By Rekpene Bassey
Almost always, democratic governments confronted by protracted insurgencies eventually face the same temptation. A temptation to adopt a doctrine of silence, when victory on the battlefield proves elusive, they try to manipulate the narrative instead.
That temptation now appears to be at the centre of one of the most troubling allegations emerging from Nigeria’s northeast conflict theatre in recent times.
An allegation that, if true, carries implications far beyond national security and the military formations recently attacked in Yobe State.
According to multiple military sources cited by Sahara Reporters, commanders were allegedly instructed to suppress public disclosure of Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) attacks until after Nigeria’s 2027 general elections.
The alleged directive reportedly followed coordinated assaults on military facilities in Buni Gari and Buniyadi, where dozens of soldiers and Mobile Police personnel were reportedly killed.
Nigerian authorities have not independently verified the claims; the office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) and the Nigerian military have not issued a comprehensive response; and the Nigerian military has publicly issued a comprehensive response.
But even as allegations, they illuminate an increasingly visible fault line inside Nigeria’s national security architecture: the widening gap between operational reality and political messaging.
The issue is no longer simply whether Nigeria is winning the war against insurgency. The deeper concern is whether elements of the state now believe that managing perception has become as important as managing security itself.
That concern becomes even more consequential in the light of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s recent appointment of Retired Major General Adeyinka Famadewa as Special Adviser on Homeland Security.
The appointment comes at a delicate moment in Nigeria’s internal security trajectory; a period defined not only by kinetic instability but also by growing public distrust in official security communications.
The creation or strengthening of homeland security coordination structures is not, in itself, unusual. Modern states increasingly recognise that security threats are multidimensional and require centralised strategic coordination.
The United States established the United States Department of Homeland Security after the September 11 attacks precisely because fragmented institutional responses were proving inadequate against evolving asymmetric threats.
But homeland security architecture succeeds only when it is rooted in credibility, institutional transparency, and coherent threat assessment. Where such systems become instruments of political image management, they also risk mutating into mechanisms of narrative containment rather than national protection. That is the danger now confronting Nigeria.
For years, Nigerian officials have publicly described Boko Haram as “technically defeated,” one of the most controversial formulations in the country’s modern security vocabulary. Yet empirical realities across the Lake Chad Basin continue to undermine that narrative.
Despite repeated offensives, insurgent factions linked to Boko Haram and ISWAP remain capable of launching coordinated assaults on military formations, overrunning rural communities, attacking logistical corridors, deploying improvised explosive devices, abducting civilians, and imposing parallel authority structures in isolated territories.
The persistence of these attacks reflects a difficult truth often obscured in official briefings. Modern insurgencies are rarely defeated solely through kinetic operations. They survive through mobility, intelligence penetration, recruitment pipelines, local coercion, economic disruption, and the exploitation of state weakness.
Nigeria’s northeast conflict has increasingly evolved into what security scholars describe as a “durable insurgency”, one capable of fluctuating in intensity without fully disappearing.
This distinction matters because information control becomes strategically dangerous in durable conflicts.
Professional militaries naturally protect operational secrets. No competent army publicly exposes tactical vulnerabilities in real time. But suppressing battlefield realities for political convenience is fundamentally different from operational discretion.
Democracies rely on credible information not merely for accountability, but for strategic adaptation. Once governments begin fearing damaging headlines more than deteriorating realities, institutional blindness often follows.
History offers repeated warnings. During the Vietnam War, American military leadership became trapped in what analysts later called the “credibility gap”; the widening disconnect between official optimism and battlefield realities visible to journalists and soldiers.
In Afghanistan, both NATO forces and successive Afghan governments frequently overstated territorial control while insurgent influence quietly deepened across rural provinces.
In each case, narrative management temporarily protected political leadership but weakened long-term strategic clarity. Nigeria risks entering a similar zone.
The allegations emerging from Yobe suggest anxiety within sections of the security establishment that public reporting of insurgent attacks could politically damage the administration ahead of 2027. If true, this signals the growing politicisation of national security communication, a dangerous development in a country already battling deep institutional distrust.
Security credibility is one of the foundational currencies of state legitimacy. Citizens can endure hardship when they believe institutions are honest about threats. But when governments appear to sanitise insecurity, rumours replace facts, conspiracy replaces trust, and unofficial information realms become more influential than formal state communication.
Nigeria has already witnessed this transition repeatedly. Across regions affected by insurgency, banditry, kidnapping, and communal violence, civilians increasingly trust local WhatsApp networks more than official security briefings. Villagers often learn of attacks from fleeing civilians before state authorities acknowledge them publicly.
That erosion of informational trust often precisely weakens the elements counterinsurgency operations depend upon for the most part: civilian cooperation, intelligence sharing, and local legitimacy.
The alleged threats against soldiers accused of leaking operational information reveal another layer of institutional strain. Modern wars are now fought simultaneously across physical and informational domains.
Smartphones, encrypted messaging applications, satellite internet systems, and citizen journalism have fundamentally altered the state’s monopoly over conflict reporting. Attempts to aggressively suppress information leaks often signal not institutional strength, but institutional anxiety.
This is particularly sensitive because morale in Nigeria’s armed forces has periodically been under pressure from casualty rates, deployment fatigue, equipment concerns, delayed welfare provisions, and operational overstretch.
A military fighting a prolonged insurgency requires more than weapons. It requires institutional confidence. Soldiers who begin to believe battlefield realities are being politically curated may question whether sacrifices are being honestly acknowledged. That carries operational consequences.
Counterinsurgency success depends heavily on what military theorists call “narrative legitimacy”; the belief among troops and civilians that the state remains morally and operationally credible. Once that credibility erodes, insurgencies gain psychological space even where they lose territorial ground.
The attacks in Buni Gari and Buniyadi are strategically significant precisely because they sit along historically vulnerable mobility corridors linking parts of Yobe, Borno, and the wider Lake Chad region.
Repeated assaults in these areas suggest insurgent groups retain reconnaissance capacity, logistical adaptability, and enough operational confidence to challenge fortified positions. That should concern policymakers far more than newspaper headlines.
Nigeria’s security crisis has already evolved beyond a single-front conflict. The country simultaneously confronts jihadist insurgency in the northeast, banditry in the northwest, separatist violence in the southeast, communal conflict across the Middle Belt, piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, urban criminal syndicates, narcotics-linked transnational networks, and rapidly expanding cyber-enabled insecurity.
This is precisely why the appointment of Major General Famadewa will now be watched closely by both security professionals and political observers. His office could become either a stabilising strategic coordination platform or another layer in an increasingly centralised architecture of security messaging. The distinction will matter enormously.
A functional homeland security doctrine should strengthen intelligence fusion, improve inter-agency coordination, enhance critical infrastructure protection, deepen community resilience, and institutionalise transparent risk communication.
But if National and/or Homeland Security evolve primarily into perception management, Nigeria risks drifting toward what political scientists call “performative security”, where governments prioritise the appearance of control over the infrastructure of actual control.
History consistently shows that states that prioritise optics over institutional resilience eventually encounter strategic shock. Insurgencies thrive in environments where truth becomes politically inconvenient, because informational denial creates delayed reactions, flawed assessments, and weakened public trust. Transparency, therefore, is not a public relations burden. It is a strategic infrastructure.
Democracies survive prolonged security crises not because they hide vulnerabilities, but because they build institutions resilient enough to withstand public scrutiny while correcting operational weaknesses in real time.
If the allegations against senior security authorities are accurate, then Nigeria may be entering a dangerous phase in its security evolution: the gradual replacement of conflict management with perception management.
And history suggests that governments which become too invested in controlling the narrative often discover, too late, that the doctrine of silence on the security situation rarely defeats insurgencies.
*Rekpene Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics and a Security Specialist.
