₦airaland Forum

New York Times Did Not Say That A Screwdriver Seller Provided Targetting Intelligence For The Sokoto Missile Strike.

Strangely some people have claimed that the New York Times said that a screwdriver seller in Onitsha provided targetting intelligence for the US missile strike in Sokoto. The paper/article never said any such thing (I will post the full article on this thread).

Clearly these people did not read the New York Times article. I wonder if it's because it was behind a pay wall.

In simple terms this is what the article actually said.

1) Emeka Umeagbalasi set up several NGOs including one called International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (or InterSociety for short).

2) He, his wife and his friend are the only members of the board of the NGO.

3) He rarely goes to northern Nigeria where the insurgency is raging.

4) Yet he was publishing numbers of Christians that have been killed in the insurgency in the north.

5) Here's an example of what that means. Remember that some Muslims girls were kidnapped from a school in Kebbi State late last year?

https://www.nairaland.com/8563474/teacher-killed-25-girls-abducted

He listed them among Christians that have been kidnapped.

He has never ever been to the school before.

6) When the reporter told him that the girls were Muslim, he said that the government changed the names of the girls in order to deceive people.

7) Any time this guy hears that there has been an attack in the north, he'll list the victims as Christians, without even verifying if they are actually Christians.

8 ) It is this man's figures that Senator Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and other Republican politicians are citing as the number of Christians that have been killed in Nigeria.

9) That's why they are saying that there is a Christian genocide.

This thing is so easy to understand.

This is the New York Times article in full.

How a Screwdriver Salesman Helped Fuel U.S. Airstrikes in Nigeria

The Screwdriver Salesman Behind Trump’s Airstrikes in Nigeria

Spotty research from a Christian activist has been used by Republican lawmakers to justify U.S. intervention in the country.

By Ruth Maclean
Reporting from Onitsha, in southeast Nigeria
Jan. 18, 2026

In a market in southeastern Nigeria, a short man wearing one earbud recently made his way to the tool section, dodging wheelbarrows of sugar cane and porters carrying stacks of hard hats.

The man, Emeka Umeagbalasi, owns a tiny shop selling screwdrivers and wrenches in this market in Onitsha, the commercial hub of southeast Nigeria.

But this screwdriver salesman is also an unlikely source of research that U.S. Republican lawmakers have used to promote the misleading idea that Christians are being singled out for slaughter in Africa’s most populous nation. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Representative Riley Moore of Virginia and Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey have all cited his work.

Armed with his ideas, President Trump launched airstrikes on the other side of Mr. Umeagbalasi’s country on Christmas Day.

To Mr. Umeagbalasi, that the American president had taken up a cause he had promoted, was “miraculous.”

“If nothing is done,” he said in an interview from his home, “Nigeria will explode.”

Mr. Umeagbalasi says he has documented 125,000 Christian deaths in Nigeria since 2009, but told The New York Times that he often does not verify his data. He acknowledged that his research was mainly based on “secondary sources,” including Christian interest groups, Nigerian news reports and Google searches.

Cruz, Moore and Smith did not respond to requests for comment. A White House spokesperson did not address questions about Umeagbalasi’s data and methods, but said in a statement that “the massacre of Christians by radical, terrorist scum will not be tolerated.”

It is notoriously difficult to collect data on the killings, kidnappings and attacks that have wrought havoc on Nigerians for years.

The Nigerian government does not release comprehensive data on the number of people killed in violent attacks, or their religions. Many attacks in Nigeria go unrecorded because they happen in remote areas and are only heard of long afterward.

While some research shows that Christians are being killed in large numbers in Nigeria, researchers say a lack of security and widespread impunity in the most affected parts of the country endangers both Christian and Muslim Nigerians.

Mr. Umeagbalasi, who is Catholic, founded the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, or Intersociety, in 2008. He runs the organization out of his home. His wife, Blessing, an evangelical Christian, is a board member.

He said he has degrees in security studies and peace and conflict resolution from the National Open University of Nigeria and described himself as a very “powerful” and “knowledgeable” investigator, comparing himself with the veteran CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour.

But when questioned about the accuracy of his data, establishing the religion of victims and determining the intent of perpetrators, he admitted that he rarely travels to the regions where attacks have occurred and usually assumes the victim’s religion.

Mr. Umeagbalasi has said that more than 7,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria in the first seven months of 2025. But an independent conflict-monitoring group, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, estimates that around 6,700 people, including Islamist insurgents and military personnel, were killed in the same period. Only 3,000 of them were recorded as civilians, but that data is not disaggregated for religion.

Mr. Umeagbalasi explained that he determines the religious identity of victims based on where each attack occurs. If a mass abduction or killing happens in an area where he thinks many Christians live, he assumes the victims are Christians.

“For instance, if killings take place in Borno today, when I look at it, I will just look at the zone where the killings take place,” he said, referring to the majority-Muslim state at the heart of Boko Haram’s deadly insurgency in Nigeria. “Once they take place in southern Borno, there is likelihood of the victims being Christians or many of them or most of them being Christians.”

Many of Boko Haram’s victims are Muslim.

He also gave the example of 25 schoolgirls recently kidnapped in the state of Kebbi. The girls were all Muslim, according to the school principal and local officials. But Mr. Umeagbalasi claimed that they were mostly Christian.

“The girls — a majority of them are Christians, but you know what Nigerian government did?” he said. “They went and Islamized them. Gave them Islamic names just to confuse people.”

Alkasim Abdulkadir, a spokesman for Nigeria’s foreign minister, denied that the government had misrepresented the girls’ religion. “There’s a lot of fallacy to his research, a lot of confirmation bias,” he said of Mr. Umeagbalasi. “He’s very performative.”

Mr. Umeagbalasi said he almost never travels to Nigeria’s Middle Belt, the region where violence against Christians is most intense. Instead, he said, he relies on “secondary sources” like news reports and Open Doors, a Christian advocacy group whose data has been cited by Mr. Trump.

One of his main secondary sources is Truth Nigeria, a project founded by a filmmaker and evangelist from Iowa, Judd Saul.

Like Intersociety and other Christian advocacy groups in Nigeria and the United States, Truth Nigeria frequently identifies the perpetrators of attacks on Christians in the country as “Fulani ethnic militias.” The Fulani are an ethnic group with tens of millions of mostly Muslim members, some of whom are herders whose ancestors have roamed across West Africa for centuries.

Mr. Umeagbalasi called the Fulani “animals” and said all Fulanis should be confined to one Nigerian state, a move that would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing.

Researchers, journalists and prominent Christians regularly dispute Mr. Umeagbalasi’s figures.

Nnamdi Obasi, the Nigeria adviser for the International Crisis Group, described Intersociety’s methodology as “a total blank” and said that the figures in Intersociety’s reports did not add up correctly.

“The basic addition is very, very faulty,” he said.

Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, the Catholic bishop of Sokoto, the northwestern Nigerian state that the United States bombed in December, said in an interview that focusing too much on the data about Christians obscured a more important issue. “Focus on the fact that this state is weak and doesn’t have the capacity to protect its people,” he said.

Mr. Umeagbalasi remains undeterred by criticism.

He flipped open his laptop, where he had almost completed work on his next report, titled, “The Situation of Christians in Nigeria Fueled by Jihadist Terrorism Inches a Point of No Return.”

“This is our heavenly marathon,” he said.

He sat in his living room, its walls painted green and black. A bookshelf was crammed with old papers and plaques. One read, “For excellent service to humanity.”

He said close to 20,000 churches were destroyed in the past 16 years, and, he said, 100,000 churches existed in Nigeria.
There is no government data on the number of churches in Nigeria. So where did he get the 100,000 figure?

“Googled it,” he said.


Reporting was contributed by Saikou Jammeh, Dionne Searcey, Ismail Auwal and David Chidi Eleke.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/world/africa/nigeria-christmas-bombing-republicans.html?searchResultPosition=1

Photo 1) Emeka Umeagbalasi, 56, at his home in Onitsha, Nigeria last month. Taiwo Aina for the New York Times.


Photo 2) Emeka Umeagbalasi’s awards at his home. Credit... Taiwo Aina for The New York Times

Photo 3) The dormitories where gunmen kidnapped schoolchildren is seen in Kebbi, Nigeria, in November. Credit... Deeni Jibo/Associated Press

Photo 4) Mr. Umeagbalasi at his tool shop. Credit... Taiwo Aina for The New York Times

Photo 5) A Catholic church in Asaba, a neighboring city to Onitsha. Credit... Taiwo Aina for The New York Times

Photo 6) Mr. Umeagbalasi. Credit... Taiwo Aina for The New York Times

Photo 5) A Catholic church in Asaba, a neighboring city to Onitsha. Credit... Taiwo Aina for The New York Times

Photo 6) Mr. Umeagbalasi. Credit... Taiwo Aina for The New York Times

Very many people had commented on Mr Umeagbalasi's statistics long before the US air strikes. This article is from November 2025. Read the paragraph in bold.

Nigeria: Political Hypocrisy Amidst Systemic Crisis

The Eleventh Pan-Africa Newsletter (2025)

When Trump threatens to invade Nigeria over alleged Christian genocide, he recycles old colonial tactics wrapped in ‘humanitarian’ rhetoric — while Nigerians demand Hands Off.

25 November 2025

November unfolded with threats from US President Donald Trump to invade Nigeria ‘guns-a-blazing’ in defence of ‘cherished Christians’ whom he claimed were facing a genocide in the country. This immediately sparked discussions across the country and beyond – everywhere except in The Nation, a newspaper owned by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. By the end of the week, Trump not only reiterated his insidious threats; he also put Nigeria on the US list of ‘countries of particular concern’ (CPC) for the second time.

US Senator Ted Cruz, who boasts that he has ‘fought for years to counter the slaughter and persecution of Christians in Nigeria,’ introduced a bill for religious freedom and accountability in Nigeria two months earlier. According to him, jihadists have murdered 52,000 Nigerian Christians and destroyed 20,000 churches and institutions since 2009, the year the Boko Haram Salafi-Jihadist group took up arms against the Nigerian state.

These claims would have been laughable in less tragic circumstances. There is no doubt that Nigeria has been bleeding, with tens of thousands of people killed by an array of non-state actors and the military. But the reality, rooted in a history of imperialist machinations and morbid manipulation of the national question by those in power or contending for power, is much more complex. And the figures put forward to justify allegations of genocide are at best conjectural.

The major source of these figures, as well as several other numbers bandied about over the years, is the colourfully named ‘International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law’ or InterSociety for short, which is headed by liberal democracy advocate Emeka Umeagbalasi. Since 2008, apart from Emeka himself, the group’s board has had only two other members: his friend, Anayo Okoli, a journalist based in the same town, and Emeka’s wife, Blessing Chidiebere Ohia-Umeagbalasi, an evangelical church leader. While the organisation lists several ‘field officers’ on its website, InterSociety has never published its research methodology, raw data sources, or verification processes for the staggering death toll figures it claims. No peer-reviewed publications, independent audits, or collaborative research with established human rights documentation organisations support these numbers.

The United States has refused to call the massacre of over 60,000 people in Gaza a genocide, including Christians, for whatever Trump’s supposed ‘cherishing’ is worth. This is despite the impeccable documentation of this genocide which shows that ‘Israel has killed or injured more than 10 per cent of Gaza’s population over the past 24 months.’ Yet, it hurls accusations of genocide and threats of invasion at a ‘shithole’ country like Nigeria for some supposed ‘genocidal’ killing of 52,000 Christians over a 16-year period, based on the most spurious ‘data’ by the most questionable ‘researchers’. There can be no more macabre definition of hypocrisy in high places.

A spectrum of responses


There has been a broad spectrum of responses in Nigeria. The federal government has denied any genocide, responding with a timidity that is the very opposite of the arrogance it displays when addressing and repressing critics at home. Liberals and politicians from the traditional parties of the ruling class have been more concerned with calming the situation and averting any breakdown in the Nigerian state’s long-term strategic partnership with the United States.

Middle-class perspectives have taken two broad lines of thought. On the one hand, nationalist narratives present Trump’s tirades and threats as responses to what appear to be progressive politics by President Tinubu’s All Progressives Congress (APC) government. These include Nigeria’s support for Palestine, refusal to accept deported Venezuelans, and deepening ties with Russia and China.

On the other hand, critics have highlighted the hypocrisy of President Tinubu and the ruling APC, pointing out that an APC delegation met with John Kerry and other top US officials in 2014 to report an alleged Christian genocide in Nigeria.

The dominant perspective on the left is that the United States’ concern is much more profane than celestial. Trump’s aim, as political economist Yusuf Bangura argues, is to bully Nigeria into opening up its rich mineral resources for ‘the supply chains of US hi-tech companies and defence industries.’ Others argue that ‘targets and victims of bloodthirsty jihadists’ (whether herders or bandits) ‘have nothing to lose but their cruel chains of bloodbaths’ – including activists in the Middle Belt, where violence has killed thousands (most of them Christians). Yet Boko Haram and its offshoots have been most active in the Northeast, where most victims have been Muslims. Omoyele Sowore, National Chair of the revolutionary African Action Congress (AAC), pointed out that while the threat to launch a military action ‘may sound appealing to some…history has shown this to be perilous’.


Hands Off Nigeria!


Political analysts like Jeffrey Sachs have underscored the political hypocrisy of Trump and the United States in playing the ‘moral symbolism’ card of Christian genocide. Sachs adds that this mirrors the humanitarian narrative of post-Cold War Western imperialism. But this line of politics goes even deeper for us. Britain bombarded Lagos in 1851, ostensibly to stop the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A decade later, it annexed Lagos, beginning the period of formal colonialism, using the same lame excuse.

The hypocritical and brutish process of colonisation did not end with that. Divide and rule was a pivotal strategy of conquest. They recruited Muslims from the north into a Hausa constabulary to police Lagos and its environs in the west. Meanwhile, missionaries encouraged ethnic minorities in the north – especially those in the Middle Belt region who felt suffocated by the Emirate system that expanded after the 19th-century Jihad in that region – to join the church. They did so in droves. The religious divide, so to speak, became bound with ethnicity, geography, and politics in what would become a very complex national question – a dynamic I explored in a 2013 article on the manipulation of ethno-religious identities as masks in Nigerian politics. Donald Trump and his ilk in the United States have joined the masquerade ball with claims of genocide as their masks.

We must reject any attempt to reduce this bloodletting to unfounded claims of genocide, and tear the masks from their faces. Working-class people in Nigeria must hold the Nigerian state responsible for the generalised insecurity, without illusions of salvation from the United States. The systemic crisis of capitalism – which has engendered poverty, mass unemployment, climate change, and social anomie – is the root we must address. We must stand firm against Yankee imperialism under any guise.

Warmly,

Bàbá Ayé

Ayé

https://thetricontinental.org/pan-africa/nigeria-trump-genocide-threats/

Bros, leave matter

An ordinary screwdriver seller provided the intelligence that the USA and the Nigerian government used to bomb terrorists. This was what batists said and we believe them.

Never forget that the FG claimed that it coordinated the attack with the USA.

Some may view it that "IPOB" provided intelligence. One wonders how and why FG would seek for and use intelligence from their enemy, IPOB.

Bwala was indeed right.

Case closed.

The bottom line is, there are some people from South East precisely who paid the lobbyists to misled president Trump about the fake Christian persecution in Nigeria.

Nigerians are taking note of all their moves to make everything scatter in Nigeria

Nigerians don't read and can't understand it they manage to read.

His articles might have formed some of the basis for trump to be interested, but it was not his article that led to the decision to bomb

I said it.

Gutter press with the influence of western media moguls. They want this nation to sink into tribal conflict just to keep that incompetent bandit in aso villa.

If you have brain and school fees was paid for you to learn how to reason beyond the ordinary and you eat this news with joy, I must conclude l that you are sick.

this was results from the 9 millions dollars tinubu paid into the U.S for lobbying.

This tinubu govt is worse than buhari own.

helinues:
The bottom line is, there are some people from South East precisely who paid the lobbyists to misled president Trump about the fake Christian persecution in Nigeria.

Nigerians are taking note of all their moves to make everything scatter in Nigeria

Irrespective of their religion, people are dying and someone needs to do something fast. Christian or Muslim genocide, many are dying. Just because someone someone labeled it something you don't like doesn't mean we should fold our hands and watch. For whatever it's worth, more Christians have lost their lives due to insurgency than Muslims, except you want to deny the truth.

Lol... I'm really sorry for the defenders of evil.

Hope this narrative is not part of the one paid for by the Federal Government to deceive the USA on the terrorism in Nigeria? The manner in which this Screwdriver Seller is being publicized is a proof of the fact that it is being sponsored by some state paid agents to deceive the USA. Was it the screw driver seller that sentenced a Christian to death for killing an Islamic terrorist attacker in self defense? The USA has more information about what happens in Nigeria than most resistant Nigerians. Do not be deceived. They have other sources of information.

DeOTR:
Irrespective of their religion, people are dying and someone needs to do something fast. Christian or Muslim genocide, many are dying. Just because someone someone labeled it something you don't like doesn't mean we should fold our hands and watch. For whatever it's worth, more Christians have lost their lives due to insurgency than Muslims, except you want to deny the truth.

Nobody is denying the killings across Nigeria but that a particular faith are being targeted is just a bullshit narration. We all knew there was nothing like such.

So what's the deliberately misleading, mischievousness for?

fedorahat:
Nigerians don't read and can't understand it they manage to read.

His articles might have formed some of the basis for trump to be interested, but it was not his article that led to the decision to bomb

So what exactly is the purpose of the article?

helinues:
The bottom line is, there are some people from South East precisely who paid the lobbyists to misled president Trump about the fake Christian persecution in Nigeria.

Fake? 🤥
North Central in particular, is it also fake?

helinues:
Nobody is denying the killings across Nigeria but that a particular faith are being targeted is just a bullshit narration. We all knew there was nothing like such.

So what's the deliberately misleading, mischievousness for?

An Islamic Scholar was honored for hiding 239 Christians.

Maybe it was their skin color that got them targeted..

Very useless disgraceful country of particular concern.

In serious countries like Israel and even Rwanda....

Lying against your country is treason.

You will simply disappear without trace. Any family members who ask after you, will be ....

naptu2:
New York Times Did Not Say That A Screwdriver Seller Provided Targetting Intelligence For The Sokoto Missile Strike.

Strangely some people have claimed that the New York Times said that a screwdriver seller in Onitsha provided targetting intelligence for the US missile strike in Sokoto. The paper/article never said any such thing (I will post the full article on this thread).

Clearly these people did not read the New York Times article. I wonder if it's because it was behind a pay wall.

In simple terms this is what the article actually said.

1) Emeka Umeagbalasi set up several NGOs including one called International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (or InterSociety for short).

2) He, his wife and his friend are the only members of the board of the NGO.

3) He rarely goes to northern Nigeria where the insurgency is raging.

4) Yet he was publishing numbers of Christians that have been killed in the insurgency in the north.

5) Here's an example of what that means. Remember that some Muslims girls were kidnapped from a school in Kebbi State late last year?

https://www.nairaland.com/8563474/teacher-killed-25-girls-abducted

He listed them among Christians that have been kidnapped.

He has never ever been to the school before.

6) When the reporter told him that the girls were Muslim, he said that the government changed the names of the girls in order to deceive people.

7) Any time this guy hears that there has been an attack in the north, he'll list the victims as Christians, without even verifying if they are actually Christians.

8 ) It is this man's figures that Senator Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and other Republican politicians are citing as the number of Christians that have been killed in Nigeria.

9) That's why they are saying that there is a Christian genocide.

This thing is so easy to understand.

Save this damage control for your comrades in the apc who began this narrative.
You suddenly came up with this image laundering because your initial plan backfired.

God bless the bot.

6 more characters needed.

Okay. So who now said so ? Talk o

Somehow the kidnapping and killings has suddenly reduced since the strikes

As at now

It's the photographer (Taiwo Aina for the New York Times) that they're calling out for framing the man and they said she's trying to pin the blame on ibos

It's really difficult to have a straight conversation in this country

aworatak:
Save this damage control for your comrades in the apc who began this narrative.

Why do you guys keep wasting your time? Don't you know that any response that does not have something sensible and meaningful in it is a waste of time?

Ask yourself what meaningful thing you have contributed to the topic of discussion.

Well sha, I know that you are not capable of doing that.

Goodbye

Elusive001:
Bros, leave matter

An ordinary screwdriver seller provided the intelligence that the USA and the Nigerian government used to bomb terrorists. This was what batists said and we believe them.

Never forget that the FG claimed that it coordinated the attack with the USA.

Some may view it that "IPOB" provided intelligence. One wonders how and why FG would seek for and use intelligence from their enemy, IPOB.

Bwala was indeed right.

Case closed.

my brother this your violence

9 million dollars for lobbying has started paying off. Keep up amuda. E remain 5 years. If you spoil the country more than this, we and you and your children dey here. You kuku see as abiola children dey drag their self. No rest for the wicked

Propaganda summersault

The propaganda has backfired, the hunter is now hunted. Go and pay back the money you collected to write this childish fake news.

Stop explaining

naptu2:
Why do you guys keep wasting your time? Don't you know that any response that does not have something sensible and meaningful in it is a waste of time?

Ask yourself what meaningful thing you have contributed to the topic of discussion.

Well sha, I know that you are not capable of doing that.

Goodbye

Hmmm
I can see guilt written all over you.