By Rekpene Bassey
Nigeria has crossed a threshold it can no longer afford to ignore. On 26 November 2025, President Bola Tinubu declared a nationwide security emergency, ordering an accelerated recruitment drive across the police and military and mandating broader deployments to confront the country’s spiralling violence.
It was a bold announcement, but also an admission that the state is losing ground in its long struggle against terrorism, banditry and rural insurgency.
The emergency declaration is best understood as a response to a security environment that has shifted from episodic violence to systemic instability.
Attacks in Borno, Kebbi, Kaduna, Niger, Kwara and Plateau now follow a grim pattern: heavily armed groups, often better equipped than local police units, raid villages, abduct schoolchildren and challenge the state’s monopoly of force with alarming confidence.
The government’s response, boosting force numbers, is a recognisable starting point, but not yet a comprehensive strategy.
At the heart of the President’s plan is the deployment of 20,000 new police officers, supplemented by forest guards trained to navigate dense, ungoverned wilderness where insurgent cells and criminal syndicates embed themselves.
This reflects a growing recognition that Nigeria’s conflicts are intensely territorial, shaped by contested landscapes and the strategic use of forests and borders by militants.
But overwhelming force alone has never defeated an insurgency. Lessons from the Sahel, Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Nigeria’s own campaigns against Boko Haram show that military surges offer only temporary respite when they are not guided by strong intelligence, local buy-in, and disruption of financing networks. Without these, insurgent groups simply absorb losses, disperse, and reconstitute themselves elsewhere.
President Tinubu’s call for “all hands on deck,” including the long-awaited possibility of state police, represents a significant shift in Nigeria’s historically centralised security architecture. Decentralisation, if carefully regulated, could bring policing closer to communities and reduce response times. But it also raises contentious issues: how to prevent political misuse, ensure training standards, maintain interoperability with federal agencies, and manage jurisdictional conflicts.
A sophisticated security environment requires more than a workforce; it demands a national intelligence renaissance. Nigeria’s intelligence community, while experienced, remains overstretched, under-resourced, and at times siloed. Bandit groups now leverage encrypted communications, cross-border alliances, and informal arms markets.
A modern response requires integrated intelligence fusion centres, advanced geospatial tracking, financial intelligence units, and real-time information-sharing between police, the DSS, the military, and state security outfits.
The administration’s insistence on ranching to resolve farmer-herder conflicts aligns with global best practices, yet it risks reducing a multidimensional crisis to a single policy option. Nigeria’s pastoral conflicts are driven not only by grazing routes but by climatic shifts, demographic pressure, weak local dispute mechanisms and the infiltration of armed groups that exploit communal tensions. Ranching is a piece of the puzzle, not the puzzle itself.
The economic undercurrents of Nigeria’s insecurity cannot be ignored. Widespread youth unemployment, rural poverty, abandoned farmlands, and shrinking state capacity create a fertile recruiting pool for armed groups. Insurgency thrives when the state’s presence is felt only through checkpoints and convoys, not through schools, clinics, and functioning justice systems.
A genuine emergency response would therefore require a dual strategy: restoring physical security while simultaneously rebuilding civilian governance in abandoned localities. Communities in Borno, Zamfara, Niger and Katsina often describe a more profound fear; the fear that the government will liberate their villages only to leave again, allowing militants to return at night.
The humanitarian toll remains staggering. In Kebbi, entire communities have fled into displacement camps after successive raids. In Borno, the abduction of schoolchildren continues to haunt the national conscience. Each attack further erodes public confidence, sending a dangerous signal: that the state can neither prevent atrocities nor sufficiently punish perpetrators.
President Tinubu’s sincere condolences to the victims’ families echo, but Nigerians have heard such words before. What they need now is a credible architecture for deterrence; a system in which attacks are met not only with force, but with swift arrests, airtight investigations, and transparent prosecution of those responsible.
Transparency itself is a security tool. When citizens feel excluded from the strategy, conspiracy theories flourish, undermining national cohesion. The government must communicate clearly, regularly, and honestly about its goals, its challenges, and its progress.
The President’s emergency declaration also presents an opportunity for regional leadership. Nigeria cannot defeat insurgency within its borders if arms, logistics, and fighters flow freely across Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and Benin. Revitalising the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) and negotiating stronger cross-border intelligence agreements are essential steps.
Critical, too, is the need to disrupt the financial lifelines of criminal networks. Kidnapping syndicates operate through sophisticated money-transfer channels. Terrorist groups rely on informal trade routes, cattle rustling, artisanal mining, and laundered funds from local collaborators. Nigeria’s anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing regime must evolve with the evolving threat.
As the emergency unfolds, human rights must remain non-negotiable. Heavy-handed raids, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial responses have historically fueled mistrust, driving civilians toward non-state actors for protection or justice. Smart security is accountable security.
The National Assembly has a role to play. Declaring an emergency is not merely an executive project; it requires legislative oversight, budget transparency, and sustained political consensus across party lines. Security is too important to be trapped in Nigeria’s partisan machinery.
The private sector also has untapped potential. Technology firms can support digital-forensic capacity; telecom companies can collaborate on lawful interception frameworks; banks can strengthen suspicious-transaction reporting; and agribusiness investments can revive rural economies where insurgency thrives.
Meanwhile, civil society and traditional institutions remain indispensable. In many rural areas, local chiefs, vigilante groups, women’s associations, and religious leaders possess insights and influence that official agencies lack. Their inclusion in early-warning systems and community-based intelligence networks could significantly enhance preventive capacity.
For this emergency declaration to be more than another short-lived surge, it must evolve into a Sustainable National Security Reform Plan, grounded in realistic timelines, measurable milestones, and long-term institutional strengthening. Nigeria must shift from crisis-response to strategic resilience.
The world is watching, but Nigerians are watching more closely. This is a moment of consequence: a chance for the Tinubu administration to chart a new course, one that abandons reactive firefighting for a long-term, intelligence-driven, community-centred security architecture. The President has sounded the alarm; now he must deliver the blueprint for lasting peace.
*Rekpene Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics, a Drug Prevention and Security Specialist.
