Chapter 11: The Great Nigerian Project: Forging a Unified Destiny

Nigeria is a body in convulsion, its regions gripped by different fevers, yet the diagnosis is the same: a profound failure of security, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as the ultimate symptom of a state that has lost its covenant with the people.

In January 2019, I watched a police corporal at the Barkin Ladi division in Plateau State push his patrol vehicle out of the station gate. The tank was empty. There was no fuel allowance that month, the corporal told me, and the divisional officer had gone to Jos to plead with the state accountant. The corporal, posted from Enugu three months earlier, could not name the ward secretary of the community he was sworn to protect. He did not speak Hausa or Berom. He knew no one. That same week, in Marte, Borno State, soldiers at Forward Operating Base Mohammed were distributing five-kilogram bags of rice to families whose farms had been burned during the dry season. The soldiers had bullets and rations. The farmers had nothing to plant and nowhere to go. In a creek settlement near Bodo, Rivers State, a youth pointed at a pipeline silhouetted against the afternoon sky and said, "That is our government. It speaks in crude oil and listens in gunshots." Three regions. Three dialects. The same broken sentence.

I have carried that sentence in my notebook for fifteen years. It is written in different inks—black for the Niger Delta, where the pages warped from humidity; grey for the Sahel dust of Maiduguri; brown for the Plateau soil that never quite washes out. But it is the same sentence. Nigeria does not have a security problem. It has a protection problem. Every armed group—from Boko Haram to pipeline vandals to ethnic militias—is speaking the same sentence to the same deaf state, in the only language the state has taught them to use: force.

The Same Sentence in Different Accents

The error is to treat these crises as separate files in different ministries. The Northeast is filed under counterterrorism. The Northwest under banditry. The Niger Delta under oil theft. The Middle Belt under communal clashes. The Southeast under separatism. Each has its own budget line, its own set of acronyms, its own cluster of NGOs writing proposals in Abuja. But on the ground, where the blood dries and the displaced sleep, the categories dissolve.

In 2015, I sat with a Civilian JTF commander in Maiduguri who described his fighters as "the children the state forgot, now raising themselves with sticks and prayers." He was twenty-six years old. He had been fighting Boko Haram for three years without a salary from any government. His mother sold kunu at the Bama Road market to support his younger siblings. When I asked him why he risked his life for a state that did not pay him, he opened his palms and said, "Because if I don't, who will protect my mother?"

In 2021, in Zamfara, a man who mediated between communities and armed groups told me his village had not seen a government teacher in twenty years. The primary school building still stood, its roof gone, its chalkboards used for firewood during a cold harmattan. "So we built our own school with what we had," he said. "The curriculum is survival. The graduation certificate is a gun." He was not making a metaphor. He meant it literally. Boys in his community who could not read were proficient with assault rifles by the age of fourteen.

In 2023, in a creek community in Bayelsa, a former Niger Delta militant who had accepted amnesty in 2009 said the monthly stipend of N65,000—later reduced and irregularly paid—had become a "pension for a war that never ended." He was forty-three years old and had never held a job that did not involve a weapon. The amnesty programme, which cost over $500 million between 2009 and 2015, had bought his silence but not his future. HYPREP, established in 2016 to clean up the UNEP-documented contamination in Ogoniland, had begun work on only a fraction of the 4,000-plus contaminated sites by 2024. No comprehensive HYPREP progress report has been published since 2022— itself a measure of institutional opacity.

The state, in each case, made the same withdrawal. It stopped protecting. It stopped adjudicating. It stopped investing. It continued extracting—taxes, rents, votes, obedience—but it broke the reciprocity that makes a state legitimate. When protection fails, people build their own protectors. When justice fails, they carry their own judgment. When dignity is denied, they demand it at gunpoint. The methods vary because the terrain varies. The grammar is identical.

This is not an original insight. It is visible in any IDP camp, any abandoned police station, any creek where the only government presence is a pipeline surveillance contract awarded to a former warlord. The insurgent in Borno, the bandit in Zamfara, and the pipeline vandal in Delta are not collaborators. They do not share ideology or even tactics. But they share a common interlocutor: a state that has forgotten what it means to hold up its end of the bargain. And they have all arrived, independently, at the same conclusion: if the state will not protect them, they will protect themselves. If the state will not share the wealth, they will take it. If the state will not listen, they will speak in explosions.

The economists have a term for this. Alex de Waal calls it the "political marketplace," a system in which violence is traded for power and profit like any other commodity. In Nigeria, the political marketplace is not an underground economy. It is the economy. Security votes—unaccountable allocations to state governors for security expenses—run into billions of naira annually with no public audit. Defence procurement contracts are awarded to companies with no manufacturing capacity. The amnesty programme created a class of wealthy ex-warlords while leaving the masses in the creeks as destitute as ever. Each of these transactions is a purchase in the political marketplace. The currency is instability. The buyers are elites. The sellers are the armed groups that provide the instability that justifies the budgets.

Dr. Zainab Usman of the Carnegie Endowment argues that the "resource curse" narrative obscures the real mechanism. The problem is not oil wealth per se, she writes, but the political settlement that distributes it. I agree, with one amendment: the political settlement does not merely distribute oil revenue. It distributes the absence of protection. Some Nigerians get roads and electricity. Others get checkpoints and curfews. The difference is not geography. It is power.

The Arithmetic of Loss

The scale of this failure is measurable. In 2023, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project recorded 8,764 fatalities nationwide from 4,682 conflict events. Of these, 2,705 were civilian-targeted deaths, and 4,193 occurred in battles between armed actors. The violence did not pause for the new year. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, ACLED recorded another 2,353 fatalities across 1,410 events, a figure compiled by the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes and published on 8 May 2024. These numbers are not abstractions. They are the aggregate of individual deaths, each with a name, a burial, and a family that will not recover.

The displacement is equally stark. OCHA, in its 2024 humanitarian overview, reported over 3 million internally displaced persons in Nigeria. Over 2.5 million of them are in the Northeast alone, concentrated in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states. In Maiduguri, the population has swollen by hundreds of thousands of IDPs who fled rural areas now outside government control. The camps have become permanent cities of tarpaulin and rust, administered by humanitarian agencies because the state has no plan for return. IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix has documented this expansion through forty-five rounds of data collection, yet the federal government still speaks of "voluntary return" as if the villages these people left were still standing.

Meanwhile, the macroeconomic crisis feeds the violence. The National Bureau of Statistics Consumer Price Index for May 2024 recorded national inflation at 33.95%, the highest in twenty-eight years. Food inflation hit 40.53%. The naira had depreciated over 90% year-on-year. A bag of rice that cost N25,000 in early 2023 cost over N70,000 by mid-2024. A loaf of bread that fed a family in Kano became a luxury item. These prices do not appear in ACLED's conflict database, but they belong there. A hungry young man in Katsina who watches his family skip meals is not counted as a conflict death, but he is a recruitment opportunity for the same bandit networks that killed 2,353 people in ninety days. The inflation and the fatalities are entries in the same ledger.

The World Bank estimates that Nigeria loses approximately $10 billion annually to conflict, though this figure should be used with caution given its wide confidence intervals. The federal security budget is approximately $3.5 billion. The arithmetic is simple: prevention is cheaper than reaction, but reaction is more profitable for those who control the budgets. A governor who receives a monthly security vote of N500 million has no incentive to eliminate the insecurity that justifies the allocation. A defence contractor who supplies vehicles that break down in the Sahara has no incentive to see the insurgency end. The political marketplace rewards the perpetuation of crisis, not its resolution.

FEWS NET and the World Food Programme reported in 2024 that over 8 million Nigerians faced acute food insecurity, with Crisis and Emergency outcomes persisting in the Northeast, Northwest, and North Central states through early 2025. Inaccessible LGAs in Borno—Abadam, Bama, Guzamala, Marte—faced Emergency outcomes. These are not hungry people in an abstract sense. They are specific populations that the state cannot reach because the roads are unsafe, the military convoys are irregular, and the humanitarian agencies lack the access protocols to move freely. Food insecurity is not a agricultural problem. It is a security problem wearing a hunger mask.

The Tinubu Years: Continuity Under New Management

President Bola Tinubu assumed office on 29 May 2023 with a promise of "renewed hope." His administration's first major economic act was the removal of fuel subsidies in June 2023, a policy long advocated by economists but implemented without adequate mitigation. The result was a macroeconomic convulsion. Petrol prices tripled within weeks. The naira went into free fall. By May 2024, inflation had reached 33.95% and ordinary Nigerians were paying for a reform from which they had seen no benefit. The NBS data is unambiguous: the cost of living crisis that followed subsidy removal was the sharpest single economic shock to Nigerian households in a generation.

On security, the administration has offered more of the same. Operation Savannah Shield was launched in February 2025, targeting terror groups operating from forests in central Nigeria, stretching from Kwara to Nasarawa. The military has continued its kinetic campaigns in the Northeast and Northwest. Air strikes have resumed in Zamfara. Ground troops have been redeployed to Borno. Yet no fundamental reform of the security architecture has been enacted. The state police bills revived in the 10th National Assembly remain stalled, caught between southern governors who support decentralization and northern traditional rulers who fear that state police would become ethnic militias under constitutional cover. The Nigeria Police Force is still centralized under Section 214 of the 1999 Constitution. Amotekun in the Southwest, Ebube Agu in the Southeast, and various vigilante groups in the North demonstrate that de facto state policing already exists; the constitutional prohibition is increasingly a fiction that everyone pretends to respect.

The CLEEN Foundation's 2023 National Crime and Safety Survey found that only 27% of Nigerians trust the police to protect them, and 68% believe security forces are complicit in violence. Nothing in the Tinubu administration's first two years suggests these numbers will improve. The police recruitment drives have continued, but no updated official police strength data has been published since 2021— itself a measure of institutional opacity. Officers still complain of poor equipment, delayed salaries, and a lack of clear rotation schedules. The conditions that produced the EndSARS protests of October 2020 remain essentially unchanged. As of April 2024, victims awaited N1.7 billion in compensation from 25 states where judicial panels had recommended payment. The US State Department, in January 2024, urged the Federal Government to implement the panel reports and prosecute indicted officers. The urging has produced little action.

In March 2025, ISWAP overran Marte town in Borno State, the site of the state's largest military base. Governor Babagana Zulum, who had long been vocal about federal failures, admitted publicly that the authorities were losing ground. By late May 2025, all but one of Marte LGA's three hundred-plus towns and villages were outside government control, according to the European Union Agency for Asylum. This is not a fringe event. It is the most significant territorial loss to insurgents in years, occurring on the watch of an administration that promised renewed security. The Ujasusi Blog Terrorism Monitor, in its 22 July 2025 assessment, recorded over 300 ISWAP attacks in Nigeria in the first quarter of 2025 alone, resulting in more than 500 deaths. Sixteen military bases were overrun in Borno and Yobe as of June 2025.

Some federal officials have argued that Nigeria's security challenges are exaggerated by opposition politicians and hostile media. This view, while politically potent, collides with the data. SBM Intelligence, in its June 2025 security assessment, documented that Boko Haram attacks rose from 147 in 2023 to 191 in 2024. The bombing tactics that were once confined to the Northeast have diffused to bandits and separatist groups. The violence is not declining. It is evolving.

There is a dissenting optimism that deserves its hearing. Some technocrats, including figures in the current administration, argue that digital transformation and youth entrepreneurship offer alternative pathways to stability that bypass failed institutions. The logic is that if enough young Nigerians can earn a living online, the recruitment pool for armed groups will shrink regardless of what the police or military do. It is not a foolish argument. Nigeria's tech ecosystem has produced genuine successes, and the Minister of Communications, Bosun Tijani, has made this case with data. But it is an argument for evasion, not reform. A state that cannot protect its citizens cannot outsource that duty to fibre optic cables and fintech apps. The digital economy is a complement to governance, not a substitute for it. A programmer in Yaba can build a payment platform, but she cannot build a police station in Guzamala. The two projects are not interchangeable.

The Border is Everywhere

The regional context has deteriorated sharply. In January 2024, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso announced their withdrawal from the Economic Community of West African States. By December 2024, the withdrawal was operational. These three Sahelian states had been partners in the Multinational Joint Task Force fighting Boko Haram and ISWAP around the Lake Chad Basin. Their departure has degraded cross-border intelligence sharing, severed joint patrol protocols, and left Nigeria facing ISWAP largely alone on its northern flank. The MNJTF, which once coordinated Nigerian, Nigerien, Chadian, and Cameroonian forces, has lost its northern axis just as the threat is becoming more transnational.

The consequences are already visible. Lakurawa fighters, operating from safe havens in the Sahel, launched attacks in Benin in December 2024 and Niger in January 2025. Boko Haram has sent advisors to collaborate with armed groups in the Northwest, including Lakurawa. ISWAP and Boko Haram, after years of internecine conflict that culminated in the 2021 death of Abubakar Shekau, are now coordinating attacks in the Northeast and sharing tactical innovations. ISWAP has evolved to include weaponized drones, coordinated night assaults, and foreign fighter integration. This is not the same insurgency that pre-2024 analyses described. It is more capable, more connected, and more geographically dispersed.

The border between Nigeria and Niger, drawn by colonial administrators in 1898 and never properly demarcated, has become a fiction. Small arms, combatants, and terror tactics flow across it as easily as dust. The Nigeria-Cameroon border in the Mandara Mountains is equally porous. The Nigeria-Benin border in the Southwest has long been a corridor for smuggling fuel, rice, and weapons. Every one of these frontiers is a security fiction that exists on maps but not in the sand. A bandit who kidnaps travellers on the Kaduna-Abuja highway is not merely a Nigerian criminal. He is a node in a regional economy of violence that stretches from the Atlantic coast to the Sahara. The weapons he carries were likely trafficked through Mali or Libya. The ransom he collects may be laundered through informal networks that span four countries. The cattle he rustles are driven across borders where no customs officer dares to patrol.

ECOWAS, once the most functional regional body in Africa, is now a shell of its former self. The Sahelian withdrawals were not merely diplomatic. They were security divorces. Nigeria, which has always anchored West African stability, now finds itself in a neighbourhood where the neighbours have left the collective security agreement and, in some cases, are actively hostile to Abuja's influence. The Lake Chad Basin Commission still meets, but its resolutions have no enforcing power. The Multinational Joint Task Force still exists on paper, but its operational capacity has been halved by the loss of Nigerien territory and cooperation.

This matters for the argument of this book because it demolishes the illusion that Nigeria's crises are internal affairs that can be solved with better domestic policy alone. To treat banditry as a Nigerian policing problem is to mistake a regional pandemic for a local fever. The armed groups do not recognize the borders that Nigeria's diplomats defend. They recognize only terrain, safe havens, and markets. Until Nigeria's security strategy acknowledges that the border is everywhere—that the enemy is not on the other side of a line but embedded in a regional network—it will continue to fight a war with maps that do not describe the battlefield.

What Binds the Wounds

I have spent fifteen years carrying a notebook through the geography of Nigerian pain. The pages are filled with things I wish I had not seen: a mother in Monguno searching through a sack of charred maize for grains that were not burnt, her fingers black with ash; a farmer in Barkin Ladi burying his son in the same family plot where his own father was buried after the 2001 riots; a young man in the Delta showing me his amnesty ID card, laminated and faded, and asking what he was supposed to do with it now that the stipends had stopped and the skills training never materialized. These are not stories. They are receipts. They are proof of purchase in a political marketplace where dignity is the commodity most frequently stolen.

But the notebook also contains other entries. In 2022, in a camp for displaced persons outside Maiduguri, I met Aisha Bukar, a thirty-four-year-old widow who had started a tailoring collective with fourteen other women. They had no electricity, so they used hand-powered sewing machines salvaged from the wreckage of the Monday market. They made school uniforms for children in the camp and sold them for N500 each. The profit was negligible. The purpose was not. In 2023, in Jos, I watched Pastor James Wuye and Imam Muhammad Ashafa mediate a dispute between Berom and Fulani youth over a damaged water pump in a mixed community on the outskirts of the city. The pump was fixed. No blood was spilled. The two men have mediated conflicts in over 200 communities since 1995, and their work continues despite repeated threats. In 2024, in Anambra, members of the state vigilante service arrested a kidnapping syndicate and handed them to the police—a rare instance of local security actors functioning as auxiliaries rather than predators.

These moments do not balance the ledger. The tailoring collective does not undo the 8,764 fatalities of 2023. The repaired water pump does not restore the 3 million displaced. The vigilante arrest does not reform the Nigeria Police Force. But they matter because they prove something that the cynics in Abuja have forgotten: Nigerians do not need to be taught how to live together. They have been doing it for generations, in marketplaces and mosques, in churches and classrooms, in the ordinary transactions of daily life that never make the security reports. The crisis is not that Nigerians are incapable of coexistence. The crisis is that the state has repeatedly undermined the institutions that make coexistence possible, and has failed to protect the people when those institutions break down.

The West Africa Network for Peacebuilding has operated Africa's most sophisticated early warning system across Nigeria's 36 states since 1998. Its community monitors report signs of tension before they become headlines. The Interfaith Mediation Centre in Kaduna has prevented violence that would have killed hundreds. The Kukah Centre, founded by Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, brings together traditional rulers, religious leaders, and youth activists in annual summits that produce concrete local agreements. These institutions are Nigerian. They are not imports. They were built by people who looked at the same broken social contract and decided to repair it themselves, one community at a time.

Yet even these efforts are fragile without state backing. Multiple peace agreements in Plateau between 2022 and 2024 collapsed within months due to political interference, revenge killings, and the absence of state enforcement. The Civilian JTF in Borno, initially praised as a community policing model, has been implicated by 2024 in extortion, extrajudicial killings, and recruitment of former insurgents. Community security without accountability becomes predation. This is the lesson that the optimists must absorb: Nigerian resilience is real, but it cannot substitute indefinitely for state responsibility. The tailor and the imam and the vigilante are holding a line that the state should be holding. They will not hold it forever.

The bridge from here to a different future is not a blueprint drawn in Abuja. It is not a constitutional amendment, though one is needed. It is not a regional summit, though summits have their place. The bridge is a million small acts of repair performed by people who refuse to surrender their communities to the logic of violence. It is the teacher who returns to a rural school in Zamfara despite the risk because her pupils have no one else. It is the trader in Kano who extends credit across ethnic lines because the alternative is mutual ruin. It is the youth in Port Harcourt who rejects militia recruitment because his mother asked him not to break her heart. It is the journalist who keeps writing when the story is dangerous and the pay is poor and the editor has been threatened. These are not heroic acts. They are the normal fabric of civic life in any functioning society. But in Nigeria, they are acts of resistance because they contradict the state's implicit message: that you are alone, that your neighbour is your enemy, and that force is the only currency that counts.

The social contract can be repaired. Not by a single election, not by a constitutional rewrite, not by a presidential address. It is repaired one protection at a time. A police officer who shows up when called and does not demand transport money. A judge who refuses a bribe and issues a ruling that sticks. A governor who spends the security vote on security instead of on elections. A president who treats the Northeast as if it were Lagos Island and the creeks as if they were Abuja estates. Each of these is a stitch in a torn fabric. Enough stitches, and the fabric holds. Too few, and it rips further.

The fault lines are real. To deny them is folly. But they are not our destiny. They are the scars of a difficult past, not the prophecy of our future.

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