Opinion: The Tinubu Pivot To China

* And why we cannot afford to lose Nigeria

By Mike Arnold

Tinubu is pulling Nigeria out of America’s reach and into China’s arms, on purpose, to make our pressure on the genocide irrelevant before it can bite. We are about to lose Africa’s anchor state to Beijing and the caliphate at the same time, and the window to stop it is closing by the month.

Their own side said the quiet part out loud. The day after our Christmas strike on Sokoto, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, one of the north’s most influential clerics, called it a “neo-Crusade war against Islam,” told Abuja to cut military ties with the United States, and named the replacements: China, Turkey, and Pakistan. Those powers are already moving in.

The scale is not theoretical. In 2025, Chinese construction commitments to Nigeria hit $24.6 billion — up from $1.8 billion the year before, a thirteenfold jump, and the largest of any country on earth. In September 2024 Beijing raised Nigeria to its highest partnership tier, the one it reserves for Russia and Pakistan. Nigeria is bidding for BRICS with Chinese backing. It renewed its currency swap with Beijing and asked to expand it. Its banks now settle directly in yuan, off the dollar rails. This is the largest foreign-policy realignment in Nigeria’s history, and it is moving fast.

This is why sanctions alone will fail. They run on the dollar; the currency swap and yuan settlement route around it. They bite a government with no other banker; China is now the banker. The pivot is a shock absorber — built so that whatever Washington restricts, Beijing replaces. We have to stop assuming financial pressure on Abuja still works the way it did five years ago.

And the regime we are pressuring is not just dodging us — it is paying the killers. Chinese miners pay “rent” to the Fulani militias to work the land the massacres clear. The National Security Adviser’s own office has armed those militias. The minerals flow to China, the protection money flows to the killers and their institutional backers, and the cleared ground becomes the next mine. Chinese capital now bankrolls the political class that runs the whole machine.

This is not a country we can write off. Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy and largest oil producer, and it is on track to be the third most populous nation on earth by 2050 — one of the decisive states of the century. We cannot afford to let it be hijacked by China and radical Islam at the same moment. That is not a regional setback. It reshapes the global board.

The answer is not to out-bid Beijing or to keep firing sanctions that miss. It is not to keep propping up a corrupt regime under a constitution designed to keep the people under control of the Caliphate. It is to break the stranglehold itself.

Investigate the Sokoto Caliphate network for terrorist designation and confront the source of the violence.

Force out the truth the regime is hiding with a U.S.-backed census of the millions of denied displaced, which builds the genocide case and unlocks international aid being withheld.

>> Continue to target the jihadis — and widen the scope to include the Fulani militia known to be the most prolific killers. Wipe them out without mercy.

> Cut the propaganda line by barring lobbying on behalf of any Country of Particular Concern.

And guarantee a free, honest 2027 election with a constitutional referendum — not merely observe it — so the Nigerian people can take their own country back.

Free the people from the stranglehold and help them rise, and China loses the chaos it feeds on. That is how we keep Nigeria — and earn a true, lasting ally in an increasingly dangerous part of the world.