As so often with Donald Trump it was a half-digested news item that prompted him to reach for his box of matches. After watching a segment on Fox News about attacks on Nigerian Christians, the US president took to Truth Social for one of his customary blasts. If Nigeria didn’t stop the killings, he warned, he would deploy the US military “guns-a-blazing” to get the job done. “If we attack, it will be fast, vicious and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians.”

Trump has got it wrong, or at best only half right in what one Nigerian commentator called a “scandalous oversimplification”. Nigeria’s problem is not that it fails to protect its Christians. It is that it fails to protect anyone of whatever faith — from criminal gangs, bandits and organised terror.

For nearly 20 years, successive Nigerian governments have failed to provide even minimum security — let alone job prospects or decent public education — in swaths of ungoverned territory. Many of these are in the predominantly Muslim north.