Insecurity: Tinubu, structured solutions please
A recent picture trending in the social media, and which President Bola Tinubu slouched on his seat in office while being briefed by security chiefs on topical developments across the country, aptly captures the pressures from the weight of his service as the president of Nigeria, especially at a time as this. What, with a […]
A recent picture trending in the social media, and which President Bola Tinubu slouched on his seat in office while being briefed by security chiefs on topical developments across the country, aptly captures the pressures from the weight of his service as the president of Nigeria, especially at a time as this. What, with a surfeit of recent security breaches and contingencies which featured killing of innocent Nigerians, kidnapping of female school children from their unprotected schools, ambush and killing of a serving Nigerian brigadier-general in a theatre of war, and open taunting of the country’s security establishment; all by the same terrorists.
To accentuate the sordid dimension of the dilemma, the National Human Rights Commission (HHRC) reportedly issued statistics of people killed and abducted by terrorists in the first half of 2025 as 2,266 and 857 respectively.
So grave has been the seeming security meltdown in the country that in a rash of panic responses, several state governments across the northern part of the country have ordered primary and secondary schools, as well as even tertiary academic institutions, to shut down, ahead of the scheduled closure for the Christmas holidays.
Tinubu’s situation is not helped by the globalised de-marketing of his administration and the country by all institutions, the US government, citing its consideration of the Nigerian administration as doing less than enough in respect of the reported mass killings of Christians in the country, as well as insecurity.
Incidentally, the US government did not act in a vacuum but based its position on a deluge of reports from Nigerians over time, and which indicted their government, even before the Tinubu era.
Meanwhile, these are just beyond the other routine headaches of the Tinubu administration like recalibrating the Nigerian economy to place it on a winning run, as well as the self-serving consolidation of its political fortunes to ensure a return to office come the 2027 general polls, with Nigeria under one political party. What a plateful of challenges, one would say!
Apparently responding to the briefings by the security chiefs, President Bola Tinubu had launched a complement of sweeping emergency measures, which are ostensibly intended to beef up the country’s security architecture. In this regard, he had ordered the police to expand their intake of new officers and granted approval for NYSC camps to serve as temporary training hubs. The Department of State Services (DSSS) has also been empowered to deploy trained forest guards and reinforce operations targeting terrorists and bandits across remote regions. Along with the foregoing measures is also the order for the police to withdraw all officers on VIP protection duty, who number as many as 100,000 of the country’s 370,000 police officers.
In following up on the president’s measures is a mountain of clear evidence that the administration may be reading the country simplistically too wrong; hence launching ill-fashioned therapies which hardly provide adequate respite for the people. This contention is not confined to the security terrain of the country, but seems to permeate all facets of government’s administrative intervention in the lives of the citizenry. Incidentally, the weakness of poor reading of the Nigerian situation by the administration manifests more graphically in the security terrain, largely due to the sensitivity of loss of irreplaceable lives in the reported contingencies.
As things stand, the problem associated with the implementation of these sweeping measures is that they cannot be implemented with the wave of a magic wand, no matter how powerful such may be. Rather, their success can only be defined to the extent which the structural endowments of governance in the country allow. And such is limited with respect to the tasks at hand.
Like any administration, Tinubu’s may have come into office with altruistic intentions as is the case with respect to the current security measures, its major weakness remains the disconnect between such rhetoric of its expressed intentions and the demonstratable capacity to execute such intentions. And it is taking the current security meltdown under its watch to play out this reality for it. In recall of the president’s resort to simplistic approach to the country’s challenges is his reference during his presidential campaign to solving the unemployment crisis by recruiting the teeming number of unemployed Nigerian youth into the military and feeding them with the country’s vast stocks of cassava and maize. Incidentally, while even such a matter as unemployment would not be easily assuaged with such rather simplistic approach, the issue of insecurity offers an even more demanding approach. For instance, much of the emergency measures that are to be implemented courtesy of the presidential fiat face institutional challenges that may detract from their effective implementation. A case in point is the recruitment of extra police officers who will be availed crash programme training just to fight battlefield hardened terrorists. Given the history of police recruitment in Nigeria, the context clearly defies the very ethos of mobilising for the full-blown war, which the Nigerian state is currently facing. This is even as the country has at its disposal a large complement of combat-experienced, discharged ex-soldiers and ex-police officers, who can be re-mobilised as volunteer reservists and redeployed to contend with the terrorists’ challenge.
Just as well, the mere mention of the recruitment of additional 20,000 police officers to fight terrorists recalls to memory, a portion of a book on the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 to 1970 (title and author’s name withheld) where it was mentioned how, during the liberation of Enugu , the capital of the rebelling Biafran enclave on October 4 1967, about 5,000 Igbo youths, inspired by propaganda from the defunct ‘Radio Biafra’, were mobilised with mere matchets to confront the better armed Nigerian army. According to the report, the Nigerian soldiers who came with machine guns had wrongly assumed the din of war songs by the Biafran side as the onrush of a mighty army and rained machine gunfire at the direction of the noise, only to stop when the din died suddenly and a deadly silence followed. On investigation of the sudden turn of developments, the Nigerian soldiers discovered, to their shock, hundreds of bullet-ridden dead bodies lying still in the bush, with some still clutching the machetes they were supplied with to go to war against the federal forces.
The lesson here for President Bola Tinubu is that Nigeria, at its current level of development or otherwise, needs structured solutions to its myriad of problems and not knee-jerk approaches that serve only political goals.