My attention was recently drawn to some chats centred on the Federal Government of Nigeria’s condemnation of the Houthi led Yameni government attack on alleged civilian targets in Saudi Arabia. A brother forwarded the discussion to me with an interesting instruction attached: “Kindly get your scholars to write COUNTER NARRATIVE.” That was how the parcel arrived at my WhatsApp doorstep, complete with its proposed diagnosis and prescribed medicine. Apparently, before the evidence had been examined, we already knew that what was required was a counter narrative. In these interesting times, facts sometimes arrive rather late to meetings at which conclusions have already taken their seats.
First, a caveat. I am not a scholar, and I make no claim to that distinction. My ambition is much more modest. I hope to remain a perpetual student and a learner tiytiybiri grade until I breathe my last. The day a man becomes convinced that he has finished learning is often the day ignorance quietly appoints him a Fasfetsa. I therefore approach this matter carrying no brief for Abuja, Washington, Tehran, or Riyadh, and I have no geopolitical uncle whose sins require laundering. Facts have an irritating habit of refusing party membership, and when they quarrel with our sympathies, it is our sympathies that should pack their bags and get lost.
On the central factual question, the documentary record is fairly clear. Nigeria condemned the Houthi attack on alleged civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria had earlier condemned Israel’s terrorist attack on Iran in June 2025. In its official statement of 14 June 2025, the Federal Government expressly stated that it “condemns Israel’s pre-emptive strike on Iran.” Abuja called for restraint, cessation of hostilities, dialogue and respect for international law. Anyone claiming, therefore, that Nigeria suddenly discovered its voice when the Houthis attacked Saudi Arabia after maintaining complete silence over Israel’s attack on Iran would be arguing against the documentary record. Facts may be inconvenient guests, but throwing them out of the house does not make them cease to exist.
The Glorious Qur’an gives us a sterner standard than the one commonly observed in political arguments: “Wa lā yajrimannakum shana’ānu qawmin ‘alā allā ta‘dilū…” Let not the hatred of a people, cause you to depart from justice. There is enough moral philosophy in that injunction to occupy international relations departments for several semesters. Justice that functions only when dealing with people we like is not justice. It is favouritism wearing judicial robes. The real test of fairness comes when the facts compel us to acknowledge something inconvenient about an opponent or something embarrassing about a friend.
Nigeria therefore deserves commendation for taking a principled position in both instances. A civilian remains a civilian whether he lives in Najran, Tehran, Gaza, Beirut, Southern Lebanon or anywhere else unfortunate enough to appear on somebody’s military map.
International humanitarian law cannot be issued different passports at the border. Human blood cannot acquire a higher market value because the victim possesses the preferred nationality, worships in the preferred direction or lives under a government favoured by a powerful capital or an empowered fool like DJT. Once human dignity is rationed according to alliance, religion, ethnicity or geopolitical convenience, the principle has already been surrendered before the argument begins.
Neither should the morality of an explosion depend upon the manufacturer’s label on the missile. If a projectile launched by an armed movement tears through a civilian neighbourhood, we call it barbarism, and rightly so. If another missile arrives polished, insured, technologically sophisticated and accompanied by a Pentagon briefing, the person beneath the rubble remains inconveniently dead. Modern civilisation has perfected many things, including the remarkable ability to make violence respectable by improving the vocabulary surrounding it. Killing becomes a strike, invasion becomes intervention, destruction becomes degradation of capability, and dead civilians acquire the bureaucratic dignity of collateral damage.
Nigeria condemned both incidents, and on that narrow question the documentary argument should end. But that is precisely where the more interesting discussion ought to begin. Then what? What have we actually learnt from these episodes about the world in which we live? If the entire exercise is merely to prove that Abuja condemned A as well as B, we can congratulate the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, close the file and return home before lunch. The more troublesome question is whether the principles so confidently proclaimed in diplomatic statements survive when they encounter power, friendship, domestic politics and inconvenient facts.
States speak endlessly about principles, yet the international system continues to operate substantially through interests, alliances, capabilities and power. International law exists, and humanity would be considerably worse without it, but its enforcement sometimes resembles a hotel with different entrances. Some countries enter through the front door, surrender their luggage and are searched down to their socks. Others arrive through the presidential suite where nobody considers it polite to ask what is inside the suitcase. The law may be written in universal language, but enforcement has somehow developed an excellent eye for passports.
Consider the Russia and Ukraine conflict. Territorial sovereignty became sacred vocabulary, and rightly so. Aggression was condemned, sanctions followed, diplomatic isolation followed, and the architecture of international law was invoked with considerable conviction. Yet elsewhere in the occupied Palestine otherwise called (the illegal state of) israel, when and where borders are crossed by the gangsters with IDF uniforms enjoying the correct alliances, political language undergoes an extraordinary transformation. Aggression becomes pre-emption, bombing becomes a precision operation, violation of sovereignty becomes legitimate self-defence, and the discussion quickly shifts from what happened to why the perpetrator was supposedly compelled to do it. Apparently international law, like certain Nigerian traffic regulations, can be extremely strict with the man driving a battered Bulhodi and remarkably philosophical when the approaching vehicle carries an SUV with government number plate.
This is where our own argument becomes uncomfortable. The Houthi attack on civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, if indeed the facts establish that civilians were deliberately targeted, deserves condemnation. Whatever political or military grievances the Houthis may have, deliberately attacking civilians cannot become morally acceptable merely because those firing the weapons describe themselves as resisting injustice. The history of a conflict may explain an action, but explanation is not absolution. A principle worth defending must survive even when its application disadvantages the side towards which our sympathies lean. Otherwise, we may end up being the evil we abhor.
For anyone who genuinely claims intellectual and spiritual allegiance to the school of Ahlul Bayt, the standard should be even more demanding. Our moral compass cannot be calibrated by whether the actor involved is politically close to us or opposed to those we regard as oppressors. We have a far more challenging responsibility. We have Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib. The battlefield did not suspend his ethics. Provocation did not rewrite his principles. The conduct of his opponents did not become permission for him to imitate them. His restraint becomes particularly instructive precisely because it was exercised amid conflict, betrayal, political intrigue and the bitter confrontation with Muawiya’s camp.
The episode surrounding access to water at Siffin captures the principle with almost unbearable clarity. When Muawiya’s forces initially controlled access to the Euphrates and sought to deny Ali’s army water, Ali’s forces eventually fought their way to the river and gained control of it. Here was the perfect opportunity for reciprocal justice as men commonly understand it. They denied us water, therefore deny them water. They used cruelty, therefore answer cruelty with cruelty. Revenge could easily have dressed itself in the respectable clothing of justice. Yet Imam Ali refused to make the water a weapon of collective punishment and permitted the opposing army access to it. His enemy’s conduct did not determine his own moral character.
That is the harder meaning of following Ahlul Bayt. It is easy to admire Imam Ali’s courage with Zulfiqar. It is considerably harder to inherit the restraint of the hand that held it. Anybody can celebrate victory over an enemy. The more demanding lesson is possessing power over an opponent and refusing to become the evil one condemns. Imam Ali teaches that injustice suffered does not manufacture a licence to commit another injustice. If your enemy violates a principle, his violation does not release you from that principle. Otherwise, the oppressor has achieved something greater than defeating you militarily. He has recruited you into his school of thought.
This principle runs through Imam Ali’s understanding of war. The enemy was not transformed into a population without rights merely because battle had begun. Restraint towards those who were not fighting, limits on vengeance, rejection of mutilation and concern for the defeated were not luxuries reserved for peaceful times. They mattered precisely because war creates the temptation to discard them. There would be little moral achievement in practising restraint when nobody has provoked you. The character of Imam Ali’s restraint becomes visible because it survived provocation.
That lesson should trouble every partisan camp, including our own. If tomorrow credible evidence establishes that people acting in the name of resistance deliberately targeted innocent civilians, our response cannot be to search desperately for the crimes of their enemies. Those crimes may be real, monstrous and worthy of condemnation, but they cannot perform ablution for another wrong. Najran cannot be justified by Gaza. Gaza cannot be justified by October 7. Once innocent blood becomes acceptable because we have first assembled a catalogue of the enemy’s crimes, we have abandoned Imam Ali while continuing to pronounce his name.
Perhaps this is one of the hardest lessons of Siffin. Muawiya’s camp could deny water, employ political stratagem and commit injustice, yet Imam Ali remained responsible for and to Imam Ali. His ethics could not be outsourced to the behaviour of his adversary. That is an extraordinarily demanding conception of morality because it deprives us of one of humanity’s oldest excuses: “They started it.” The school of Ahlul Bayt asks a more unsettling question. What did you become after they started it? Did you remain the real good guy or the evil you abhor.
So when we condemn an attack on civilians, we should not feel that we have betrayed the oppressed or strengthened their oppressors. If the allegation is established, condemnation is precisely what fidelity to principle requires. One may oppose aggression against Yemen, condemn the devastation of Gaza, reject attacks on Iran and still insist that civilians in Saudi Arabia possess the same inviolability. There is no contradiction there. The contradiction begins when justice changes definition according to whose missile is travelling through the sky.
That, to me, is where allegiance to Ahlul Bayt must move beyond slogans, banners and historical mourning. To follow Imami is not merely to know who wronged him. It is to ask what prevented the wrongs committed against him from turning him into a mirror image of those who wronged him. His restraint at the moment when retaliation was possible is perhaps more difficult to imitate than his courage when the swords were drawn. If we inherit his grievances but abandon his teachings, we may have inherited the history of Ahlul Bayt without yet understanding their school.
Yet the same standard must travel in the opposite direction. If Saudi sovereignty matters, Iranian sovereignty matters. Yemeni sovereignty matters. Lebanese sovereignty matters. Palestinian lives matter, civilian lives wherever they may live matter too. If civilians in Najran deserve protection, civilians in Minab, Tehran, Gaza, Beirut, Sana’a and Southern Lebanon do not require a separate application form. If firing weapons across an international boundary demands condemnation, the moral equation cannot suddenly change because the aircraft costs one hundred million dollars, carries advanced electronics and belongs to a state with permanent friends in important places. Otherwise, international law begins to resemble a village meeting in which everyone is equal until the chief’s son enters the room.
Nigeria’s statements therefore present an opportunity more useful than partisan celebration. They allow us to ask whether Nigerian foreign policy can defend a principle when applying that principle becomes diplomatically expensive.
Condemning Israel’s terrorist attack on Iran was proper, and condemning attacks on Saudi civilians was equally proper. Condemning attacks on innocent people should not require a geopolitical calculator. Yet consistency receives its real examination when the actor involved possesses considerable military power, diplomatic influence, economic leverage and enough friends to redefine an unpleasant noun into a respectable verb.
The United States attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025 presents precisely that examination. Nigeria’s condemnation of Israel’s earlier terrorist attack appears explicitly in the official record, yet I have not found comparably explicit Nigerian language condemning the subsequent US unprovoked terrorism inspired strikes. If such a statement exists, let it be produced and the record corrected. Facts should remain facts even when they destroy a beautiful argument. But if no such statement exists, the silence deserves interrogation because a principle that becomes suddenly shy in the presence of a superpower as championed by empowered fool is no longer behaving like a principle. It is behaving like an employee who has recognised the chairman walking into the room.
Washington should not be condemned merely because it is Washington, but neither should Washington acquire diplomatic immunity simply because it is Washington. If attacking another sovereign state without lawful justification is wrong, the nationality of the aircraft cannot perform moral alchemy upon the bombs it carries. Great powers have always possessed an impressive vocabulary for their own violence, and the United States is hardly different in this respect. Empires rarely announce that they are acting like gangsters. They usually arrive bearing civilisation, security, stability, freedom or some other respectable noun while somebody else discovers that his roof has disappeared.
And here our diplomatic telescope must finally be turned around because there is another lesson considerably closer to home and therefore considerably less comfortable. Nigerians have developed remarkable expertise in detecting injustice several thousand kilometres away. Our moral eyesight at long distance is astonishing. We can identify violations of international law in Yemen before breakfast, discover oppression in Palestine before I can finish munching my Gurasa da Kuli and issue solemn declarations about civilian protection in Saudi Arabia before dinner. Yet somebody mentions Zaria and suddenly the national spectacles develop cataracts, the files become complicated and everybody remembers an urgent appointment elsewhere.
If the Federal Government’s condemnation of attacks on civilians abroad proceeds from a genuine conviction about the sanctity of human life, that conviction must possess a Nigerian visa and be permitted to come home. What, then, of the December 2015 Zaria killings involving the Nigerian Army and members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria? What of the findings and unanswered questions that followed? What of subsequent allegations involving killings, prolonged detention, sundry violations of constitutional right to freedom of speech, association and persecution of members of the movement at federal and state levels? These questions cannot simply be deported because they make Rankadades and Yallabois uncomfortable.
The dead of Najran cannot be sacred while the dead of Zaria become an administrative inconvenience. If civilian protection is a principle, its jurisdiction cannot mysteriously expire at Nigeria’s border. Moral authority is not acquired merely by issuing statements concerning atrocities committed abroad because governments manufacture press releases rather cheaply. Moral authority is considerably more expensive. It requires investigation, accountability and the willingness to examine the conduct of institutions carrying one’s own flag with the same seriousness applied to institutions carrying somebody else’s.
This is not an invitation to compare corpses as accountants compare figures in opposing columns. It is an argument for consistency. A government earns moral credibility when the same concern for human life governs its conduct towards its own citizens, including citizens whose beliefs, politics or methods it finds objectionable. If an attack on civilians in Najran offends our conscience because civilians must never become expendable, allegations of unlawful killing in Zaria should disturb precisely the same conscience. Geography cannot determine the value of blood, and citizenship should not reduce the protection owed to a human being by the state that claims him as its own.
The familiar saying that charity begins at home acquires a harder meaning here. Perhaps moral authority should be required to obtain its first address there too. Nigeria should condemn credible violations of international humanitarian law whether committed by gangsters in tailored suits or their Arabian yesmaniac bootlickers. It should also confront grave violations committed by Nigerian institutions where credible evidence establishes them. The last category is where patriotism receives its examination because it is remarkably easy to condemn another country’s soldier while considerably more courage is required to investigate your own.
Nigeria got something right when it condemned attacks on civilians and condemned the bastard child of zionism i.e. the illegal state of Israel’s series of terrorist attacks on Iran. Give the government its due, then demand more from it. Those statements should mature into a coherent foreign policy doctrine in which sovereignty, civilian protection and international law are principles rather than diplomatic accessories brought out for selected occasions. Nigeria is not an American province, a Saudi dependency or an Israeli diplomatic outpost. It is a major African country with its own history, interests, responsibilities and diplomatic traditions, and its voice becomes stronger when Abuja can say exactly the same thing to a friend that it would say to an adversary under identical circumstances.
There is also a hard Nigerian interest involved. Most African countries cannot defend themselves through overwhelming military power, and their protection within the international system depends heavily upon rules against aggression, territorial conquest and arbitrary intervention. Africans should therefore be extremely careful when applauding doctrines that permit power drunk states to attack weaker ones whenever sufficiently talented lawyers, diplomats and public relations officers can manufacture a persuasive justification. The lion may find flexible jungle law wonderfully convenient, but the antelope would be a fool to applaud merely because today’s lion happens to be eating somebody else.
Today’s convenient exception may favour the country we admire. Tomorrow another powerful state will retrieve yesterday’s argument, change the names in the communiqué and send somebody else the bill. That is the inconvenient thing about precedents. Once released into international politics, they rarely remain the private property of those who invented them. A world in which might can repeatedly manufacture its own right is unlikely to be a comfortable world for countries whose principal weapon is an appeal to rules.
So, for me, the interesting question is no longer whether Nigeria condemned the Houthis and the bastard child of zionism: Israel. It condemned both, and credit should be given where credit is due. The serious question is what follows from the principle Nigeria has proclaimed. If civilians must not be deliberately attacked, let the rule travel without requiring a passport. If sovereignty matters, let every country possess some. If international law is truly a law not a moke, let us resist turning it into a restaurant menu from which powerful states order ala carte.
If Nigeria wishes to speak with moral authority in an increasingly fractured international order, consistency will matter far more than the volume of statements issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That consistency must operate abroad and at home, when dealing with adversaries and allies, when the offender is weak and when the offender possesses aircraft carriers. Otherwise, we risk developing a foreign policy in which principles are magnificent ceremonial garments worn for diplomatic photographs and quietly returned to the wardrobe when actual power enters the room.
The world, after all, does not suffer from a shortage of narratives. Washington has one, Riyadh has one, the bastard child of zionism has countless. Every belligerent has a narrative, usually accompanied by maps, legal opinions and solemn assurances that whatever happened was regrettable but absolutely necessary. Modern warfare has become so sophisticated that a missile now appears almost incapable of leaving its launcher without a press release travelling closely behind it, assuring humanity that whatever destruction follows will be proportionate, defensive and undertaken with the deepest respect for human life. Really!
The missile destroys the building while the communiqué is assigned the more delicate task of repairing what remains of the battered morality. Between the military spokesman and diplomatic vocabulary, even aggression can emerge from the laundry looking crips and minted. What remains scarce is something far less sophisticated and considerably more demanding, namely the courage to use the same scale when weighing the conduct of our enemy, our friend and ourselves. If there must be a counter narrative, perhaps that is the only one worth writing.
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