Will Trump or Pope Leo Hire Erik Prince to Save Nigeria’s Christians?

By
Richard C. Young
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The National Christian Centre in Abuja, Nigeria. By Miros @ Adobe Stock

In Nigeria, Christians are being slaughtered, and President Trump has lamented the slaughter, speaking with CNN in the clip below.

Recently, Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and friend of the Trump administration suggested to Pope Leo XIV that he (Prince) be hired by the church to protect Christians in Nigeria.

In The Spectator, Paul Wood details Prince’s life and comeback after legal troubles in Iraq, writing:

Erik Prince, the American mercenary, wants to sell you a phone. His Unplugged phone is aimed at stopping big tech and big government spying on you. It’s available in the United States, and shortly in the United Kingdom too. He tells me: “It’s been troubling for me to see the crackdown on free expression in the UK.” But the phone is a sideline. His main business remains sending private armies to some of the world’s most dangerous places. The Biden years were lean ones, or at least quiet ones; now that Donald Trump’s back, so is Prince.

Most people know Prince as the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military company. In 2014, four of Prince’s soldiers got long prison sentences in the US for opening fire on Iraqi civilians, killing 14. Trump eventually pardoned the four men, but by then Blackwater had been renamed and merged out of existence. Prince moved on. He traded under a series of bland corporate identities: Xe Services, Vectus, Presidential Airways. His latest proposal is for a mercenary force to protect Christians in Nigeria.

Prince talks to me about this on a video call from what looks like a pickup truck as he drives around his estate in Virginia. He was once a Navy SEAL and is still absurdly clean cut: short blond hair, blue eyes, square jaw. “Tens of thousands” of Christians are being killed by jihadi gangs, he tells me; the Nigerian army won’t stop it because “corrupt” generals are skimming a bloated defense budget and $28 billion of oil is being stolen every year – the world’s “largest case of industrialized crime.” But, he says, “the private sector can actually help put that fire out.”

Prince offered his services to the Pope on X. Under a video of Pope Leo blessing a block of ice – a Papal gesture toward climate change – Prince posted: “@Pontifex Sir, I have a better idea. Why don’t you fund my colleagues to protect Nigerian Christians from the marauding Muslims who are slaughtering them.” He hasn’t heard back from the Pope and doesn’t really expect to. It’s all part of the Prince publicity machine.

Read more here.