FT称尼日利亚900万美元游说合同改善对美关系，并提及12架Bell直升机交付

The DC lobbyists helping African leaders survive Donald Trump
At the annual Washington prayer breakfast on February 5, President Donald Trump had some rare kind words to say about Nigeria, the west African country that US forces had bombed only two months earlier.
Scanning the floor for Remi Tinubu, Nigeria’s first lady and pastor at a Nigerian Pentecostal megachurch, Trump declared her a “very respected person” and said it was “a great honour” to have her attend. His administration, he said, was working “in close co-operation” with Nigeria’s government to defeat Islamist terrorism.
The president’s praise marked quite a turnaround from a few months earlier when Trump branded Nigeria a “disgraced country” that was committing “horrible atrocities” against Christians, and ultimately launched strikes on Christmas Day against those he called “ISIS Terrorist Scum”.
It was also the most tangible sign that Nigeria’s deployment of a US lobbying company to improve its image with the Trump administration was bearing fruit.
Faced with the prospect of an angered Trump, Nigeria turned to DCI Group, signing a $9mn-a-year contract that is one of the most expensive in African history. It had been DCI’s plan to bring Nigeria’s first lady to Washington during the week of the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual faith gathering traditionally addressed by the sitting president.
So significant was Trump’s public acknowledgment of Nigeria’s first lady that one Washington insider called it “the $9mn shout-out”.
During Trump’s second administration, African countries — not high on the US diplomatic agenda and vulnerable to sudden swings in administration policy — have spent millions on Republican-linked firms perceived to have the president’s ear.
As normal diplomatic channels have become clogged, governments from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Tanzania and from the breakaway state of Somaliland to Zimbabwe have sought the services of lobbying groups to get their message through.
Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s national security adviser who put the deal together through Aster Legal, a recently registered Nigerian law firm, chose a conservative lobby group with strong links to the administration.
Among the consultants working for DCI to help change the perception that Nigeria was persecuting Christians, according to filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, was none other than Roger Stone, a legendary spin-doctor and associate of Trump. Stone received a presidential pardon in 2020 after being convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation into alleged Russian interference in the US election.
“Given the way this administration behaves, you can bypass Congress and everyone else,” said Phillip van Niekerk, managing partner at Calabar Africa, a political risk consulting group in Washington, of the merits of seeking to influence Trump. “So $9mn might actually be worth it.”
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump had advanced US relationships with African countries in “an unprecedented way”. This “has everything to do with the president’s effectiveness in restoring American strength on the world stage and nothing to do with forces outside the administration”, she said.
Nigeria’s population of 242mn is roughly split between Christians and Muslims. As head of national security, Ribadu, like recent predecessors, has failed to roll back deadly security challenges from an Islamist insurgency to herder-farmer clashes and industrial-scale kidnapping.
One Washington observer said Ribadu, who has cultivated contacts in the US, including Trump’s defence secretary Pete Hegseth, had proved better at PR than security. He was astute enough to know he could not repair Abuja’s image in Washington by going through conventional channels, the person said.
Nigeria’s contract with DCI — a prominent Washington lobby group whose clients include Myanmar’s military junta — has been controversial domestically, with opposition lawmakers questioning the source of the funds to pay for it. Ribadu did not reply to FT requests for comment.
Bolaji Abdullahi, a senior official with Nigeria’s opposition African Democratic Congress, described the $9mn deal as “scandalous”, adding that it was a government attempt “to launder its battered image abroad instead of addressing the deepening security and economic crises at home”.
Witney Schneidman, a former US deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa, said African governments relied too heavily on lobbyists and would do better to develop their diplomatic services.
At the time of Trump’s reversal in sentiment towards Nigeria at the February prayer breakfast, President Bola Tinubu — already nearly three years in office — had still not appointed an ambassador to Washington. That left much of the diplomatic heavy lifting to DCI and other lobbying groups employed by Nigeria, including Washington-based BGR.
Remi Tinubu’s Christian credentials were seen as making her an ideal messenger: whatever problems Nigeria had with Islamist terrorism, her husband’s government was surely not complicit.
In the days before the prayer breakfast, according to one person familiar with the schedule, DCI arranged meetings for Nigeria’s first lady with influential figures in Trump’s evangelical base, including Paula White-Cain, a televangelist and spiritual adviser to the president.
Aubrey Hruby, co-founder of the Africa Expert Network, a Washington-based body that connects potential investors with experts, said lobbying got a bad rap. But it was well regulated, she said, as well as being a good way for foreign governments to negotiate with Washington and for American lawmakers to learn about subjects such as Nigeria’s complex security situation.
“It plays an important role in our messy federal democracy,” Hruby said.
The DR Congo has retained several lobbying groups, including a now-terminated contract with Ballard, a Florida-based company founded by Brian Ballard, a fundraiser for Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Nigeria, Kinshasa has dramatically improved relations with Trump, whose administration in May imposed sanctions on Congo’s rival Rwanda and has aggressively pursued mineral deals in the central African country.
Last month, Tanzania’s government signed a one-year $3mn contract with BGR, whose managing director David Urban helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign. Tanzania has sought to repair its image in Washington after authorities shot hundreds dead during last October’s presidential election.
It was yet another US lobbying firm that originally helped plant the idea with Trump of a Christian genocide in Nigeria, according to Nigeria’s government and several Washington observers.
Elias Gerasoulis, a lobbyist then with Moran Global Strategies, told the FT he had sought to further the interests of his client — an exiled group seeking independence for Nigeria’s predominantly Christian region of Biafra — with a narrative of Christian persecution.
“That got into the bloodstream of Christians in Congress,” said van Niekerk of Calabar Africa. “Someone whispered into Trump’s ear and he realised it was a way of playing to his Christian base.”
DCI’s efforts have helped reverse that perception and produced a sea change in US-Nigerian relations. DCI declined to be interviewed about its strategy, but it pointed to the website securenigeria.com that it uses to showcase Abuja’s efforts to combat security threats.
Abuja was quick to brand the US Christmas Day bombings in northern Nigeria not as an attack on a sovereign country but as a joint operation.
Since then, the US said it had delivered “critical military supplies to our Nigerian partners”, part of more than $1bn in arms shipments that include 12 Bell Textron attack helicopters due to be delivered by 2028. It has also dispatched 200 military advisers to Nigeria to assist the armed forces in intelligence gathering and counterterrorism.
In May, in what was presented as another joint operation, US-Nigerian forces killed Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, a man described by Trump as Isis’s global second-in-command.
By no means has everything gone Nigeria’s way. In July, the House of Representatives approved an amendment seeking to withhold all assistance to Nigeria until it takes effective steps to stop “the slaughter of Christians”.
The state department said: “Nigeria must continue to provide safety, security and rule of law for Christians, and protect religious freedom across the country.”
Still, where the Trump administration is concerned, Nigeria is widely regarded as having pulled off a dramatic improvement in relations with the US.
Nigeria went from “guns-a-blazing to a joint strike a month later and to where we are today”, said a former state department official. “Things don’t normally work that fast.”