The recent surge in kidnappings across Nigeria has raised concerns about the country's national security. The phenomenon is no longer confined to areas traditionally associated with insurgency, with the Northwest and North-Central regions increasingly affected. Criminal networks have demonstrated their ability to exploit forests, weakly governed spaces, and porous borders, making it challenging for authorities to combat the problem.
The scale of the problem was dramatically illustrated in August when hundreds of people were abducted in Niger State. This incident highlights the need for a more comprehensive approach to addressing national security. While the military can report successful operations, recovered weapons, and rescued hostages, citizens measure security differently. They want to know if they can travel, farm, send their children to school, and sleep without fear.
General Christopher Musa's assessment of the national security situation should be welcomed as a potentially significant indication of progress, but it should be treated as a hypothesis to be tested rather than a conclusion to be celebrated. The military has made efforts to degrade 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 or rescuing a hostage, while strategic success is dismantling the network that identifies, abducts, transports, finances, and conceals the hostage. To achieve strategic success, Nigeria needs to focus on network disruption, targeting the person providing the telephone number, motorcycle, food, intelligence, bank account, ransom channel, safe house, or warning that security forces are approaching.
This requires a deeper fusion of intelligence among various security agencies, including the military, DSS, police, financial-intelligence authorities, telecommunications regulators, immigration, customs, and state-level security structures. They must be capable of seeing the same threat picture and connecting the dots before an attack rather than explaining the dots after it.
Nigeria should also be careful not to confuse silence with defeat, as an armed organisation that has stopped conducting spectacular attacks may have simply learned that such attacks attract overwhelming retaliation. The country should 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.
To measure the success of national security, Nigeria needs to develop a more comprehensive national security scorecard, including indicators such as 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.
Key points
- The country's national security landscape remains complex, with kidnappings and terrorist activities spreading beyond traditional insurgency areas.
- Nigeria needs to focus on network disruption to achieve strategic success in its fight against terrorism.
- A comprehensive national security scorecard is necessary to measure the success of national security efforts.
