Earlier this month, fellows of the 2025 Mandela Washington Fellowship convened in Lagos for our reunion conference, reconnecting after being deployed across different U.S. states and leadership institutes to deepen our leadership capacity in business, civic engagement, and public policy.
Beyond fellowship reflections, the gathering offered direct engagement with senior U.S. government officials, including U.S. Consul General Rick Swart, Public Affairs Officer Ms. Julia McKay, and Public Diplomacy Officer Ms. Raisa Dukas.
Our reunion came shortly after the release of the United States’ 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), a document that outlines how America defines its interests, selects partners, and pursues security in an increasingly unstable global economy.
During one session, Ms. Dukas articulated the guiding frame of current U.S. foreign policy: “making America safer, stronger, and more secure by defending U.S. interests abroad, strengthening partnerships, and ensuring that American prosperity and values lead the global order.” She emphasized that partnerships today are focused, specific, and outcome-oriented.
Reading the NSS closely after the reunion, one omission stood out clearly: Nigeria is not mentioned, at all.
What Nigeria’s absence reveals:
This omission is striking. Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy, its most populous democracy, and a central actor in West Africa’s economic and security architecture. Yet in a strategy that emphasizes regional anchors, economic resilience, and migration management, Nigeria is conspicuously absent.
The NSS prioritizes commercial diplomacy, regional stability, and partnerships that reduce irregular migration while strengthening private enterprise. By those standards, Nigeria should matter deeply.
Its absence is therefore a signal not of irrelevance, but of unrealized positioning. Nigeria has not yet been framed, or has failed to frame itself, as an economically credible regional anchor in U.S. strategic thinking.
Nigeria’s crisis is economic before it is anything else:
Nigeria’s challenges are often framed through ethnic, religious, or political lenses. On the ground, however, the reality is far more practical.
The average Nigerian is concerned about inflation, jobs, electricity, insecurity, and whether there is enough income to survive another month. Our dominant anxiety is economic.
Even within the political elite, beneath their rhetoric lies a shared fear: economic insecurity. Many cannot guarantee their survival outside public office. This fuels corruption, short-term extraction, and zero-sum politics.
Economic instability is the root driver of many national challenges. Youth unemployment feeds insecurity. Corruption becomes a coping mechanism. The “japa” wave (legal and illegal migration) is economic. Nigerians migrate not for adventure, but for stability, dignity, and opportunity.
Subnational growth as a strategic level:
For a U.S. foreign policy focused on safety, strength, and prosperity, Nigeria remains consequential because of scale and spillover. With over 200 million people, deep entrepreneurial capacity, and regional influence, Nigeria’s instability cannot remain domestic. As the saying goes, “If Nigeria sneezes, Africa catches a cold.”
Yet U.S. engagement remains heavily concentrated in Lagos and Abuja, while much of Nigeria’s growth potential and its fault lines, exist at the subnational level.
States such as Delta, Anambra, Abia, Kano, Benue, Cross River, Ondo, and Plateau represent emerging markets with millions of consumers, agricultural and manufacturing potential, and a young workforce eager to build and partner.
When state-level economies grow, three outcomes follow: employment expands and insecurity declines; outward migration pressures reduce; and democratic institutions gain legitimacy.
If the United States is truly committed to reducing instability, irregular migration, and competing external influence in Africa, it must support broad-based economic growth across Nigeria, not only in the political and commercial capitals.
Using existing networks to move faster
Deepening U.S.–Nigeria economic engagement does not require new bureaucracies. It requires better use of existing ones.
Every Nigerian state has alumni of U.S. government-funded programs—YALI, IVLP, Fulbright, Humphrey, and others. These alumni are trusted local actors who understand markets, institutions, and community dynamics. Networks such as the U.S. Government Exchange Alumni Association of Nigeria and the Mandela Washington Fellowship Alumni Association of Nigeria can help identify bankable projects, support enterprise and workforce development, convene state governments and private capital, and translate U.S. strategic priorities into local outcomes.
This is high-impact engagement at low marginal cost.
American spaces as platforms for economic diplomacy:
Another underutilized asset is the network of American Spaces across Nigeria. Traditionally cultural and educational hubs, they can be repositioned as platforms for economic diplomacy —hosting investment roadshows, MSME export-readiness clinics, U.S. standards workshops, and innovation programs linked to American firms.
When American Spaces are integrated with alumni networks and the private sector, public diplomacy becomes a pipeline for commercial diplomacy. Closer integration between public diplomacy and the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service would further shift engagement from symbolism to measurable economic traction.
A Stronger Nigeria is good business for America:
Supporting Nigeria’s economic growth beyond Lagos and Abuja is not charity. It is a reciprocal strategy.
A more economically stable Nigeria offers the United States expanded markets, more resilient supply chains, reduced irregular migration pressures, stronger security partnerships, and a credible counterweight to rival global influences, many of which are already active at the subnational level.
Conclusion:
The United States’ National Security Strategy is clear: disciplined interests, focused partnerships, and measurable outcomes will define global engagement.
If the U.S. helps create conditions where opportunity can thrive within Nigeria—especially beyond Lagos and Abuja—it will not only strengthen Nigeria’s stability and prosperity, but also reinforce America’s global leadership and security.
That is how America becomes safer, stronger, and more secure—by lifting partners, strengthening economies, and building a world where prosperity is shared, not scarce.
.Anazia is a 2025 Mandela Washington Fellow (Leadership in Business, Jackson State University, USA), development practitioner, accountant and founder of Sunbridge Consulting, an MSME-focused advisory firm supporting enterprise growth and economic inclusion. He serves as the Coordinator of the YALI Network in Delta State and works at the intersection of business, civic engagement and subnational economic transformation in Nigeria.
