U.S. approves potential $346 million weapons sale to Nigeria to bolster safety

The U.S. State Department accredited a potential $346 million weapons sale to Nigeria to assist enhance safety within the sub-Saharan nation, the Pentagon stated on Wednesday (August 13, 2025).

Congress was notified and would want to approve the sale, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency stated in a press release. The company is a division of the Department of Defense physique that gives technical help and oversees transfers of protection gear.

The weapons requested by Nigeria embody munitions, bombs and rockets.

A resurgence of assaults by Boko Haram, Nigeria’s homegrown jihadist group, has shaken Nigeria’s northeast. The group took up arms in 2009 to combat Western training and impose its radical model of Islamic regulation. In latest months, Islamic extremists have repeatedly overrun army outposts, mined roads with bombs and raided civilian communities, elevating fears of a potential return to the height insecurity of the Boko Haram period regardless of the army’s claims of success in opposition to them.

The battle, which has unfold into Nigeria’s northern neighbours, has claimed about 35,000 civilian lives and displaced greater than 2 million folks within the nation’s northeastern area, in response to the U.N.

Apart from the insurgency within the northeast, Africa’s most populous nation additionally faces severe safety challenges within the north-central and northwest areas, the place tons of have been killed and injured in latest months.

“The proposed sale will enhance Nigeria’s functionality to satisfy present and future threats by means of operations in opposition to terrorist organizations and to counter illicit trafficking in Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea,” the Pentagon stated on Wednesday (August 13, 2025). “There will probably be no opposed influence on U.S. protection readiness on account of this proposed sale.”

In the previous 10 years, Nigeria has purchased army gear from the U.S. on a number of events. Most just lately, the U.S. accredited a $997-million weapons sale in 2022.