National insecurity: The trouble with Dambazau’s treatise

BY TONY ELUEMUNOR

I read with an interchange of intense pleasure and intense pain, the insightful lecture which the much-decorated Lt Gen (Rtd) Abdulrahman B. Dambazau delivered on November 4, 2025. That 7th Annual Public Lecture of the “Just Friends Club of Nigeria” (JFCN), with the theme, “Nigeria’s Security Challenges and the Quest for National Cohesion: A New Paradigm for Internal Security Architecture”, should have so engaged the attention of the nation that it should have given rise to a national discourse on Nigeria’s present security tragedy.

This is because Dambazau, as a former chief of army staff and minister of interior at different times, must know the national security terrain expertly. He is also superlatively educated; holds a PhD degree in criminology, and he is also the pro-chancellor, Capital City University, Kano, so he must have been interfacing with professors. So, it is curious that his most topical lecture didn’t elicit a national discourse.

In a sense, Dambazau didn’t disappoint; he traversed the field expertly, espousing every aspect of it in a way that would make a layman an expert. Hear him: “Security must be approached from a comprehensive and holistic perspective, as a concept centred on people rather than territories and on investment in human development rather than armaments, a broader construct that extends beyond traditional military concerns to encompass the protection of individuals’ lives, property, and their overall well-being.”

Military security is primarily concerned with protecting a nation’s territorial integrity and sovereignty against external threats, typically using armed forces and defence strategies. Being state-centric, it focuses on safeguarding the state from military aggression, invasion, or armed conflict. In contrast, human security is people-centric and encompasses a broader range of concerns. It emphasises the protection of individuals’ lives, properties, and overall well-being.

Human security addresses threats such as poverty, illiteracy, disease, unemployment, corruption, and environmental degradation, issues that cannot be resolved by military force alone but require effective governance and social investment. In the Nigerian context, these threats pose significant human security challenges.

Nigeria is confronted with a range of complex security challenges that demand a robust and adaptive internal security architecture. Foremost among these are threats to the safety of lives and property. This “freedom from fear” has been eroded by the activities of groups such as Boko Haram, bandits, IPOB, Yoruba Nation agitators, militants, urban criminal gangs, and other violent offenders engaged in armed robbery, murder, and ritual killings.

In addition to physical threats, Nigeria faces significant human security challenges that undermine its survival and livelihoods- poverty, unemployment, hunger, disease, and illiteracy have denied many citizens their “freedom from want.”

Despite its abundant resources, Nigeria continues to rank low on the United Nations human development index.

For instance, extreme poverty is expected to rise from 30.9% in 2018 to 46% in 2024, with approximately 90 million Nigerians living below the poverty line. Multidimensional poverty, encompassing deprivation in health, education, and living standards, affects 63% of the population and is exacerbated by inflation, economic stagnation, insecurity, regional disparities, and inadequate social protection.

Population growth further compounds these challenges, with projections indicating that Nigeria’s population will exceed 400 million by 2050, and over 70% of the population is young, including approximately 10 million out-of-school children”.

Freedom from want? This should remind us of the “Four Freedoms of Man” as articulated by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. They are universal principles for a just world: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear, representing essential democratic values that should exist everywhere, and inspiring global Human Rights ideals like those in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It is actually from here that I began to disagree with Dambazau. He attributed the problem to: “The proliferation of firearms, driven by porous borders, regional instability, and illicit local production, the widespread availability of unregistered and unmarked weapons has fueled insurgency, banditry, armed robbery, and other violent crimes.”

Reports indicate that Nigeria accounts for a significant share of illegal weapons in West Africa, with the Lake Chad region remaining a hotspot for arms trafficking and local manufacture of arms, including components used by groups such as Boko Haram.

Root Causes, Triggers, and Drivers of Insecurity

The persistence of Nigeria’s security challenges can be attributed to a complex interplay of root causes, triggers, and drivers. A significant factor is the tendency to oversimplify complex issues, often influenced by emotions, sentiments, and the denial of reality. Religious and ethnic intolerance frequently clouds objective reasoning, leading to a fragmented national perspective and undermining collective efforts to address insecurity.

Key drivers include poor governance, inadequate welfare for security personnel, insufficient coordination among security agencies and underdeveloped criminal justice institutions. Additional factors, such as limited legislative oversight, corruption, inconsistent enforcement of law and order, an overstretched military, misallocated police resources, underutilised civil defence units, and the absence of a comprehensive strategy for rural security, further exacerbate the situation”.

All the points he mentioned above could have contributed to Nigerian terrorism, but it is curious that Gen. Dambazau could have left off listing killer cattle herders among the terrorist groups, just as he left off fundamental Islamic influences among the triggers of that terrorism. He failed to condemn the calls for cattle routes and government-provided cattle settlements or colonies, or rural grazing areas (RUGA), a controversial government project for cattle herders.

I say this for two strong reasons. One, a militia apparently exists for the sheer purpose of fighting for the interests of the Fulani cattle herders. Such a militia or militias visit mayhem on villages and towns in furtherance of cattle herders’ interests around the Middle Belt area. They appear suddenly, do their deadly deed and disappear instantly.

Two, if animal husbandry is a personal business, what is wrong with requiring those in that business to sequester their cattle in personal ranches? The government could provide the initial take-off loans. Government-sponsored RUGA is like robbing Peter to pay Paul. No personal business should be so subsidised. And to talk about Cattle Routes in the year 2025 is to escape from modernity and leap into the dark ages.

Introduce cattle ranches, and the so-called farmers and cattle herders’ clashes will disappear as cattle will stop destroying farms, and cattle herders will stop moving with AK-47 assault weapons because they won’t be moving about at all, let alone other economic fruits.

Yes, northern Muslims have experienced insurgency, but the explanation for this is clear; as the terrorists become more and more confident, they exert territorial control and impose taxes. It requires force to impose such, and that explains the troubles the non-Christians in the north-west and north-east face. But to deny that there is an orchestrated attack or even genocide against Christians in Nigeria, as Dambazau did, will fall flat against the evidence.

And what is this evidence? For starters, the religious terrorists are all unpretentious Islamic jihadists, going by their names. Second, their roots go far into history, especially the escalating events like the 1980s Maitatsine riots, the introduction of Sharia law in the North (starting from 1999), and the rise of Boko Haram, which have been creating cycles of violence over resources, identity, and governance, impacting stability despite coexistence efforts. Unfortunately, the religious crisis didn’t begin with Boko Haram.

It just happened that despite the failures of the earlier attempts, Boko Haram’s attempt has given rise to full-fledged terrorism. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) reported that, as of 2025, just under 53,000 Muslims and Christians had been killed in targeted political violence since 2009. Organisations that monitor political violence in Nigeria have reported that the majority of victims of jihadist groups are Muslim.

According to ACLED’s 2022 report, although Christians constitute roughly 50% of the population, violence explicitly targeting Christians on the basis of religion accounted for only 5% of reported civilian-targeting events”.

In the face of such indices, why would anybody, including the American President, Donald Trump, claim otherwise? The answer is this: Religious conflict in Nigeria, when it befalls the Christians, religion and not mindless theft and mayhem is often the issue.

From Wikipedia comes this: “This was the case of the mayhem in Tafawa Balewa town to 1948. The 1980s saw an upsurge in violence due to the death of Mohammed Marwa (“Maitatsine”). In the same decade, the military ruler of Nigeria, General Ibrahim Babangida, enrolled Nigeria in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. This was a move which aggravated religious tensions in the country, particularly among the Christian community. In response, some in the Muslim community pointed out that certain other African member states have smaller proportions of Muslims, as well as Nigeria’s diplomatic relations with the Holy See.

Thus, when Boko haram began, it clearly had religion as its aim. And the various groups are affiliated with known Islamic fundamentalist organs from the Middle East. Boko Haram wasn’t fighting against bad governance nor hunger and want per se; it fought because of Islam trying to impose its own version on other people. I must add that although direct conflicts between Christians and Muslims were rare, eruptions often happened, as in October 1982, when Muslim zealots in Kano were able to enforce their power in order to keep the Anglican House Church from expanding its size and power base. They saw it as a threat to the nearby Mosque, even though the Anglican House Church had been there for forty years prior to the building of the Mosque.

Two student groups came into contestation: the Fellowship of Christian Students and the Muslim Student Society. In one instance, there was an evangelical campaign organised by the FCS and brought into question why one sect should dominate the campus of the Kaduna State College of Education in Kafanchan. This quarrel accelerated to the point where
the Muslim students organised protests around the city and burned a Church within the college. The Christian majority at the college retaliated on March 9. Twelve people died, and several mosques were burnt in that war.

Since the restoration of democracy in 1999, the Muslim-dominated Northern states have implemented strict Sharia law. Religious conflict between Muslims and Christians has erupted several times since 2000 for various reasons, often causing riots with several thousand victims on both sides. Since 2009, the Islamist movement Boko Haram
has fought an armed rebellion against the Nigerian military, sacking villages and towns and taking thousands of lives in battles and massacres against Christians, students and others deemed enemies of Islam, not enemies of bad governance.

So, the religious tension has been rife for decades before Boko Haram emerged. But it emerged because the ground was fertile enough to nurture it. On this, I give the last word to Wikipedia: “Despite Mohammad Marwa’s death, Yan Tatsine riots continued into the early 1980s. In October 1982, riots erupted in Bulumkutu, near Maiduguri, and in Kaduna, to which many Yan Tatsine adherents had moved after 1980.

Over 3,000 people died. Some survivors of these altercations moved to Yola, and in early 1984, more violent uprisings occurred in that city. In this round of rioting, Musa Makaniki, a close disciple of Maitatsine, emerged as a leader and Marwa’s successor. Ultimately, more than 1,000 people died in Yola, and roughly half of the city’s 60,000 inhabitants were left homeless. Makaniki fled to his hometown of Gombe, where more Yan Tatsine riots occurred in April 1985. After the deaths of several hundred people, Makaniki retreated to Cameroon, where he remained until 2004, when he was arrested in Nigeria. Some analysts view the terrorist group Boko Haram as an extension of the Maitatsine riots”.

Gen Dambazau did not go this far in his analysis of the Boko Haram problem. Please remember that in 1991, the German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke was accused of attempting to start a crusade in Kano, and a religious riot ensued, killing 12 people. That would not have been the work of miscreants who were simply worried about their poverty and bad
governance. Religion was involved. And religion runs through Nigeria’s present insurgency.