On April 10, 2025, a private, still-mysterious meeting took place in Paris between one of the Trump administration’s top diplomats and the leader of the most populous country in Africa. Bola Tinubu, the president of Nigeria, was in the French capital on a secretive 19-day work retreat in which he did not appear to participate in any official public events or meet with any leading French officials. One person he did meet with was Massad Boulos, a senior adviser on Arab and African affairs at the State Department. Boulos arranged the sit-down with Tinubu without informing his colleagues at State, “[catching] the U.S. embassies in both France and Nigeria off guard,” sources briefed on the meeting told Politico. (Other officials disputed this account to the publication.) The following day, the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, published a brief X post about the meeting, saying the two men had talked about “working together with partners to build a durable peace in eastern DRC”—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that doesn’t even border Nigeria—as well as “expanding opportunities for economic cooperation throughout Africa.” The Nigerians released a more detailed readout: “The U.S.,” Tinubu’s office announced after the sit-down, “wanted to work closely with President Tinubu to expand American investment in Nigeria and Africa.”...

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