law without the conscience of the society it seeks to regulate.
Jeremy Bentham’s Felicific (Hedonic) Calculus offers a rational lens: the rightness or wrongness of a law is measured by its capacity to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Thus, in determining whether blasphemy laws serve justice or impede liberty, the real question is its sociopolitical utility, not imported sentiments from Washington or Brussels.
Applying Bentham’s seven indices– intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent– the preservation of blasphemy laws yields a higher aggregate of societal pleasure than their abolition in the context of Northern Nigeria.
Intensity & Certainty: In a region where Islam is not merely a religion but a way of life, reverence for the Prophet (peace be upon him) carries profound emotional intensity. Any act of blasphemy produces immediate, intense societal pain, often triggering communal unrest. History confirms the certainty of this consequence.
Duration & Propinquity: The wounds of blasphemy outlive the utterance; they corrode trust and harmony for years. The temporary restraint imposed by the law prevents long-term chaos, and the pleasure of public peace outlasts the discomfort of speech restriction.
Fecundity & Purity: Moral restraint breeds virtues, respect, cohesion, tolerance. Removing such restraint fertilizes resentment, moral decay, and anarchy. The pleasure of stability is pure; unrestricted provocation pollutes peace.
Extent: The happiness preserved by maintaining the law far outweighs the displeasure of the few who feel censored. This is as utilitarian equity serves the greater number.
This is not merely philosophical flourish but constitutional reality. Sections 38 and 39 of the 1999 Constitution guarantee freedom of expression, but Section 45 makes clear that these freedoms may be lawfully restricted in the interest of public morality, order, and the rights of others. The Sharia Penal Codes in Northern states are constitutionally valid exercises of residual legislative power under Section 4(7). This is actually in a bid to make sure that Nigeria’s federalism accommodates moral diversity.
To invalidate such laws on the altar of Western liberal absolutism is to elevate the pleasure of a few over the peace of the many, which is an inversion that offends both Bentham’s utilitarian justice and Nigeria’s constitutional pluralism.
Trump’s reckless commentary not only distorts Nigeria’s security realities; it emboldens those who wish to impose alien moral frameworks on a diverse society. Freedom of expression does not include freedom to tear at the moral fabric of communities. Liberty is not licence and rights coexist with responsibilities.
Bentham teaches that the law’s duty is to secure “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” In Northern Nigeria, where the majority’s spiritual well-being is intertwined with religious sanctity, permitting deliberate blasphemy in the name of free speech would constitute a legislative assault on collective happiness.
The abolition of blasphemy laws would breed more pain than pleasure. It would breed more psychological unrest, more communal tension, and more religious provocation. Their retention sustains a larger sphere of societal satisfaction, public order, and spiritual tranquillity. Thus, the debate on blasphemy laws transcends legality. It is a question of collective moral calculus.
And perhaps if Trump and his shallow-psyched apologists were not so busy hallucinating across oceans, they might understand that Nigeria’s stability is not a playground for American political theatre, but a delicate equilibrium. It is one that must be safeguarded not with imported doctrines, but with laws anchored in the lived realities of its people.
In the final analysis, Nigeria must confront a hard truth: the continued existence of the death penalty for blasphemy is legislative impunity stretched beyond reason. It is a relic that no longer aligns with a world governed by freedom, human dignity, and constitutional liberty. Our laws must reflect a society that protects faith without weaponizing it; that honors sacred religious tenets without allowing the state to take life in their name.
Reform is not rebellion against religion. And so, the path forward is clear: modify the blasphemy laws, abrogate the death sentence, and replace it with penalties that preserve order without violating humanity. Only then can we claim to be a nation that defends both its moral heritage and the inalienable rights of its people.
