Upon the 2015 emergence of Muhammadu Buhari as president of Nigeria and the exponential increase in the murderous onslaught of Fulani invaders with open support, collusion, and facilitation by Buhari’s government, the need arose to seek outside cooperation on behalf of the indigenous peoples of Nigeria, particularly across the Middle Belt and the South, who were predominantly Christians, and who were being slaughtered by the Fulani invaders.

This search for collaboration found a convergence with the U.S. security interests in the West African sub-region when Boko Haram fused with ISIS to become ISWAP, at a time the U.S. was at war with ISIS and other terror networks in the Middle East.

An interface between the LNC-NINAS team, which was leading that search, and a coalition of U.S. evangelicals, which was at the time seeking ways to secure the intervention of the U.S. government on the killings going on in Nigeria—with the undisguised complicity of the Nigerian government—resulted in the watershed January 17, 2019 emergency press conferences on Nigeria at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., to which the LNC scribe, Tony Nnadi, was invited to make presentations.

That January 17, 2019 event became the beginning of working with U.S.-based partner organizations and facilitators including ICON (Steve Enada), Mission Africa International (Sayo Ajiboye), and Save the Persecuted Christians (Frank Gaffney/Dede Laugesen).

The success of that event led to a series of other engagements across the months of February, March, April, and May 2019, which built up to an invitation to the June–July 2019 ministerial roundtables on international religious freedom (IRF) anchored by the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) in collaboration with relevant congressional committees and the State Department.

Beginning with those IRF ministerial roundtables, the LNC-NINAS team led by Tony Nnadi engaged the policy beltways of Washington, D.C., between Congress and the State Department in the months that followed the IRF roundtables, culminating in several U.S. policy actions including the December 2019 watchlisting of Nigeria for widespread ethnoreligious killings; the March 2020 designation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC); and the June 2, 2020 Executive Order on Advancing International Religious Freedom.

These extraordinary engagements were coordinated by Frank Gaffney, Dede Laugesen, and Steve Enada. Veteran Congressman Frank Wolf was particularly helpful, as was Ambassador Sam Brownback (then chairman of the USCIRF), while Senator Ted Cruz was the engine room for pushing the outcomes to policy action thresholds.

Then came the U.S. presidential election of November 2020 and the emergence of Joe Biden as U.S. president. Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, for reasons that remain unclear to date, yanked Nigeria off the CPC list even when the ethnoreligious killings in Nigeria were on the increase.

With the return of President Trump in January 2025, the June 2, 2020 Executive Order on IRF was reinstated, and the core group that worked out the aforementioned U.S. policy actions on Nigeria went to work quickly to review, update, and recommence implementation.

Below are materials from those engagements in Washington, D.C., between January and July 2019.

Amidst loud lamentations about killings by Fulani invaders masquerading as herdsmen across Nigeria, and as efforts are intensified in Washington, D.C., for the reinstatement of the CPC designation of Nigeria among other sanctions, the internet is awash with all kinds of bogus claims by all kinds of entities about how the U.S. policy actions on Nigeria for widespread ethnoreligious killings came about.

Obviously intended to lay the grounds for propaganda, fundraising, and other sinister purposes, these bogus claims—particularly by the notorious “Biafra Restoration” bandwagon—seek to insert the rogue Biafra franchise and the names of criminals and freedom merchants, Nnamdi Kanu and Simon Ekpa, who were not in any way involved in these years of strenuous undertakings and who were rather debilitating, ridiculing, denigrating, and distorting the LNC-NINAS efforts.

Here are videos and pictures from the engagements in Washington, D.C.:

1. Video: LNC’s Tony Nnadi at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

2. The U.S. Center for Security Policy declares that Nigeria under Buhari is in an SOS situation and recommends immediate intervention before it explodes. The speaker in the video below is Frank Gaffney, introducing the segment of coordinated press conferences on Nigeria at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., January 17, 2019, with the theme “Nigeria at Breaking Point”, convened and facilitated by Mission Africa International, Save the Persecuted Christians, and the International Committee on Nigeria, where Tony Nnadi of the LNC made the lead presentation.

   🎥 Video: “Nigeria at Breaking Point” — Frank Gaffney, Washington, D.C., January 17, 2019

3. Frank Gaffney, a former U.S. Assistant Defense Secretary, interviewing Tony Nnadi on the actions being taken and now being proposed to the U.S. government by the LNC and its NINAS allies to halt the murderous Fulani conquest onslaught in Nigeria and the Sahel. January 19, 2019, Washington, D.C.

   🎥 Video: Frank Gaffney Interviews Tony Nnadi (Jan 2019)

4. The clip below is excerpted from an interview where Rudolf Okonkwo interviewed Nnamdi Kanu of IPOB in New York.

   🔗 https://web.facebook.com/watch/?v=2936252666435320

While the LNC-NINAS team battled in Washington, D.C., with the dark forces deployed by Nigeria to counter the NINAS push—including Nigeria’s then vice president, Yemi Osinbajo—Nnamdi Kanu, everywhere in the U.S., was distorting, denigrating, and dismissing the LNC efforts in Washington, D.C., which directly resulted in the aforementioned CPC designation of Nigeria and significantly inhibited the Buhari-led Fulani terror onslaught on Nigeria.