🌶️Pepper-Room

The first hint that China would not watch in silence came at 09:12 Beijing time on Tuesday. A short, three-line alert moved on the foreign-ministry wire: *“Spokesperson Mao Ning will host an emergency briefing—topic: Nigeria sovereignty.”* Within minutes, state-run *CCTV* scrapped a scheduled segment on pandas and went live from the blue-and-gold press room. What followed was a blunt, almost personal, rebuke to Washington.

The WhatsApp message hit every major oil-marketers’ group at 21:47 on Friday: “Breaking: 15 % import tariff on PMS/diesel signed effective immediately.” Within minutes, depot managers in Apapa began forwarding the same three-word question:

No one saw the sweep coming not the three-star generals who had flown in from Maiduguri that morning, not the naval commodore who was still signing retirement papers for 47 ratings, and certainly not the orderly who had polished the Service Chiefs’ nameplates only to box them up before dawn.

The e-mail landed in bond traders’ inboxes at 8:02 a.m. with the bland subject line: “Re-opening: Aug-2030 & Jun-2032 FGN Bonds.” By 8:05, the phones were already hopping. “Rates are going to the moon,” one dealer shouted over the clatter of the dealing room. Another simply sent a meme of a fisherman hooking a whale captioned: “DMO bait, who go bite?”

The first sign of rescue was a humming sound above the baobabs. Then the ground jumped. Halima Dauda, 11, grabbed the hand of her cousin Aisha, 9, and both girls dropped into the ditch they had been ordered to dig. “The sky cracked open, sand entered my eyes, and the men with guns started shouting ‘Allahu ak—’ before the second bomb cut them,” Halima told me, voice still hoarse from dust.

The first crack sounded like a Christmas banger—one sharp pop, then a sigh of concrete giving up. By the time the dust settled, half of No. 15 Ago Palace Way had folded into itself like a badly dealt pack of cards, taking with it the dreams (and maybe the lives) of everyone still inside at 2:17 a.m.