U.S. warns on Nigeria

The United States did not just tell Americans to be careful in Nigeria this week. On April 8, the State Department authorized non-emergency staff and family members to leave the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, which is the kind of step governments take when they think the risk picture has shifted fast enough to change how their own people work. (travel.state.gov) At the same time, Washington kept Nigeria as a whole at “Level 3: Reconsider Travel” and marked 23 of Nigeria’s 36 states at “Level 4: Do Not Travel.” The reasons listed were crime, terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, armed gangs, and patchy access to health care. (travel.state.gov) The map is not uniform. The highest warning covers northeastern states like Borno and Yobe, northwestern states like Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, and Zamfara, and southern oil-producing states like Bayelsa, Delta, Imo, and Rivers outside Port Harcourt. (travel.state.gov) That matters because Abuja is Nigeria’s capital and the seat of the federal government, but Lagos is the commercial hub where much of the country’s foreign business still runs. The U.S. Embassy said routine and emergency services would continue in Lagos even as Abuja operations were cut back. (ng.usembassy.gov) The practical effect showed up immediately in visas. The embassy in Abuja stopped visa appointments, while Lagos kept handling visas by appointment, which means consular support did not disappear nationwide but became thinner in the capital. (bbc.com) This warning did not come out of nowhere. Reuters reported that the State Department tied the move to rising political unrest, kidnappings, banditry, and attacks on security forces, which are four different problems hitting different parts of Nigeria at the same time. (reuters.com) In Nigeria, “bandits” usually means heavily armed criminal gangs that raid villages, ambush roads, steal livestock, and kidnap people for ransom. On April 4, Reuters reported that gunmen abducted residents from villages in Zamfara state in one of the northwest’s biggest recent attacks. (reuters.com) The violence is not only in the northwest. Human Rights Watch said gunmen killed more than 28 people in Plateau state on March 29, showing how Nigeria’s north-central belt has also become a zone of repeated attacks, reprisals, and displacement. (hrw.org) Kidnapping has become common enough that the U.S. advisory warns that dual nationals visiting family are frequent targets and that Americans are often seen as wealthy. The advisory also tells travelers to make an emergency plan that does not depend on U.S. government help arriving quickly. (travel.state.gov; ng.usembassy.gov) Nigeria’s government pushed back on the message. Nigerian officials said the advisory did not reflect the full security picture across the whole country, which is partly true in the narrow sense that Lagos and some other areas are operating more normally than the states under the highest warning. (reuters.com; travel.state.gov) What changed this week is not that Nigeria suddenly became dangerous on one day in April. What changed is that the United States decided the mix of insurgency, criminal kidnapping, communal attacks, and pressure on security forces was serious enough to reduce its own footprint in Abuja and warn that, in 23 states, the risk had crossed into “do not travel” territory. (travel.state.gov; reuters.com)