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The News The mass abduction of hundreds of people from mosques in northern Nigeria this month was at once shocking and yet unsurprising: The targeting of civilians by insurgents and bandits has surged compared to last year, and the three months through June were the most violent in at least three decades. The latest attack comes on the heels of a retired army general’s shocking death in captivity after being kidnapped on his way to a wedding, and the kidnap of more than a hundred other travelers in two separate events in the northwest. President Bola Tinubu, who began a three-week vacation in Europe on Sunday, ordered an army and police rescue operation of the 600 people kidnapped in Niger state, but the episode comes at a crucial moment: He is in the midst of campaigning for reelection and while his team has trumpeted economic progress, it has been quieter about Nigeria’s security situation. Tinubu anchored his 2023 manifesto on grand national security promises of “a proactive and intelligence driven security approach,” but he has mainly focused on fixing Nigeria’s ailing economy in his first term. His team put out a scorecard this month of his three-year performance that focused on economic results. “Certainly in the first couple of years of this administration, insecurity did not seem to be the priority,” said James Barnett, a non-resident fellow at the Hudson Institute who has lived and researched conflict in Nigeria. “That doesn’t mean there weren’t security policies being implemented, but it was not really getting the top level engagement.” Leading opposition candidates Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, also Tinubu’s main rivals in 2023, have pledged to hire more people and “decentralize security management” to tackle insecurity, if elected. For his part, Tinubu has backed a law that will allow Nigerian states to set up their own police departments, and tasked a security committee with drafting a five-year “strategic defence operations plan.” Alexander’s view The worry over being abducted is more firmly ingrained in the Nigerian psyche compared to three years ago. The increasing chances of being taken, whether one is in a church, mosque, school, on a trip to the capital Abuja or resting at home, is a grim reality that should not be the case given Tinubu’s firm campaign pledges. Since his first day in office, Tinubu has made sweeping economic changes — from a fuel subsidy removal and naira devaluations, to overhauling tax laws and reigniting oil and gas investment — but has not shown the same urgency on security issues that should be his primary duty. It means that Nigeria’s continuing failure to stamp out abduction and terrorism is Tinubu’s failure. “Despite sustained military pressure, there’s no evidence that Nigeria’s insecurity is abating in substantial terms,” Taiwo Hassan Adebayo, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told me. “Nigerian security planners need to ask and respond to the questions about how the armed groups source their weapons, get fuel they use to power their bikes, and access Starlink for connectivity in their remote locations where telco service is off,” Adebayo said. For Tinubu and his chief adversaries Atiku and Obi, then, Nigeria’s security predicament will require more than election season sloganeering. The candidates are yet to captivate voters with a robust action plan that seriously takes into account the ideological, economic, and governance gaps that enable bad actors to thrive. And so in facing the same electoral choices as last time, Nigerians are limited to the same set of ideas ill-suited against worsening problems. Know More Ladd Serwat, senior Africa analyst at ACLED whose data shows a 30% rise in the targeting of civilians by insurgents and bandit groups in Nigeria, said this year’s second quarter was the country’s most violent since the Wisconsin-based firm began collecting data in 1997. “The spread and intensification of armed banditry across northern and central Nigeria” drove the escalation, Serwat told Semafor. Banditry is increasingly lucrative: Between July 2025 and this year, ransom payments for abductions in Nigeria tripled to $5.8 million, according to the SBM, a Lagos-based consultancy. The rise was on the back of a 66% year-on-year increase in the number of kidnap victims, the firm said. Analysts say terror groups like rival factions of Boko Haram and al-Qaida affiliates such as the JNIM sect are surging in number and increasingly competing with one another in Nigeria, to a degree that makes it sometimes difficult to distinguish between them and correctly attribute actions. The insecurity landscape is also more chaotic because some groups, after initially being invited to help defend against insurgents, turned into terrorists, said Dengiyefa Angalapu, an analyst at the Center for Democracy and Development in Abuja. One such group is Lakurawa. It entered Nigeria from the Sahel following a recourse to self-help by some communities in the northwest, but Nigeria declared it a terrorist group last year for its al-Qaida ties. This identity flux adds to the difficulty of Nigeria’s fight against guerrilla warfare, Angalapu said. “They sometimes mix very well with their communities. Sometimes they are bandits by night, and community members by day.” Other conflicts such as between farmers and herders, separatist movements in the southeast, and oil theft in the Niger Delta make up Nigeria’s “increasingly layered and geographically dispersed,” security troubles that raise the cost of doing business, Jervin Naidoo, political analyst at Oxford Economics Africa, said. Step Back After the threat of a coup late last year, Tinubu reshuffled the Nigerian military’s top brass. The new leadership then participated in a joint operation with the US in December, striking terrorist enclaves. This year, Tinubu has raised army officers’ pay and created more army units, while Nuhu Ribadu, his national security advisor, has met with US officials on three occasions since November to update Washington on Nigeria’s efforts to prosecute terrorists and counter terrorist financing. Yet, “a lot of the Nigerian government’s reaction has had to do with managing diplomatic relations,” Barnett, of the Hudson Institute, said. Raising military pay and expanding firepower were positive measures, but whether Tinubu maintains the political energy needed to fully implement structural changes beyond this election season remains to be seen, Barnett said. Room for Disagreement Ebenezer Obadare, the Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow on African Studies, tallies about a half dozen military operations by the Tinubu administration that have rescued hostages, and declares that “the Nigerian President has every reason to be delighted.” The killing of at least four high-profile terror group leaders and more than 1,000 terrorists with the US government’s assistance suggests that the tide of a prolonged fight against jihadist insurgency “has turned in favor of the Nigerian authorities,” he wrote. But Obadare added that Nigeria’s security situation “remains critical,” and that continued cooperation with the US remains necessary “for the foreseeable future.” The View From Washington DC The US Department of Defense plans to withdraw 200 troops who were deployed to Nigeria in February as part of the Trump administration’s counter-terrorism assistance. The mission generated “significant security returns,” the Pentagon said. President Donald Trump’s aides and Republican political allies have often framed security engagements with Nigeria firstly as a defense of Christians that are supposedly being particularly targeted by jihadists. It continues to be the leading priority of a joint working group that said Abuja has taken steps to prosecute hundreds of terror suspects, and improve law enforcement capacity. Nigeria has spent at least $9 million on lobbying in the US to counter sentiments questioning Tinubu’s security commitment. But that has not stopped Trump allies, like Sen. Ted Cruz, chair of the US Senate’s Africa subcommittee, from threatening sanctions and an aid freeze in response to what they still deem to be “mass violence against Christians and religious minorities.” Notable - Limited court and prison capacity to “sanction atrocities and curb lawlessness” compounds the governance failures that fuel Nigeria’s security crisis, a senior International Crisis Group adviser wrote in Foreign Affairs.
document fetched 2026-09-01 02:50 · canonical https://semafor.com/article/08/28/2026/nigerias-worsening-insecurity-tests-presidents-second-term-bid