Beyond the politics of insecurity

[John Onyeukwu]

Beyond the Politics of Insecurity

 As politicians debate whether rising violence is linked to the 2027 elections, recurring school kidnappings from Chibok to Kuriga, Borno and Oyo raise a deeper question: why has Nigeria struggled to translate rising security expenditure, multiple reforms, and constitutional mandates into consistent security outcomes?

By John Onyeukwu | Policy and Reform Column, Business a.m. | Mon June 8- Sun June 14, 2026 | pullout attached 

The measure of a state's strength is not how it responds to tragedy, but how effectively it prevents it. Nigeria's conversation on insecurity is increasingly becoming trapped in politics. As attacks and abductions continue across parts of the country, public debate has shifted toward whether the resurgence of violence is connected to political maneuvering ahead of the 2027 elections. Some government officials and supporters of the current administration have argued that certain security incidents are being amplified, or even orchestrated, to undermine public confidence in government.

While such claims deserve scrutiny, they risk diverting attention from a more fundamental and enduring challenge. The central question confronting Nigeria is not whether insecurity is being politicised. The central question is why, despite constitutional guarantees, multiple security reforms, and unprecedented levels of expenditure, the Nigerian state continues to struggle to provide one of the most basic public goods: security.

The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended) is unequivocal on this point. Section 14(2) (b) provides that "the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government." Equally significant is Section 33, which guarantees every person's right to life. Taken together, these provisions establish security not merely as a policy aspiration but as a constitutional obligation.

Measured against that standard, recent events should concern us deeply. More than a decade after the abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, on 14 April 2014, Nigeria continues to witness attacks on educational institutions and vulnerable communities. The Dapchi abduction of February 2018, the Kankara School kidnapping of December 2020, the attacks in Jangebe and Tegina in 2021, the Kuriga abduction of March 2024, and more recent incidents affecting school communities in Borno and Oyo States reveal a troubling continuity. These incidents occurred under different administrations, different security leaderships, and different political circumstances. Yet the vulnerabilities remain remarkably similar.

This continuity suggests that Nigeria's insecurity challenge is rooted less in electoral politics than in institutional weaknesses that have proven resistant to reform.

The tendency to frame insecurity primarily through a political lens can therefore be misleading. Politics may influence insecurity. Politicians may exploit insecurity. In some cases, political actors may even contribute to insecurity. Nigerian history certainly provides examples. The political violence that contributed to the collapse of the First Republic, electoral violence during successive democratic transitions, militancy in the Niger Delta, and allegations of political sponsorship of armed groups in different parts of the country all demonstrate that politics and insecurity have often intersected.

However, political explanations alone cannot adequately explain why insecurity has persisted across the administrations of Presidents Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari, and Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Nor can they explain why similar institutional failures continue to recur despite significant investments in security infrastructure.

The more compelling explanation lies in the concept of state capacity. State capacity refers to the ability of public institutions to enforce laws, secure territory, deliver public services, coordinate policy responses, and maintain legitimacy. Countries do not become secure merely because they allocate more money to security agencies. They become secure when institutions possess the competence, coordination, accountability, and adaptability necessary to prevent threats and respond effectively when threats emerge.

This distinction is critical because Nigeria increasingly appears to be confronting what governance scholars describe as a capacity trap. In such situations, institutions expand in size, budgets increase, agencies proliferate, and reforms multiply, yet the state's ability to deliver meaningful outcomes remains stubbornly weak.

Nigeria's security sector exhibits several characteristics of this phenomenon.

Over the past decade, federal allocations to defence, intelligence, policing, military operations, and internal security have risen dramatically. The 2026 federal budget allocated over ₦6 trillion to defence and security-related institutions, making security one of the largest areas of public expenditure. Since 2015, cumulative spending on security has run into tens of trillions of naira.

Yet rising expenditure has not consistently translated into corresponding improvements in citizen security. This is not an argument against security spending. Nigeria faces complex threats, including insurgency, banditry, kidnapping, organised criminal networks, communal violence, and separatist agitations. Such threats require substantial investment. The question is whether existing investments are generating measurable improvements in prevention, deterrence, and institutional resilience.

In the private sector, sustained underperformance despite increased investment inevitably prompts rigorous review. Boards investigate. Auditors examine systems. Leadership decisions are scrutinised. Performance metrics are reassessed. Public security institutions often operate under a different logic.

When major security failures occur, investigations are announced, committees are established, reports are prepared, and official statements are issued. Yet the extent to which institutional lessons are learned and implemented remains unclear. Accountability frequently appears episodic rather than systematic.

The controversy surrounding the school kidnapping in Kebbi State illustrates this challenge. Governor Nasir Idris publicly alleged that security personnel assigned to the affected school had been withdrawn before the attack occurred. If accurate, such an allegation points to a preventable security lapse. If inaccurate, it required immediate clarification. Either way, it raised important questions about decision-making, risk assessment, and accountability. The public deserved answers.

Instead, the issue largely faded from national attention without a transparent resolution.

This pattern matters because accountability is not merely a democratic virtue; it is an operational necessity. Security institutions improve when failures are investigated honestly, responsibility is assigned appropriately, and corrective measures are implemented consistently. Without accountability, institutional learning becomes difficult, and vulnerabilities persist.

School kidnappings provide a particularly revealing lens through which to examine this challenge. Following the Chibok abduction, the Safe Schools Initiative was launched with support from government, development partners, and the private sector. Subsequent years witnessed additional interventions, including school protection frameworks and coordination mechanisms designed to improve safety in educational institutions. Yet attacks on schools continued.

The policy question is therefore not whether reforms were introduced. The question is why those reforms have struggled to produce consistently measurable outcomes.

The answer may lie partly in broader structural weaknesses within Nigeria's governance architecture. One example is the persistent tension between a centralised policing framework and highly localised security threats. While insecurity is experienced within communities, constitutional responsibility for policing remains overwhelmingly concentrated at the federal level. This often creates a disconnect between local intelligence, local accountability, and operational authority.

A farming community in Benue faces different security risks from a border settlement in Sokoto or a school community in Kaduna. Yet responses frequently emerge from a centralised structure that may not always possess the flexibility or local knowledge required for effective prevention.

This does not automatically resolve the debate over state police or broader security decentralisation. However, it highlights the need for a serious national conversation about whether existing institutional arrangements are adequately aligned with contemporary security realities.

Perhaps the most damaging consequence of recurring insecurity is not only the immediate loss of life, property, or opportunity. It is the gradual erosion of public confidence in formal institutions. Citizens who lose faith in the state's ability to protect them increasingly turn to informal alternatives, including vigilante groups, ethnic militias, and self-help arrangements.

While some of these mechanisms emerge from legitimate community concerns, their proliferation can further complicate security governance and weaken the state's monopoly over the legitimate use of force.

This is why the normalisation of insecurity represents a deeper threat than insecurity itself. Many countries have experienced periods of significant violence and instability. What distinguishes successful recoveries is the refusal to accept insecurity as inevitable. When abductions become routine headlines, when investigations produce few visible consequences, and when institutional failures generate more explanations than reforms, public expectations begin to decline.

That decline in expectations is dangerous. A state does not lose legitimacy only when it loses territory. It also loses legitimacy when citizens cease to believe it can fulfill its most fundamental obligations.

The debate over whether insecurity is politically motivated ahead of 2027 may therefore be politically attractive, but it is analytically insufficient. Even if political actors are exploiting insecurity, that does not explain the persistence of institutional vulnerabilities across multiple administrations, repeated reforms, and rising expenditure.

The more important question is not who benefits from insecurity.

The more important question is why the Nigerian state continues to struggle to prevent it.

More than a decade after Chibok, Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of laws, strategies, committees, institutions, or budgetary allocations. It suffers from a persistent gap between constitutional promises and institutional performance.

Closing that gap will require more than rhetoric. It will require stronger intelligence systems, better coordination among agencies, clearer lines of accountability, deeper community engagement, measurable performance standards, and reforms that align authority with responsibility.

Until those institutional questions are addressed, Nigeria will continue to debate the politics of insecurity while the deeper challenge, a crisis of state capacity, remains unresolved.

https://businessamlive.com/beyond-the-politics-of-insecurity/

John Onyeukwu
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/

 http://about.me/onyeukwu
“Let us move forward to fight poverty, to establish equity, and assure peace for the next generation.”
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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

The central drivers of insecurity in Nigeria are Islamic terrorism and Fulani imperialism and banditry, the sponsors of which have held Nigeria hostage since the 2011 Boko Haram escalation in GEJ's time to the expansion enabled by Buhari and the APC orientation further represented by Tinubu.

The problem is rooted in people and orientations in the Muslim North who want to reshape Nigeria and have captured the state's security apparatus, forces Tinubu has made a bargain with in the name of becoming President beceause he sees himself as needing them to secure votes in the populous Muslim North.

Having Shettima as VP, describing himself at the beginning of his tenure as responsible for defense, Nuhu Ribadu as National Security Adviser and Matawalle as Minister of Defense indicates the country's security architecture has been sold to terrorism enablers.

The capacity may be there but the will is not there to destroy  Islamic terrorism and Fulani imperialism and banditry.

Thanks

toyin

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[Toyin Falola]

Mr Adepoju:

Do you have evidence for what you said below? Should the state arrest you, can you provide the evidence? Exercise caution in not converting a beer parlor talk to the public domain.

TF

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[Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth]

Hm.interesting and disturbing analysis  by Toyin Adepoju .the norternisation of security architecture  for political  gain?

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

I believe I can defend myself.

I dont do beer parlour talk. I dont drink beer or any alcohol and dont frequent such environments though I have nothing against those who do both.

I would be creatively challenged if the state were to publicly call me to order and urge me to defend myself.

Enough is enough. We have had enough from the people who refuse to live peacefully with others.

From Buhari's ''The war against Boko Haram is war against the North'' and ''You are killing Boko Haram but invite Niger Delta militants to Aso Rock'' to Miyetti Allah's serial defense of massacres by Fulani militants and Fulani herdsmen without any repercussions, to Buhari's dedication of his Presidency to empowering Fulani imperialism across Nigeria, to Shettima's enabling of the Chibok kidnapping by keeping the Chibok school open against the orders of the fed govt, leading to an event that brought down the GEJ govt, an act for which he was perhaps rewarded by being VP in Tinubu's Presidency, to Tinubu's paralysis in the face of the consistent southward spread of Fulani banditry from their Northern strongholds where they have kept entire communities hostage and decimating others, from Kwara and now to Oyo, we have had enough.

I am summing up a sequence I have long written about here and elsewhere including my Facebook essay ''Nigeria's Boko Haram President'' on Buhari's inauguration to my various writings on Fulani imperialism here and on Facebook, orientations steadily gathering momentum among various Nigerians.

In terms of the wave of current thought in Nigeria, I'm simply summing up what a no of others are also stating on social media, a perspective I ex[p the state is well aware of and are likely to be wary of highlighting by trying to escalate my comments into public visibility.

If they do, the onus will be on them to prove views like mine wrong by dealing decisively with the Islamic terrorism and Fulani imperialism menace.

Southerners are not impressed. Northerners are not impressed.

Whatever happens, Im ready. If I cant yet carry a gun against the ongoing efforts at internal colonization of my country I should be able to write boldly.

Will I be able to continue spinning beautiful ideas in writing all day as I do now if im kidnapped as I travel on a research trip or if my Lagos home is invaded by those terrorists whom govts spokesmen have named ''brothers"?

We are at war.

Thanks toyin



 

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[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Toyin Adepoju,

I would be careful about what I wish for, if I were you. 

Discretion is the better part of valour

Talk is cheap. Brave soul, we understand that you don’t imbibe haram al-cohol, so it’s mere braggadocio talking when you famously declare,

” Whatever happens, I'm ready. If I can't yet carry a gun against the ongoing efforts at internal colonization of my country I should be able to write boldly.“

You no fraid God when you go around more or less saying that our venerable Jagaban is in bed with the terrorists ?

You have heard about Primate Elijah Babatunde Ayodele getting into some hot waters  for saying things about Liberia's President. But for the freedom of speech which currently obtains in Nigeria, he would have been arrested, and so could you, if you’re not careful, and sadly Kenneth Harrow who would have been one of the foremost  ringing the alarm bells at Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International about your sorry plight is now only with us in spirit. 

As for me,  if you get detained etc, I’ll just say “ It served him right, shooting his mouth off like that.” 

Cheer up. Things will get better, although, sadly  some of us won’t still be around by that time. Check this out now : https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1JFW3KvieD/