The United States (US) House Subcommittee on Africa on Thursday opened a public hearing to examine President Donald Trump’s recent decision to redesignate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC).
The session, which began at 5pm in Room 2172 of the Rayburn House Office Building and was streamed live, was chaired by Representative Chris Smith.
Lawmakers convened to assess the implications of the designation, which if endorsed by the Senate, could authorise punitive measures against Nigerian officials deemed complicit in religious persecution and limit certain categories of US aid.
Two panels testified before the subcommittee, including senior officials from the US State Department and Nigerian religious leaders invited to share perspectives on the country’s security and human rights landscape.
During the hearing, Representative Pramila Jayapal cautioned against framing Nigeria’s violence through a single lens.
“But I appreciate that people have also recognised it isn’t just the persecution of Christians. This is persecution of multiple groups. And I think we have to be careful not to portray it just as persecution of Christians. That feels to me simplistic, and it doesn’t account for the intersectional diversity of Nigeria,” she said.
Drawing on research into conflict dynamics in the Middle Belt, Jayapal stressed that both Christians and Muslims had suffered from cycles of violence.
She also criticised President Trump’s reaction to a televised news clip.
“I’m very concerned that a day after President Trump saw a clip on Fox News about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, he threatened to go guns-a-blazing in Nigeria and revoke all assistance,” she said, adding that such a step could undermine health programmes essential to combating malaria and HIV.
“Can you tell me under what authority the US military would strike inside of Nigeria?”
Responding, Jonathan Pratt, Senior Bureau Official at the Bureau of African Affairs, said the State Department had been directed to develop a comprehensive response.
“The Secretary of State has directed us to put together a comprehensive plan that uses all tools at our disposal, including security and the Department of War.
“We can also share information and intelligence. We can talk about counterterrorism. And so those are the tools that we are primarily looking at in our strategy,” he said.
Jayapal pressed further, questioning whether diplomatic channels had been fully explored before the president’s public remarks.
“Don’t you think it would have been appropriate to have the task force discussion and the alternatives presented prior to the president going on Truth Social and saying we’re going to go guns a-blazing into Nigeria?” she asked.
Pratt stated that Washington had long maintained engagement with Nigeria on development and security.
“We have been working on these problems in Nigeria for a long time. We have a lot of programmes of assistance in the country. They did undergo a foreign assistance review, but many of them continue, and we want to make sure that we are using them strategically to get the best outcomes,” he said.
In her closing remarks, Jayapal criticised what she described as an unnecessarily aggressive posture.
“I just wish we would actually stick to that playbook rather than bully and threaten a country that is extremely important to us and to the region,” she said, quoting former US Ambassador Kelly Currie: “You cannot solve problems created by men with guns by turning to men with guns for the solution.”
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