25 Years after September 11: Lessons for Americans and Africans

25 Years after September 11: Lessons for Americans and Africans Chido Nwangwu captures and reflects on the events of 25 years ago on September 11, 2001. In New York and nearby Pennsylvania, almost three thousand Americans, Africans and other nationalities suffered deaths from the direct consequences of the terrorism of September 11. Hopefully, the world will come to terms with the interconnectedness of our global security and individual safety. This second week of September 2026 is the 25th anniversary of the Tuesday, September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States by the radical jihadist group known as Al-Qaeda. Those acts of terror and wholesale visitation of murder and mayhem did not only affect Americans but persons from almost 20 countries. Before that, on August 7, 1998, the U.S Embassy in the East African country of Kenya was bombed — it led to the deaths of 207 Kenyans, 12 U.S citizens and left more than 4,000 injured. Within a minute of that sad event, a smaller terrorism blast rocked Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, killing 11 Africans. For those who have forgotten, late Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian was the driving force for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He was based, briefly, in the Islamic African country of Sudan (largely a failed State) before he left in 1996. He later settled in the Islamic fundamentalist country of Afghanistan. His primary operational base, according to unclassified records and security analyses of the September 11 attacks, was in Afghanistan, under Taliban rule. I have made some factual, historical contextualizations and contemporaneous juxtapositions over the past 30 years that I have written on some domestic, international and transnational terrorism, violent impositions and continuing battles for power. The relatively medieval-minded Taliban have since come back to power, despite the massive, hellish bombing, severely punitive deployment of American and Western European might and power! The United States left Afghanistan, to put it politely, in a hurry…. We witnessed the exponential escalation of radical jihadist movements and violence, almost every other day across the Middle East, Nigeria and the Sahel belt of Africa. We’ve seen the murderous excesses of these harbingers of death and purveyors of bigotry inside parts of the African continent, such as the Boko Haram, ISWAP, the foot soldiers, artfully called “herdsmen” with AK-47, etc in Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and the rest of the Sahel. Nigeria’s late, former ruler, retired General Muhammadu Buhari, his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan; and Buhari’s successor, Bola Tinubu, have turned out to be agile models of incompetence on insecurity and failures on the matter of food. They all proved incapable of securing/protecting the lives and property of Nigerians, including members of their armed forces and the police! The al-Shabab group continues to disrupt East Africa. It should be a matter of vital national duty that African governments take a more decisive and no-holds-barred approach to choke off the camps and networks of terrorism hiding under the veneer of religiosity and a concoction of bloody, assorted fanaticisms. These troublemakers and merchants of death have caused the killings of at least 18 million Africans since the end of colonialism in the early 1960s. Enough! -Dr. Nwangwu, Founder & Publisher of the first African-owned, U.S-based newspaper on the internet, USAfricaonline.com, established USAfrica multimedia networks in 1993 in Houston. Follow him @Chidö247