Can Tinubu Tackle Insecurity?

With President Bola Tinubu’s recent shakeup in the national security architecture, the task of effectively restoring internal stability largely depends on military response as much as non-military measures as enunciated in the National Security Strategy, 2019, Gboyega Akinsanmi writes

On June 18, precisely three weeks after his inauguration, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu carried out a comprehensive re-organisation in the country’s national defence and security services. The exercise culminated in the immediate retirement of the last set of service chiefs that served under former President Muhammadu Buhari.

With their retirement, the president immediately appointed Maj. Gen. Christopher Musa as the new Chief of Defence Staff, Maj. Gen. Taoreed Lagbaja as Chief of Army Staff, Rear Admiral Emmanuel Ogalla as Chief of Naval Staff, AVM Hassan Abubakar as Chief of Air Staff and Mr. Kayode Egbetokun as Acting Inspector-General of Police.

The president, also, named former Chairman of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mallam Nuhu Ribadu as the National Security Adviser. With this exercise, Tinubu has now fully constituted his national security team, which according to the National Security Strategy, 2019, has the sole mandate of transforming Nigeria from its current unstable status to a more stable federation.

But is their appointment sufficient to de-escalate diverse internal conflicts that now put Nigeria on the edge of precipice? Obviously, as military strategists recently observed, the exercise only raised hope for a stable Nigeria. However, they argued, restoring stability still demands a review of conflict response strategies to achieve a desirable outcome.

Now that the new service chiefs are now in place, some questions critical to restoring stability to Nigeria still beg for answers. The first of such questions borders on understanding the dynamics of Nigeria’s worsening insecurity that has claimed no fewer than 43,110 lives between 2011 and April 2023 according to the Nigeria Security Tracker.

Conflict analysts agreed that the country’s internal fragility predated Buhari’s era, even as old as the federation itself. But it became intractably worsened under the administration due to what conflict analysts ascribed to error of judgement, endemic corruption, poor motivation of troops, prevalent nepotism that laced the appointment of security chiefs and parochial execution of response strategies in the fight against insecurity.

Under Buhari, these factors explained why extremely violent non-state actors were able to unleash armed attacks on civilian populations and security personnel in the North-east on a sustainable basis. Behind the attacks were the insurgents of Boko Haram and Islamic State’s West Africa Province, whose operations broke down public order mainly in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe.

But the North-east dimension is not strictly limited to extremist violence. Like Africa’s most conflicts, it is closely connected to natural resource exploitation around Lake Chad and the resolve of some Western powers, especially France, to protect their oil multinationals within the region. In this case, as conflict analysts have argued, there is always apprehension that Nigeria’s plan to explore oil in the south of Lake Chad may lead to significant reduction in oil production in the north part bordered by Chad and Niger Republic.

This apprehension has largely contributed to instability in the North-east. The previous administration, as shown in diplomatic communications, attempted to strike deals with other state actors that border Lake Chad. But the attempt failed due to what have been ascribed to illogical terms that might further compromise Nigeria’s national security interests by some Western powers.

By 2017, the activities of the agents of instability escalated to nearly all states of the North-west, though took an entirely different dimension. While the North-east then faced extremist violence, the North-west was infested with banditry, kidnapping and cattle rustling, which conflict analysts claimed, was rooted in the excruciating socio-economic conditions that afflicted Nigeria and its citizenry.

There is also a resource competition dimension to insecurity in the North-west. In its 2020 policy document, ENACT Africa revealed how gold exploitation had been fueling insecurity in Kaduna, Sokoto and Zamfara. The document fingered Chinese corporations and their domestic allies in the country’s security complexity, which Senior Research Fellow, United State Institute of Peace, Matthew Page claimed, engulfed nearly all North-west states.

Also, North-central, mainly Benue, Niger, Plateau and Taraba States, experienced its own darkest moment amid herdsmen’s ceaseless onslaught on farmers and Buhari’s reluctance to tame their activities. South-east too came under vicious attacks by the jingoists of the Biafra Republic, whose activities had compounded fear among South-east people.

Since Tinubu’s ascension to the presidency, the realities of intractable insecurity are recurrent episodes nationwide whether in the North or in the South. This was attributed to what former Chief of Training Operations and Plans, Nigerian Army, Maj. Gen. Ishola Williams described the shadow of Buhari’s parochial conflict containment strategies.

The second question relates directly to what literally went wrong with Buhari’s conflict containment strategies. This demands pragmatic answers that address the roots of insecurity in Nigeria rather than its symptoms. For most conflict analysts, Buhari accentuated military response to the country’s internal crises at the expense of other approaches. Consequently, Buhari increased security spending significantly, which aimed at procuring basic military hardware required to fight bandits, extremists and terrorists.

For instance, as shown in annual appropriation laws, the expenditure of the Nigerian Army rose from N149.82 billion in 2015 to N665.12 billion in 2023. Within this timeframe, this accounted for a 344 percent increase. The Nigerian Air Force too recorded an increase of 157 percent in its spending from N77.99 billion in 2015 to 200.42 billion in 2023.

In its own case too, the spending of the Nigeria Police rose from N366.13 billion in 2019 to N409.39 in 2020; N455.13 in 2021; N787.86 billion in 2022 and N838.04 billion in 2023 in 2023. In aggregate, office of the National Security Adviser received N941.61 billion within the timeframe. Yet, Nigeria was ranked among the world’s most terrorist-infested states in the 2023 Global Terrorism Index.

The third question probes into why the military response failed to guarantee a stable political environment. The approach, as its critics have always observed, often deemphasised non-military measures. The critics explained insecurity from the increasing economic pressures, which they believed, were more complicated due to policies and programmes the Buhari administration embraced.

Such decisions, as the records of the National Bureau of Statistics and KPMG Nigeria have shown, pushed unemployment rate to 40.6 per cent; consumer price index to 22.22 per cent; out-of-school children to 18 million; poverty index to 63 per cent and  crashed the GDP twice within eight years.

With these indicators, Chief Executive Office, Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE), Dr. Muda Yusuf argued that all means “are always justified by the victims of economic downturn.” By implication, he observed, grievous economic conditions have pushed thousands of younger generations into banditry, kidnapping, ritual killing and even armed violence nationwide.

The last question revolves around the compromise of the political class to address insecurity, which Kaduna State Governor, Senator Uba Sani attributed to a lack of consensus on how to secure the North-west. For him, former governors of the zone are winning and dining with bandits while compensating them and negotiating with them.

With these deeply rooted internal challenges, strategists now suggested the need for the new service chiefs to approach insecurity differently with emphasis on eclectic measures. They first proposed a comprehensive review of the national security strategy. As much as military response, most conflict analysts are now emphasising the imperative of mainstreaming non-military approach into the conflict containment strategy that the presidency might employ to effectively restore internal stability. 

They largely canvassed the need to restructure the country’s national security architecture with a view to deepening its core values in the pursuit of national interests and objectives and ensuring compliance with global best practices in the prosecution of the war against extremely violent non-state actors.

They further challenged the new service chiefs to devise modalities to boost morale of officers in the battlefront to avert conditions that could push them to compromise the country’s core values. This suggestion is founded on claims that troops are grossly disincentivised to fight  in the battlefront amid graft allegations in the armed forces.

They, specifically, tasked the presidency to ensure policing powers are devolved to the federating units since the Nigeria Police could no longer effectively live true to its constitutional mandates. Due observance of these measures, as strategists have argued, is key to avert Nigeria’s descent into tragedies.