View / Nigeria’s insecurity crisis is one of weak statehood

The salvo of missiles fired by a US destroyer on Christmas Day — purportedly at Islamic State targets — in northwest Nigeria is yet to have the desired effect. US President Donald Trump said the strike was aimed at stopping insurgent violence and punishing the alleged persecution of Christians, yet the insecurity has continued.

Cruise missiles are not the answer to issues as complex as Nigeria’s security challenges. We know this from insurgent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Sahel. Trump’s framing of the crisis as a “Christian genocide” is also faulty — as many analysts have pointed out.

Yet most people would agree that something has gone profoundly wrong here in Nigeria. It’s a disaster long in the making, and like the proverbial frogs in the pot, we are being slowly cooked.

Nigeria’s raft of security challenges include multiple jihadist insurgencies expanding out of the northeast, separatist tensions in the southeast, herder and farmer conflicts in the center, and the violence of criminal gangs known colloquially as “bandits” running riot in the northwest.

What links them all is the weakness of Nigeria’s security architecture and administrative systems. Early warning is rudimentary and community liaison mechanisms are flimsy. The police — and the broader judicial apparatus — is flawed and deeply distrusted. The resultant impunity means people turn to alternative structures for protection, from vigilantes to the very criminals that oppress them.

Then there’s the military, which has been charged with fighting the jihadists over the last decade. It contains many brave and skilled individuals, but command failings mean it suffers from a deep morale problem. It tends to be reactive and slow to adapt. Intelligence gathering and analysis is shockingly weak. I’ve met intelligence officers in the northeast who speak neither Hausa or Kanuri, the two main languages of the region.

Yet a better security response only gets you so far. Instead, the terms of the social contract between rulers and ruled needs to be made explicit. “Root causes” and “good governance” are designations that have become almost meaningless with overuse. That’s unfortunate because the Nigerian state faces multiple challenges to its legitimacy and needs to work far harder to earn its people’s allegiance.

Take the northeast, the base of ISWAP, the largest of Nigeria’s jihadist groups. Unlike brutal rival Boko Haram, it has a sense of public relations and presents itself as an alternative to the Nigerian state. Its hearts-and-minds campaigns stress social justice, in contrast with the corruption and exploitation most Nigerians struggle under. Thanks to a healthy war chest, it can also afford basic public services for those that defect to its caliphate.

The northwest, meanwhile, is the epitome of state failure. Bandit gangs control entire districts, extorting protection money from communities in cash or kind, killing those that resist. Even jihadist groups that have explored tactical alliances with these gunmen have been turned off by their purely criminal intent. And yet at the core of some of these gangs is a grievance: The failure of state authorities to fairly arbitrate communal tensions between politically connected farmers and the pastoralist communities to which the bandits typically belong.

Rather than dealing with these issues, several state governments have chosen appeasement: buying off bandit leaders with stipends, positions, and amnesties. It not only ultimately encourages yet more violence, but ignores the suffering of their victims.

The far better response would be for the Nigerian authorities — both state and federal — to tackle the festering conditions that have created the insecurity. That means more effectively serving the people. It sounds simple, but sadly we know it’s not.

Obi Anyadike is Senior Africa Editor at The New Humanitarian, with a focus on violent extremism.