Atiku to Tinubu: Terrorists Are Learning. Why Isn’t Your Government?

Former Vice President of Nigeria and Presidential Candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has said every Nigerian should be worried if terrorists are capable of learning, adapting, and improving their methods after every attack. In a statement issued on Thursday by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku warned […]

Former Vice President of Nigeria and Presidential Candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has said every Nigerian should be worried if terrorists are capable of learning, adapting, and improving their methods after every attack.

In a statement issued on Thursday by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku warned that the disturbing expansion of terrorism, banditry, and kidnapping from the North to other parts of the country is evidence that Nigeria’s current counterterrorism framework is failing to evolve as rapidly as the threats it was designed to defeat.

According to the former Vice President, Nigeria can no longer afford a business-as-usual approach to terrorism, stressing that the nation’s security architecture must be urgently recalibrated to reflect the realities of a threat landscape that is becoming more sophisticated, decentralized, and geographically expansive.

“The terrorists are learning from every attack. They study their successes and failures. They refine their tactics. They identify vulnerabilities. They adapt and strike again.

“The question Nigerians must ask is simple: Why isn’t the government doing the same? From Chibok to Oyo, from countless villages in the North-West to communities across the Middle Belt and beyond, the pattern has become tragically familiar. An attack occurs. The nation mourns. Promises are made. Committees are announced. Then another attack follows.

“A nation that refuses to learn from its tragedies is condemned to relive them.
“The disturbing expansion of banditry, terrorism, and kidnapping across different parts of the country clearly demonstrates that our current counterterrorism framework is no longer adequate for the scale and complexity of the challenge before us.”

Atiku noted that Nigeria’s counterterrorism efforts have for too long relied on centrally designed and often imported frameworks that pay insufficient attention to the hard-earned experiences of communities that have directly borne the scars of terrorist violence.

He argued that one of the greatest failures of the current approach is the inability of government institutions to systematically harvest lessons from previous attacks and deploy them as preventive tools against future occurrences.

“It is now imperative that the Federal Government immediately initiates a comprehensive review of Nigeria’s National Counterterrorism Policy. Such a review must be rooted in Nigeria’s own experiences, drawing lessons from communities that have suffered attacks and developing context-specific, adaptive, and community-driven solutions rather than depending largely on foreign templates.

“We went through the harrowing tragedy of the Chibok schoolgirls’ abduction. The pain of that national trauma remains etched permanently in our collective memory. Yet years later, schoolchildren and teachers are still being abducted in different parts of the country.

“We ought to have drawn critical lessons and early warning indicators from Chibok and other similar incidents to ensure that what recently happened in Oyo State and elsewhere never happened again.”

The former Vice President proposed the establishment of a Terrorism Violence Peer Review Mechanism, a structured platform that would enable communities, local leaders, security personnel, and stakeholders from previously affected areas to share experiences, document lessons, evaluate response strategies, and contribute practical insights to national security planning.

According to him, such a mechanism would significantly strengthen grassroots intelligence gathering, improve early warning systems, enhance community resilience, and deepen collaboration between local populations and security agencies.

Beyond policy review, Atiku said Nigeria must fundamentally rethink its security architecture by embracing a multi-layered counterterrorism strategy that places intelligence, technology, local participation, and the disruption of terror financing networks at the heart of national security planning.

“The battle against terrorism cannot be won solely through military deployments. While kinetic operations remain necessary, the government must aggressively target the financial lifelines of terrorist groups. We must identify and dismantle the networks that fund, equip, transport, and shelter these criminal elements.

“Every successful counterterrorism campaign around the world has relied heavily on intelligence superiority. Nigeria must therefore invest massively in intelligence gathering, surveillance technology, aerial monitoring systems, communication interception capabilities, and data-driven threat analysis.

“Communities must become active partners in national security. Citizens are often the first to notice suspicious movements long before security agencies arrive. We need structured community intelligence programmes backed by trust, incentives, and witness protection mechanisms.

“The Federal Government should establish specialised Counterterrorism Fusion Centres in each geopolitical zone where intelligence from the military, police, DSS, civil defence, immigration, customs, local vigilantes, and community leaders can be pooled, analysed, and acted upon in real time.

“Equally important is the need to strengthen border security. Nigeria’s porous borders have become highways for the movement of terrorists, arms traffickers, and transnational criminal networks. A nation that cannot effectively monitor who enters and exits its territory will continue to face serious security vulnerabilities.”

Atiku further noted that terrorism thrives where governance is weak and citizens feel abandoned by the state.
“We must recognise that terrorism is not merely a security challenge; it is also a governance challenge. Communities plagued by poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and state neglect become fertile ground for recruitment by violent groups.

“Government must therefore invest in education, youth employment, rural development, and targeted rehabilitation programmes in vulnerable communities. It is far cheaper to prevent radicalisation than to fight insurgency after it has taken root.”

The former Vice President also proposed the creation of a National Victims and Survivors Support Framework to ensure that communities devastated by terrorist attacks receive structured psychosocial support, educational opportunities for affected children, rehabilitation assistance, and economic recovery programmes.

“A nation that fails to care for victims of terrorism inadvertently strengthens the objectives of terrorists. We must ensure that victims are not forgotten once the headlines disappear.”

Atiku criticized the Tinubu administration for maintaining what he described as an opaque approach to the financing of counterterrorism operations, arguing that transparency and accountability are indispensable components of any successful security strategy.