Israel warned its people. Nigeria's abroad are still waiting for the call.

At 1:45am on Monday, three people in hoods poured accelerant over four ambulances parked outside a synagogue in north London and set them alight. Gas canisters exploded. Windows shattered in nearby flats. By the time the smoke cleared, two-thirds of Hatzola's entire northwest London fleet was gone.

Hatzola is a Jewish volunteer ambulance service. It serves everyone, not just Jews. The people who burned those ambulances knew that. They weren't trying to destroy a medical service. They were sending a message about who belongs and who doesn't. Counter-terrorism police are leading the investigation. An Islamist group has allegedly claimed responsibility on Telegram, though police haven't confirmed it.

Israel's National Security Council had already been responding to the rising threat environment before Monday's attack. It issued guidance to Israeli citizens worldwide: avoid synagogues, Chabad houses, and kosher restaurants. Don't display Jewish or Israeli symbols. Don't post your travel plans. Country-by-country risk levels updated. Citizens reached before the crisis, not after.

You can agree or disagree with Israeli foreign policy. That's not the point.

The point is what a state does when its people are in danger outside its borders. Israel built the infrastructure for this over decades, a consequence of a specific history of Jewish communities facing targeted violence worldwide. The National Security Council exists partly because of that history. When the ambulances burned, the UK government pledged immediate replacement funding. Two governments, coordinating around one community's safety, within hours.

Now think about Nigeria. But fairly.

Nigeria has built some of this infrastructure. The Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, NiDCOM, exists. It runs repatriation flights when Nigerians are stranded. It publishes advisories. During the Lebanon crisis it coordinated evacuations. When Nigerians were targeted in South Africa during xenophobic attacks, the government flew people home.

The honest question isn't whether Nigeria does nothing. It's whether what it does matches the scale of the population it's supposed to protect, and whether it reaches people before the crisis rather than after.

The 2021 UK Census recorded over 270,000 Nigeria-born residents in England and Wales alone. The diaspora sent home $20.93 billion in 2024. That's four times Nigeria's total foreign direct investment that year. NiDCOM's budget and staffing have never come close to matching that scale. The consular network is thin. The real-time monitoring capability isn't there.

That gap, between what exists and what's needed, is partly a resource problem and partly a priority problem. Both are worth naming.

The Israeli NSC's diaspora protection infrastructure was built because of repeated, visible attacks on Jewish communities over generations. Nigeria's infrastructure is weaker partly because the political cost of that weakness has always fallen on people who aren't in the room when budgets are set.

Most Nigerians abroad already know this. They built around it years ago. The WhatsApp groups, the community associations, the informal networks that do quietly what the consulate doesn't. The Nigerian in Golders Green who checks in with their community before going out, who knows which neighbourhoods to avoid and which friends to call in an emergency, who has figured out a survival architecture that doesn't depend on Abuja.

Monday night is a reminder that building around the absence is not the same as the absence not mattering. It still costs something. It just costs the people doing the building, not the people who should have built it.