On Monday, a cable signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and obtained by The Guardian, directed every American embassy and consulate worldwide to launch coordinated campaigns against what it calls “anti-American propaganda.”
It instructs embassy staff to recruit local influencers, academics, and community leaders to carry pro-American messaging designed, in the cable’s own framing, to “feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.” It tells embassies to coordinate their operations with the Pentagon’s Psychological Operations unit. And it endorses Elon Musk’s X platform by name as an “innovative” tool for countering speech the State Department considers hostile.
Under the cable’s framework, foreign criticism of the United States is no longer free speech but a threat to American interests that embassies are now formally tasked with suppressing.
In Nigeria, that suppression was already underway.
Earlier this same month, Nigeria’s Department of State Services, the country’s secret police, arrested two men in Kaduna State over Tweets. The posts were Tweets critical of israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump, and the role of both countries in the ongoing regional war in West Asia and the genocide in Palestine.
One of the men, Sani Buhari, known online by the handle Waspapping, was released after roughly a week. Buhari is a young man from Sabon Gari in Tudun Wada, in Kaduna South. He is recently married and runs a small clothing boutique near Sheikh Gumi Market. But his release came with the condition of a public apology to the U.S. Embassy posted to his X account, in which he stated that his earlier comments had been “taken out of context” and that their “tone may have come across stronger than intended.”
The other man, Abubakar Adamu, wasn’t as fortunate. Amnesty International records show Adamu, who is known for his activism against the genocide in Gaza, had been in DSS custody since Feb. 10, 2026. He remains in detention. The DSS charged him to court and, in a counter-affidavit filed before the Federal High Court in Kaduna, claimed that Adamu’s Tweets “could lead to international conflict involving Nigeria, similar to the on-going hostility between israel and Iran with its attendant destruction.”
A Tweet. From a private citizen in Kaduna. Could drag Africa’s most populous nation into a regional war. That is the official position of the Nigerian government.
But the story of how these two men ended up in DSS custody is far more consequential than the absurdity of the charges.
The same U.S. government that funds israel’s war at roughly $18 billion a year is now using its diplomatic posts to silence people in other countries for criticizing it and directing foreign security services to arrest Black people abroad for their politics. For Black Kansas City, connected to this diaspora by the fact that these same forces operate here, what happens to a man in Kaduna for speaking his mind is our story, too.
And the story was broken by someone the Nigerian state has already tried to silence.
Inside the U.S. Embassy’s Chain of Command: “The DSS Are Just Pawns in the Game”
David Hundeyin is one of the most important investigative journalists working in West Africa today. A winner of the People Journalism Prize for Africa, a Sigma Awards global shortlist nominee for data journalism, and Founder of outlets West Africa Weekly and The Spearhead, Hundeyin has spent years exposing corruption at the highest levels of the Nigerian state. He has been living in exile in Ghana, where he holds refugee status, since 2023, after he obtained and published classified Nigerian military documents detailing plans for an illegal, imperialist-backed invasion of Niger, a move that helped stop the operation. The Nigerian government subsequently labeled him a terrorist and the Nigerian Police Force has named him wanted in connection with a whistleblower case.
Hundeyin, reporting from his interview with Adamu’s lawyer, documents how the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria initiated the entire chain of events. The Embassy submitted a petition to the office of Nigeria’s National Security Advisor over the Tweets. The NSA (not to be confused with the U.S. NSA) then dispatched the order to the DSS, which carried out the arrests.
“The narrative was the DSS is the one behind all the arrests,” Hundeyin said in a social media post, “In reality, they are just pawns in the game. They are just being used by the NSA to carry out these arrests.”
If accurate, the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria was actively surveilling the social media posts of Nigerian citizens, identifying content critical of israel and the United States, and instructing Nigeria’s security apparatus to detain those citizens, functioning as an extension of the very surveillance and censorship infrastructure that Nigeria’s constitution is supposed to protect.
For Context: The DSS, Tinubu, and the CIA
For readers encountering this story for the first time, some background is necessary.
The DSS (Department of State Services) is Nigeria’s domestic intelligence agency, with a long and well-documented history of extrajudicial detention, torture, and suppression of political dissent. Amnesty International has condemned both detentions in this case and called for Adamu’s immediate release. Prominent Nigerian activist Omoyele Sowore called the arrests “shocking,” pointing out that even the israeli government would not jail its own citizens for social media posts about Netanyahu.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu took office in May 2023 under circumstances that have never been fully resolved. He carries a far more explosive piece of unresolved history that Hundeyin himself played a central role in exposing. in 1993, the U.S. government filed a forfeiture complaint against $460,000 in bank accounts controlled by Tinubu, which federal investigators linked to a heroin distribution ring operating in the Chicago area. An IRS Special Agent’s affidavit connected him through financial transactions and shared addresses with known operatives. Tinubu forfeited the funds, sidestepping a trial. He has never been criminally charged and has denied wrongdoing.
In April 2025, a U.S. federal judge ordered the FBI and DEA to release their investigative records, ruling that the agencies’ refusal to confirm or deny the investigation was “neither logical nor plausible.” The CIA kept its records sealed. Intelligence officials arguing for secrecy, noted that disclosure could “compromise U.S. national security” and referenced Tinubu’s “possible status as a CIA asset.”
The Nigeria-Israel Security Pact and Its Body Count
The arrests are the latest manifestation of a security relationship between Nigeria and israel that was formalized in August 2025 and has already produced a body count.
On August 12, 2025, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs signed a security pact with israel’s Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister covering counter-terrorism cooperation, intelligence sharing, drone surveillance capacity, and tactical training. The pact was signed with a state the International Court of Justice has found plausible grounds to be committing genocide in Gaza, whose prime minister is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. MPAC warned at the time that the deal was a “dangerous gamble,” pointing out the dark irony of importing security solutions from a country whose own defense systems failed to prevent the October 2023 Hamas incursion and the April 2025 Iranian strikes.
The same day the pact was formalized, Nigerian authorities arrested Abu Ramzi Ibrahim, the leader of the Palestinian community in Nigeria, using anti-terrorism police. Critics alleged the arrest was prompted by israel as part of the new security arrangement.
Five months before the pact was signed, on March 28, 2025, the Nigerian military opened fire on a Quds Day procession in Abuja. Amnesty International confirmed that soldiers fired live rounds at protesters. A government intelligence report documented at least 12 dead. The Islamic Human Rights Commission counted at least 26 killed and 274 arrested, including 60 children. Multiple sources confirmed the injured were denied medical treatment. One detainee reportedly died in custody.
The IHRC alleged, based on what it described as a leaked report from the NSA’s office, that the shootings were premeditated and justified on the grounds of countering threats to U.S. and israeli interests. A senior IMN member told Vanguard News that a memo from the National Security Adviser’s office instructing security forces to act had circulated before the procession, and that while Quds Day events were held peacefully in cities across Nigeria the same day, only Abuja turned violent.
Citizens arrested for Tweets. A Palestinian leader in Nigeria detained on the day of an intelligence-sharing agreement with a state facing genocide charges. Protesters shot dead in the streets. At the center of all of it, a security relationship with israel, and backed by United States muscle, that has converted Nigeria’s security services into enforcement mechanisms for foreign interests.
A Captured State: From Rubio’s Cable to Nigeria’s Streets
Nigeria was once a pillar of African self-determination. It played a leading role in the anti-apartheid movement, provided material support to liberation struggles across the continent, and positioned itself as a champion of sovereignty and non-alignment.
The contrast with South Africa today is instructive. While the Tinubu government was signing security pacts with israel and arresting citizens for tweeting about Palestine, South Africa was leading the genocide case against israel at the International Court of Justice. One nation chose sovereignty while the other chose submission.
And the submission runs deep. Nigeria’s state security machine, which Hundeyin notes “doesn’t seem able to handle legitimate targets like bandits and terrorists,” has been systematically redirected at pro-Palestinian demonstrators, journalists, and social media users. Boko Haram has killed over 35,000 Nigerians since 2009. Rural banditry claimed an estimated 12,354 lives in 2021 alone. Roughly one million kidnappings have been recorded between 2015 and 2024. The Nigerian military cannot stop the violence tearing its own country apart. But it can track down a man in Kaduna who tweeted about Netanyahu.
Hundeyin, speaking to The Kansas City Defender, placed the arrests in a broader frame.
“It is not news that Washington has exerted a strong neocolonial influence in Abuja for more than 3 decades, but what I find particularly alarming is that under Marco Rubio, the State Department seems to be attempting to pivot from neocolonialism to open, blatant colonialism,” he said. “This sort of direct interference in the internal affairs of what is supposed to be a sovereign country can be seen in context as yet another signal of a dying empire entering a uniquely dangerous phase as it rips off its mask and attempts to use naked force and coercion to accomplish what its soft power and economic influence no longer can. Donald Trump’s United States has become a rabid dog baring its teeth and snarling at everything it considers to be a problem.”
The Rubio cable obtained by The Guardian describes foreign criticism of the United States as efforts to “shift blame to the United States, sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and even undermine American economic interests and political freedoms.” Under this framework, a Nigerian citizen tweeting that Netanyahu is a war criminal is not exercising free speech. He is promoting an “alternative worldview antithetical to America’s interests.”
The Influencer War: How Israel Pays $7,000 Per Post to Control the Narrative
There is a broader context to the suppression of online speech about israel that extends well beyond Nigeria.
In September 2025, Netanyahu held a meeting with pro-israel social media influencers in New York and stated openly that social media is a weapon. Documents obtained by Responsible Statecraft, a Washington foreign policy think tank, revealed that israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs budgeted $900,000 for an influencer campaign, a sum that, divided by the estimated number of posts, works out to roughly $7,000 per post. “Weapons change over time,” Netanyahu told the influencers. “We can’t fight today with swords or with cavalry…But we have to fight with weapons that apply to the battlefield in which we’re engaged, and the most important one is social media.”
Separately, israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs paid $2 million to an israeli political consulting firm to run a disinformation campaign targeting American members of Congress, with a particular focus on Black lawmakers, using fake accounts.
What This Means for the Diaspora: From Elbit Systems to the FBI’s ‘Black Identity Extremists
The Kansas City Defender is publishing this story because the forces operating in Nigeria are the same forces operating here. Black solidarity with Palestine, rooted in shared experiences of apartheid, displacement, and state violence, is understood by these forces as a strategic threat.
The U.S.-israel security partnership that now directs Nigeria’s secret police also trains American police departments through exchange programs documented by Jewish Voice for Peace’s Deadly Exchange campaign. Since the early 2000s, thousands of U.S. police officers, sheriffs, border patrol agents, ICE officers, and FBI agents have trained with israeli military and police forces through programs facilitated by the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. The Deadly Exchange report, produced through dozens of FOIA requests, documented how these trainings import israeli methods of mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest into American policing. After Ferguson, the israeli company Mistral Security sold “Skunk,” a chemical crowd-control weapon developed by israeli police and tested on Palestinian protesters, directly to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
The surveillance technology is equally entangled. Elbit Systems, israel’s largest military company, built the sensor systems along the Gaza separation wall and the surveillance infrastructure around the blockaded Gaza Strip. The same company holds a $1.8 billion contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deploy AI-enabled surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border, including on Tohono O’odham reservation land over the objection of tribal residents. Technology tested on Palestinians is deployed against Indigenous and migrant communities in the United States.
The counter-terrorism framework used to justify jailing a man in Kaduna for a tweet is the same framework the FBI used in 2017 when its Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit invented the category of “Black Identity Extremists,” a designation that the ACLU called baseless and that was used to surveil Black Lives Matter activists through a program called IRON FIST. That FBI report was disseminated to at least 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide. In Nigeria, the “counter-terrorism” label is now doing the same work: converting political speech into a national security threat to justify the detention of citizens who criticize American and israeli policy.
And the suppression targets Black political power specifically. AIPAC spent over $100 million in the 2024 election cycle to unseat progressive members of Congress who criticized israel’s war on Gaza, successfully defeating Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, two of the most prominent Black voices for Palestinian rights in Congress. AIPAC associate Darius Jones founded the “National Black Empowerment Fund,” which directed money specifically to defeat pro-Palestinian Black candidates; the fund is led by a member of AIPAC’s National Council. israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs ran a $2 million disinformation campaign that specifically targeted Black members of the House of Representatives using fake social media accounts.
The Black press has always understood this. Du Bois covered Pan-African Congresses for The Crisis. The Chicago Defender ran extensive coverage of Ethiopian resistance and anti-colonial movements across the continent. The Pittsburgh Courier deployed war correspondents during World War II to narrate the contradiction of fighting fascism abroad while living under apartheid at home. Internationalism is not a new addition to the Black press tradition. It is the tradition.
A man in Kaduna is in a jail cell right now because the U.S. Embassy told Nigeria’s secret police to put him there. His crime was having an opinion about a war in which more than 100,000 people have been killed. The same U.S. government directing Nigerian security forces to arrest citizens over tweets spends roughly $18 billion per year in military aid to the state committing the genocide.
As Hundeyin tells The Defender: “Only the total uprooting of all puppet power structures in Abuja can restore Nigeria’s basic sovereignty and the dignity of its citizens.”
He is speaking about Nigeria. But the principle is universal.The Kansas City Defender is a radical abolitionist Black nonprofit media organization. Support our independent investigative journalism at kansascitydefender.com
