This Article was published by The Cable on January 4, 2026
Yesterday, President Donald Trump unleashed his fury on the South American country of Venezuela. Woken to Trump’s tweet on his Truth Social that the US had carried out a ‘large-scale strike’ against Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolas Maduro and wife, Cilia Fores, the world was aghast.
Sensing where Trump was going, Maduro had accused him, in an earlier statement, of “extremely serious military aggression”, stating that, “Venezuela rejects, repudiates, and denounces before the international community the extremely serious military aggression perpetrated by the current government of the United States of America against Venezuelan territory and people”.
There is huge gloating in the Trump cabinet over the Maduro rout. Reacting to it in a post on X, Deputy Secretary of State, Christopher Landau, showed excitement. Venezuela, he said, had begun to experience a “new dawn”. He had tweeted: “A new dawn for Venezuela! The tyrant is gone. He will now – finally – face justice for his crimes,” he said.
It seems to me like the celebration of the fall of Mr Jones, the neglectful, often drunken farmer, who represented the oppressive ruling class, and his replacement by beasts, in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.. Mr. Jones’ expulsion from the farm represented the beginning of self-governance by the animals.
Just like Maduro in Venezuela, George H. W. Bush, in 1989, invaded Panama. The charge against Panama’s Manuel Antonio Noriega was that his country had become a safe haven for drugs. Incidentally, the charge against Nigeria’s Mr. Jones has similar scent. It began with a bombing targeted at Noriega’s private vehicles in Panama city. It was then escalated to several slums in the middle of the city which destroyed it totally. Two hundred and fifty civilians were reported to have died. On January 3, 1990, Noriega eventually surrendered and was jailed in the US and repatriated to Panama after his term. In prison in Panama, Noriega suffered brain haemorrhage and died on May 29, 2017.
The fates of Noriega and Maduro reveal that the concept of sovereignty is fluid and has been redrawn by world’s super powers. Ukraine is witnessing the fluidity of sovereignty in the hands of Vladimir Putin. When local despots in Nigeria deploy the EFCC against sub-national leaders. threatening that, for infractions during their tenure they most times cook up, after office, they would be in the gallows, they themselves should remember that, the rod of Donald Trump or even the International Court of Justice (ICJ) awaits them, too. It is equalization of power. Yoruba conceptualize this equalization in their saying that no one should gloat when one person succumbs to the tyrannical club of death. Death, they say, is an agbádá that all are bound to wear. “Òrun dèdè, má fi ikú yò mí, gbogbo wa la dá’gbádá ikú,” they say.
