By Rekpene Bassey
Nigeria’s Defence Minister, General Christopher Musa (retd), has delivered a message that Nigerians have every reason to welcome: the country’s security situation has improved.
In his recent assessment, Boko Haram and ISWAP no longer conduct the frequent, brazen attacks that once defined the country’s terrorism crisis.
Troops, he said, are penetrating terrorist enclaves, recovering territory and rescuing abducted persons. The principal challenge now, in his assessment, has shifted toward kidnapping and other forms of criminality.
There is an important truth in this assessment. Security should not be judged only by the darkest episodes of the past. The Nigerian military has undoubtedly imposed significant pressure on terrorist organisations, disrupted their freedom of movement and demonstrated an increasing capacity to take the fight into areas once regarded as terrorist sanctuaries. In June, for example, the Army reported rescuing 360 people abducted by Boko Haram in Borno State.
But the language of victory requires greater analytical discipline. In security intelligence, the disappearance of a threat’s most visible signature does not necessarily mean the disappearance of the threat itself.
It may mean that the adversary has been degraded. It may mean that it has been displaced. Or it may mean something more subtle and potentially more dangerous: the adversary has adapted.
This is the central question Nigeria should now be asking. Are Boko Haram and ISWAP actually disappearing as strategic threats, or are they losing the capacity for spectacular attacks while evolving toward less conspicuous forms of violence, financing and coercion?
The distinction is critical because terrorism is not defeated merely when its fighters stop occupying headlines. It is defeated when the organisation loses the capacity to regenerate itself.
General Musa’s own formulation provides an important clue. He described a trajectory from criminality to kidnapping and terrorism, arguing that sustained pressure can force armed groups downward toward less sophisticated forms of violence, with kidnapping becoming an attractive method of raising money. That may indeed be evidence of military success. But it also tells us that Nigeria’s adversaries are behaving rationally: when one route to power becomes too expensive, they seek another.
This is where intelligence philosophy becomes more useful than conventional battlefield arithmetic. Intelligence does not merely ask how many attacks occurred. It asks what the pattern means. If large-scale assaults decline while kidnappings increase, the intelligent question is not simply whether violence has fallen. It is whether the architecture of violence has changed.
The available evidence should make policymakers cautious. A recent SBM Intelligence assessment reported 7,825 abductions between July 2025 and June 2026, a 66 per cent increase over the preceding year, with at least 1,142 people killed. More than $5.8 million in ransom payments were documented, although the true figure is believed to be considerably higher because many transactions remain unreported.
Those numbers complicate any simple declaration of victory. Nigeria may have substantially reduced the ability of terrorist groups to conduct the kind of massed, brazen attacks that once shocked the nation, while simultaneously allowing kidnapping to become an increasingly sophisticated security economy. In other words, the intensity of one threat may be declining while the reach of another is expanding.
And kidnapping is not merely another criminal offence. Once kidnapping becomes sufficiently profitable, it becomes an economic system. It creates incentives, finances weapons, rewards informants, sustains logistics and establishes relationships between criminal actors and communities. At that point, the kidnapping victim is no longer simply a victim of crime; he or she becomes a source of capital for an armed network.
This is where the distinction between terrorism and organised crime becomes increasingly blurred. A terrorist group can raise money through kidnapping. A bandit can acquire terrorist-style capabilities.
A criminal network can provide logistics to an extremist organisation. An extremist organisation can exploit criminal markets. What emerges is a crime-terror nexus in which ideology and profit become mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive.
Nigeria therefore needs to stop asking only whether Boko Haram or ISWAP can seize and hold territory. Modern armed groups do not necessarily need to occupy a town to exercise power over it.
If farmers abandon their fields, parents fear sending children to school, transporters avoid certain highways, and communities begin negotiating privately with armed groups, the adversary has achieved a degree of strategic influence without formally capturing a single square kilometre.
This is the paradox of territorial recovery. A military operation can clear an enclave and recover territory, but territory is not the same thing as security. The harder task is to establish permanent state presence, restore livelihoods, rebuild local confidence and prevent the armed group from returning after the troops have moved elsewhere. Clearing territory is an operation; holding the population is a strategy.
The recent geography of kidnapping makes this problem even more serious. The phenomenon is no longer confined to the traditional theatres of insurgency. Mass abductions have increasingly affected the Northwest and North-Central regions, while criminal networks have demonstrated the ability to exploit forests, weakly governed spaces and porous borders. The August abduction of hundreds of people in Niger State dramatically illustrated the scale of the problem.
There is therefore a danger in measuring success from the perspective of the command room rather than from the perspective of the citizen. The military can report successful operations, recovered weapons, neutralised terrorists and rescued hostages, and all of those achievements may be genuine. But the citizen measures security differently: Can I travel? Can I farm? Can my child attend school? Can my community sleep? Can I refuse a ransom demand without fearing that a relative will disappear?
This is not an argument against recognising military progress. Quite the opposite. The sacrifices of Nigerian soldiers should not be diminished by political argument or statistical pessimism. The military has degraded terrorist capabilities in important theatres. But professional intelligence analysis requires the state to distinguish tactical success from strategic resolution.
Tactical success is destroying a camp. Strategic success is destroying the system that keeps rebuilding the camp. Tactical success is rescuing a hostage. Strategic success is dismantling the network that identifies, abducts, transports, finances and conceals the hostage. Tactical success is killing a commander. Strategic success is understanding how the organisation replaces him.
That distinction points directly to Nigeria’s next security priority: network disruption. The most important target may no longer be the man carrying the rifle in the forest. It may be the person providing the telephone number, the motorcycle, the food, the intelligence, the bank account, the ransom channel, the safe house or the warning that security forces are approaching.
This requires a deeper fusion of intelligence. The military, DSS, police, financial-intelligence authorities, telecommunications regulators, immigration, customs and state-level security structures must be capable of seeing the same threat picture.
A suspicious financial transaction may mean little by itself. A telephone number may mean little by itself. A vehicle movement may mean little by itself. But when those fragments converge, they can reveal a network.
This is the essence of modern intelligence: connecting the dots before the attack rather than explaining the dots after it. Incident reporting tells government what happened. Intelligence should tell government why it happened, what is likely to happen next and what intervention can change that probability.
Nigeria should also be careful not to confuse silence with defeat. An armed organisation that has stopped conducting spectacular attacks may have been defeated, or it may simply have learned that spectacular attacks attract overwhelming retaliation.
It may therefore decentralise, subcontract violence, exploit criminal groups, return to kidnapping or wait for an opportunity when the state’s attention is divided.
This is particularly important as Nigeria approaches the 2027 electoral cycle. Elections create predictable patterns of movement, gatherings, political mobilisation and institutional distraction. For an adaptive adversary, predictability is opportunity.
Security planners should therefore assume that terrorist and criminal networks will observe the political calendar and look for points at which political competition, communal tensions and security vulnerabilities intersect.
The more sophisticated question, then, is not whether Nigeria has defeated terrorism in the conventional sense. It is whether Nigeria has reduced the strategic capacity of violent organisations to regenerate, finance themselves, recruit, intimidate populations and exploit governance weaknesses. That is a much higher threshold than counting battlefield victories.
The country should consequently develop a more comprehensive national security scorecard: terrorist attack frequency; kidnapping incidence; civilian casualties; displacement; territorial access; ransom flows; terrorist financing; recruitment; intelligence penetration; and the ability of communities to resume normal economic and social activity. If these indicators move consistently in the right direction, then Nigeria will have stronger grounds to speak of strategic recovery.
General Musa’s assessment should therefore be welcomed as a potentially significant indication of progress, but treated as a hypothesis to be tested rather than a conclusion to be celebrated. Nigeria may indeed have pushed terrorism backwards.
The critical question is whether the country is now confronting the residual criminal economy created by that pressure, or whether terrorism itself is changing form before our eyes.
Ultimately, the success of national security is not measured by how many enemies the state has killed, how many camps it has destroyed or how many press briefings it has issued. It is measured by how much freedom the ordinary citizen has recovered.
If Nigerians can travel without fear, farm without armed protection, send their children to school without anxiety and sleep without listening for gunmen, then the country will know that security has truly improved.
Until then, the wiser security intelligence judgment is simple: Nigeria may be winning the war against the old face of insecurity, but it must remain alert to what the enemy is becoming to sustain the victory against terrorism.
*Rekpene Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics and a Security Specialist
