A Nation at War Within: Why Nigeria’s escalating security crisis demands absolute seriousness, by Abubakar M. Kareto
The tragic death of retired Major General Rabe Abubakar, the former Director of Defence Information, inside the camp of bandits in Katsina State is a heavy blow. It completely shatters all the smooth talk and polished PR coming from official government quarters about how security is improving. This is a retired general who once spoke for the entire Nigerian Armed Forces, yet criminals tracked him, blocked his vehicle along the Marabar Musawa–Kafinsoli Road, shot his driver, and dragged him and his wife into the bush. If a whole General can be captured and die of medical complications in captivity because he could not access his health management, what is the hope of the ordinary citizen? This is no longer just a “security challenge” that we can gloss over; it is a full-blown national calamity. Nigeria is bleeding from the inside out, and the government is losing its monopoly on violence.
Look at the painful gap between what the leaders are saying and what the citizens are facing daily. While top officials are busy celebrating democratic milestones, rolling out beautiful percentages, and bragging about a historic N5.41 trillion defense budget, the reality on the ground tells an entirely different story. The truth is that we are confusing massive nominal spending on paper with actual fighting power on the ground.
While the government releases statements saying everything is under control, the criminal economy is expanding rapidly. The ransom business has become a multi-trillion Naira enterprise, and our rural communities have been left completely vulnerable.
This total systemic failure is starkly evident in the terrifying return of Chibok-style mass school abductions, which are now aggressively spreading into entirely new territories. In Oyo State, a region historically considered safe from such structural terror, heavily armed gunmen stormed the Yawota Baptist Nursery and Primary School, alongside two other nearby institutions in Oriire Local Government Area. The attackers forcefully rounded up 39 pupils and 7 teachers, carting them off into the dense forest of the Old Oyo National Park. To demonstrate their complete lack of fear, these elements executed a mathematics teacher, Joel Adegboye Adesiyan, who bravely tried to shield his students, and later decapitated another teacher, 57-year-old Michael Oyedokun, while demanding a wild N1 billion ransom and future legislative concessions.
Simultaneously, the North-East remains a highly precarious and unstable frontline despite continuous military declarations of theater victories. In Borno State, Boko Haram and ISWAP insurgents launched a coordinated daytime assault on the Mussa Primary and Junior Secondary School in Askira/Uba Local Government Area. The terrorists successfully marched at least 42 defenseless schoolchildren straight into the fringes of the notorious Sambisa Forest axis, leaving parents and community stakeholders in deep anguish and leading to massive nationwide protests by the National Union of Teachers (NUT). These hard facts and concurrent data points shatter any claim of containment; instead, they prove that the geographical frontiers of terror are deepening and expanding simultaneously across the country.
What makes the entire situation even more heartbreaking is that even the approved defense budgets are not properly implemented. Bureaucratic delays and a severe lack of actual cash backing mean that what is signed on paper rarely reaches the frontlines when needed, creating a massive cash crisis in our defense funding. Meanwhile, as our troops face resource constraints and citizens are slaughtered, government officials are openly living large on public funds, purchasing luxury cars, and funding extravagant lifestyles. This elite indulgence is happening directly at the expense of human lives, exposing a deep lack of empathy within our political class.
This deep breakdown of security is driving an unprecedented agricultural and humanitarian calamity that raw budget figures cannot fix. Current field metrics from the Dawanau grain market—the largest trading center in West Africa confirm a massive drop in food supply because farming communities are fleeing. Just days ago, bandits in Zamfara State abducted 39 community elders from Magamin Diddi who had desperately gone into the bush to negotiate a “peace deal” just to get permission to farm, with the terrorists demanding an additional N125 million fee. With non-state actors enforcing multi-million Naira “harvest levies” across Katsina, Sokoto, and Zamfara, global data from FEWS NET and the IPC projects that close to 35 million Nigerians will plunge into critical food insecurity during the lean season. We are looking at a dangerous transition where criminal cartels are expanding their parallel tax networks, pushing Africa’s most populous nation to the brink of artificial famine while the state remains reactive.
True democracy is not just about holding elections every four years; it must give people the basic right to live and move without fear. The right to vote is completely useless if you cannot sleep with your two eyes closed. The federal government must stop using calculated media campaigns to manage impressions and hide the true state of things. Nigeria cannot heal, and our economy cannot stabilise, until leadership faces the raw truth of what is happening on the ground and heavily crushes the criminal networks holding our national sovereignty hostage.
Abubakar M. Kareto is a Public Affairs Analyst and Strategic Communications Expert. He can be reached via amkareto@gmail.com.
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