The former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bolaji Akinyemi, has cautioned President Bola Tinubu against engaging in any confrontation with the newly sworn-in 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump.

Speaking in an interview with Channels Television, Akinyemi said, “If I were President Tinubu, I would try to steer clear of antagonising him because there is nothing a bully likes better than taking on people who are not strong enough to resist him. You know there is that African proverb that if you are not strong enough to take on a bully and you take him on, you are just even going to suffer more for it.

That’s the advice I will give President Tinubu: try and avoid having a confrontation with him even if that means that he does things that annoy or does things that step on the interests of Nigeria. There are ways in which you could address his reaction without confrontation,” he said.

Akinyemi, a former Director General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), described Trump's inaugural speech as uninspiring, shocking, and depressing.

He stated that instead of calling for world peace, Trump threatened the rest of the world with a bouquet of hostile policies including taking back the Panama Canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, tariff wars, and others.

Akinyemi said the US president would “soon learn that there are repercussions to policies, to jingoism”, stressing that the world is “in for a rough ride for four years” of the Trump presidency.

The former Nigerian Minister of External Affairs noted that Nigeria is out of the focus of the 78-year-old most powerful president and that we should not expect anything extraordinary from Trump’s administration.

President Tinubu has on Monday, January 20, extended his congratulations to Trump on his re-election as President of America.

He highlighted his commitment to deepening the relationship between Nigeria and the US, citing the complex global challenges facing both nations.