Nigeria’s next president will be inheriting mounting security challenges when President Muhammadu Buhari leaves office in about a year from now.
Seven years ago when Buhari came to power, Nigeria’s prominent security concern was the Boko Haram terrorism, which was mostly limited to the North-East and Borno State in particular.
Today, Nigerians have seen the emergence of “bandits”, “unknown gunmen”, and pockets of equally deadly violent actors in between, worsening the country’s security problem. A retired army general, Buhari, as president was expected to bring some of his experience to bear in solving the country’s security challenges, but these, as data and increasing cases show, have worsened over time.
“A new President, regardless where he is from, is already so very avoidably unfortunate, and owes it all to his predecessor,” says Aliyu Umar, a retired Army captain and now a security consultant. “I really do not see PMB’s successor having fond memories of him, given the load of trials he is certainly going to have to contend with, post May 29, 2023.”
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The latest salvo in the worsening attacks by terrorists and other criminal actors is the Sunday attack on worshippers at the St Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State, where over 35 people were reportedly killed, following explosives and gunshots fired into the congregation. The motive or identity of the attackers has yet to be disclosed by the authorities, but it follows growing apprehension by the public on safety everywhere in the country.
On March 28, terrorists attacked a Kaduna-bound train, which departed from Abuja, the country’s capital, killing eight passengers, injuring 41 and kidnapping others, whose exact number has yet been ascertained months later.
While some have been released after reportedly paying ransoms, others remain in captivity with videos released at different times showing captives begging the government to secure their freedom. The attack came a few days after unidentified gunmen invaded the Kaduna airport, killing an official on the runway before they were reportedly repelled by soldiers and the airport was shut down.
“According to available data, the next president will have more security crises to deal with,” Confidence MacHarry, security analyst at SBM Intelligence, said. “In 2015, the government’s major preoccupation was the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East. Currently, almost all geopolitical zones are experiencing middle- to high-level scale of attacks. For nearly 10 years, the security allocation has taken the largest share of the budget. This is a trend that will most likely continue well after Buhari, which will lead to a starvation of funds for other critical sectors, especially education.”
According to data by SBM Intelligence, there have been 4,855 attacks between January 2020 and March 31, 2022. In the first quarter of 2022, 1,884 deaths were reported from violent incidents, including Boko Haram, militia herdsmen, abductions, gang clashes, and terrorists.
As BusinessDay previously reported, while the Buhari administration inherited some insecurity problems, especially Boko-Haram in the Northeast, the terrorist group’s activities are reported to have significantly reduced, by some accounts, with up to 90 percent reduction in deaths, especially in Borno State.
However, the group’s activities have spread to other parts of Nigeria. Rather than being eliminated as government says with its description of ‘technical defeat’, the terrorists have simply moved to other parts of the country, making violence more widespread instead of concentrated in one region.
In the South-East, violence has reached an all-time-high as ‘unknown gunmen’ linked with the Indigenous People of Biafra separatist movement continue to unleash terror, a trend that was non-existent before Buhari came to power. The same is true of the so-called bandits that now routinely terrorise parts of the North-West and North-Central.
BusinessDay had also reported that at least 54,948 people have been killed in Nigeria due to violent acts, within seven years from May 2015 to May 2022 under the Buhari presidency.
“Has PMB left us better than he met us? Let time and posterity answer this sincerely asked question,” says Umar.
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