Lawmakers Protest Billion-Dollar Biden Arms Sale to Nigeria over Human Rights Atrocities

Two members of the House subcommittee on Africa, Reps. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) and Chris Smith (R-NJ), on Wednesday asked President Joe Biden to halt a $1 billion arms sale to Nigeria due to humanitarian abuses, including the Nigerian military allegedly killing children and running a near-genocidal illegal abortion program.

Jacobs and Smith pointed to a Reuters investigation of military abuses called “Nightmare in Nigeria” published in December. The investigation uncovered various human rights abuses perpetrated against Islamics insurgents, including “targeted killings of children vilified as offspring or allies of the enemy.”

According to Reuters, in 2013 the Nigerian military began a “secret, systematic, and illegal abortion program in the country’s northeast” that targeted women who were impregnated by militants, including girls kidnapped by the infamous Boko Haram gang. 

The methods employed in this abortion program were not gentle, or sanitary. Only one of the 33 women interviewed by Reuters said she consented to the procedure.

Another part of the investigation quoted eyewitnesses who saw Nigerian soldiers kill children outside of the womb, sometimes cutting down their mothers in the process. 

“Soldiers and armed guards employed by the government told Reuters army commanders repeatedly ordered them to ‘delete’ children, because the children were assumed to be collaborating with militants in Boko Haram or its Islamic State offshoot, or to have inherited the tainted blood of insurgent fathers,” the report said.

Reuters was able to verify at least 60 children killed in massacres, most recently in February 2021, but if all of the accounts collected by investigators proved to be true, the total number of child killings would run into the thousands.

Jacobs and Smith noted that U.S. has a “significant security partnership with Nigeria,” including “$232 million in security assistance, $1.6 billion in foreign military sales, and $305 million in direct commercial sales” over the past twenty years.

“The assistance we have provided has done little to stem the conflict – in fact, insecurity has worsened from the abuses committed by Nigerian forces,” the representatives wrote. To top it off, the U.S. State and Defense Departments have lost track of how many U.S.-funded weapons the rape-and-murder-prone Islamist insurgents have captured from Nigerian forces.

Jacobs and Smith said that in light of these revelations, it would be “highly inappropriate” to proceed with a billion-dollar arms sale to Nigeria.

They further advised a “review of security assistance and cooperation programs in Nigeria to include a risk assessment of civilian casualties and abuses resulting from such assistance and whether such assistance has ever been diverted or had any significant positive effect on the conflict and violence in Nigeria.”

Last month, Smith introduced a resolution calling on the Biden administration to restore Nigeria to the State Department’s list of “countries of particular concern” for violating religious freedom. Nigeria was on that list until 2021 when Secretary of State Antony Blinken stunned religious freedom advocates by removing it.

“Last year alone, 5,014 Christians were killed in Nigeria – accounting for nearly 90 percent of Christian deaths worldwide as well 90 percent of Christian kidnappings across the globe. You can’t give President Buhari a passing grade when he has utterly failed to protect religious freedom, including and especially that of Christians,” Smith said in January.

Smith also called for Biden to appoint a special envoy to monitor human rights abuses in Nigeria and the Lake Chad region.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s term will end with elections on February 25. According to the latest election polls, the leading candidate to replace him is a Christian named Peter Obi, who is running as a third-party outsider.