By Rekpene Bassey
Weeks before the Christmas Day airstrikes spearheaded by the US military, Nigeria’s war against terrorism entered a quieter, more unnerving phase; not louder gunfire or explosive headlines, but a shift in the invisible infrastructure of conflict.
Cell towers or SIM cards no longer bind the country’s adversaries. They now speak to one another through the cold, silent efficiency of satellites orbiting hundreds of kilometres above the earth.
That sobering reality was laid bare recently by Dr Mathew Adepoju, Director-General of the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA), who disclosed that terrorist groups operating in Nigeria have migrated from conventional mobile networks to satellite-based communication systems.
In doing so, they have effectively neutralised one of the military’s most well-worn counterterrorism tools: the shutdown of mobile networks during operations.
For years, the suspension of GSM services in conflict zones, from the North-East to parts of the North-West, has been treated as a decisive disruption tactic. Deny terrorists communication, the logic went, and you deny them coordination.
But as Adepoju bluntly suggested, adversaries adapt faster than bureaucracies. In security doctrine, this is a familiar maxim: the enemy gets a vote.
“It breaks my heart,” Adepoju admitted during a recent interview, “when state governments shut down communication on our mobile phones, because most of them are not actually communicating through mobile networks.” What he offered was not mere lamentation, but a warning, one rooted in technological realism rather than institutional habit.
Terrorist networks, he explained, now rely on satellite platforms that bypass terrestrial infrastructure entirely. These systems are more complex to trace, resilient to local disruptions, and increasingly accessible as satellite technologies become cheaper and more ubiquitous. Where states impose blackouts, non-state actors route around them.
The broader implication is unsettling: Nigeria may be fighting 21st-century adversaries with 20th-century assumptions. Shutting down mobile networks inconveniences civilians, disrupts commerce, and frays public trust, while doing little to obstruct groups already operating beyond GSM grids. In security parlance, this is collateral pain without strategic gain.
Adepoju also sought to dispel a common misconception embedded in public imagination: that Nigeria’s satellites provide a kind of omniscient, cinematic surveillance. They do not. “The ones the military has and the ones we’ve launched are imagers,” he clarified. “They don’t record videos, and they travel around the globe.” Satellites, in short, are not hovering CCTV cameras in the sky.
Nigeria’s current earth-observation satellites, NigeriaSat-1, NigeriaSat-X, and NigeriaSat-2, are designed primarily for imaging, disaster monitoring, and agriculture and land-use analysis. By design, they revisit the exact location only once every three days on average, a lag that is ill-suited for tracking fast-moving insurgents or bandit formations.
This revisit gap underscores a central lesson of modern security: intelligence delayed is intelligence denied. In environments where attackers move swiftly across forests, borderlands, and ungoverned spaces, three days may be three years.
Recognising this vulnerability, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has approved the deployment of a new satellite constellation intended to dramatically shorten revisit times to between 4 and 6 hours, depending on the orbital configuration. It is, by Nigerian standards, a bold and forward-looking move.
Adepoju explained the logic plainly: continuous coverage requires numbers. “As one is going, another is coming,” he said, outlining a strategy that mirrors global best practice in space-based intelligence. The plan is to begin with four satellites, with eventual expansion to four or five more to approach near-real-time monitoring capability.
In strategic terms, this is force multiplication without boots on the ground. Space assets do not tire, defect, or leak.
But their effectiveness depends on integration into military command structures, intelligence fusion centres, and political decision-making processes that can act on data at speed.
As it were, ambition alone does not guarantee capacity. Adepoju revealed that NASRDA has agreed with a U.S.-based technical partner that controls nearly 300 satellites, capable of providing advanced signal analytics for intelligence purposes. It is the kind of partnership that could leapfrog years of domestic capacity building.
Such analytics, covering signal detection, movement patterns, and communication behaviours, are now central to counterterrorism globally. Modern security no longer depends solely on men with rifles, but analysts with dashboards. As another maxim goes: wars are no longer won by firepower alone, but by information dominance.
However, the deal remains stalled. The funds required to activate the partnership have not yet been released. In this hesitation lies a familiar Nigerian paradox: strategic clarity without fiscal urgency, vision without velocity.
The cost of delay is not abstract. Terrorist groups do not pause their evolution for budgetary cycles. Every month without deployment widens the asymmetry between state capabilities and insurgent ingenuity. In security, time is not neutral; it always benefits the aggressor.
What emerges from Adepoju’s disclosure is a stark message: mobile network shutdowns are increasingly symbolic gestures in a battlespace that has gone orbital. If Nigeria continues to rely on blunt instruments while adversaries adopt precision tools, the imbalance will deepen.
This moment, therefore, demands a recalibration of doctrine. Satellite intelligence must be treated not as a luxury or adjunct, but as core national security infrastructure; funded, protected, and operationalised with urgency. Space, like cyberspace, is no longer optional terrain.
The old saying holds: generals are always preparing for the last war. Nigeria now has a rare and fleeting opportunity to prepare for the next one instead. Whether it seizes that chance may determine not just the success of counterterrorism operations, but the credibility of the state itself.
*Rekpene Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics, Drug Prevention and Security Specialist.
