By 247ureports.com
American advocacy figure Mike Arnold has told Nigerians that the Democratic victory in this week’s US midterm elections is the work of the same “cabal” that, in his telling, subverted former President Goodluck Jonathan, “unleashed Boko Haram” and put Muhammadu Buhari in power, and has warned that the new Congress will tighten its grip on Nigeria. The claims, made in a post on X, are presented without evidence, and the history he invokes does not support them.
Arnold wrote that the political force that “swept” Tuesday’s elections is the “same regime” behind those events, that it removed Nigeria’s Country of Particular Concern (CPC) designation and rushed to recognise President Bola Tinubu while the 2023 results were still in question, and that the US Democratic Party is “APC aligned” and “long in the pocket of Gilbert Chagoury.” He praised President Donald Trump as having done more for Nigeria than any previous US president, said “the US is not coming to help,” and told Nigerians to “fight for victory like your lives depend on it.”
The first part of his premise is correct. Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, November 3, according to projections by US broadcasters and the Associated Press, in what analysts called a broad rebuke of Trump driven by high prices, the war in Iran and concerns about government corruption. Vice-President JD Vance blamed the Republican losses on the Iran war. Final seat counts were still being tallied at the time of this report, and 247ureports.com has not relied on any figure for the size of the Democratic majority.
Arnold is not a neutral commentator on Nigerian affairs. A former mayor of Blanco, Texas, he heads Africa Arise International and is the author of a document, reported in October, that claimed Tinubu was gravely ill, which was widely described as a Trump “security briefing” but was in fact a private submission to a person who advises Trump, with no official status and no medical evidence behind it. He has also accused the Tinubu administration and its lobbyists, DCI Group, of conduct that may violate US law, claims that remain unproven. Atiku Abubakar, the African Democratic Congress candidate, has hired the US firm Von Batten-Montague-York, which is suing Tinubu and others, and the Tinubu government pays DCI Group $750,000 a month under a registration filed with the US Justice Department, so Nigeria’s elections are already being fought through American lobbying and litigation.
The history he cites is contested. Boko Haram was founded around 2002 in Maiduguri by the preacher Mohammed Yusuf, was crushed in a 2009 uprising in which Yusuf died in police custody, and became a much deadlier insurgency under Abubakar Shekau from 2010, with its seizure of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in April 2014 under Jonathan. That its violence was “unleashed” by Washington has no evidential basis, and the argument has been made mostly by commentators who do not offer documents. Buhari won the March 2015 election by about 2.5 million votes, and Jonathan conceded before the result was final, a decision for which he is widely credited. Claims that foreign powers wanted him out have circulated since then, and supporters of Jonathan have complained that Washington refused to sell Nigeria certain weapons during the insurgency, but none has produced proof of a plot.
The Country of Particular Concern designation, a US finding that a country has engaged in or tolerated severe violations of religious freedom, was applied to Nigeria in December 2020 under Trump’s first administration, removed in November 2021 under President Joe Biden’s, and reimposed by Trump on October 31, 2025, when he threatened military action over attacks on Christians. That sequence shows that both parties have taken different positions at different times, which is at odds with the picture of a single unchanging cabal. The US and other Western governments also congratulated Tinubu after the 2023 election while expressing concern about the conduct of the vote, a stance taken by the Biden administration, and Trump’s own administration has since done business with Abuja, including the framework on critical minerals signed in New York on September 23.
Chagoury, the Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire, is a documented figure in US politics, having been a donor to the Clinton Foundation, and his family’s construction group, Hitech, holds the contract for the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, an award Atiku has criticised as made without open tender. Those facts are on the record. The claim that the Democratic Party as a whole is “in his pocket” is Arnold’s characterisation, and 247ureports.com found no evidence for it. Chagoury’s group had not responded to such claims at the time of this report, and the Presidency, the All Progressives Congress and the Democratic Party have not commented on Arnold’s post.
Whether a Democratic Congress will change US policy toward Nigeria is open. Congressional committees can hold hearings, press for sanctions or visa restrictions, and scrutinise arms sales and aid, and some Democrats have taken positions on human rights and the conduct of Nigeria’s election. Most of the machinery of foreign policy, including the CPC designation, the Iran war and the minerals framework, stays with the president. Analysts caution against assuming either party’s majority will be a gift to a Nigerian candidate or camp, and say the more likely effect is a sharper scrutiny of the lobbying contracts and legal fights through which both the government and the opposition are now operating in Washington.
247ureports.com will update this story as final US results are confirmed and as Arnold, the Presidency or the parties respond.
