Rekpene Bassey
Nigeria has never suffered from a shortage of security agencies. What it has too often lacked is a single, continuously updated understanding of the national threat environment, translated into common operational priorities.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s directive for a comprehensive National Threat Assessment and a rolling five-year Strategic Defence Operations Plan is therefore an attempt to address one of the country’s most persistent security weaknesses.
The directive requires two interconnected strategic instruments within 90 days. The first is to identify Nigeria’s principal threats, assess their urgency and establish operational objectives.
The second is to translate that intelligence assessment into a five-year framework covering theatre requirements, force capabilities, capability gaps, equipment, logistics and implementation timelines.
Major General Adeyinka A. Famadewa (Rtd), Special Adviser to the President on Homeland Security, has been assigned to coordinate the exercise.
The participants include the National Security Adviser, Defence Minister, Minister of State for Defence, Chief of Defence Staff, the service chiefs, and the Directors-General of the DSS and NIA.
The reported discrepancy over the committee’s exact membership should, however, be resolved promptly. In an exercise whose purpose is strategic precision, command clarity should begin with clarity about the structure itself.
The directive should not be interpreted as an attempt to merge Nigeria’s security institutions into a single super-agency or unified command.
Its more realistic objective is to establish a common threat picture, interoperable planning assumptions and coordinated strategic priorities while preserving the constitutional and statutory responsibilities of individual agencies.
This distinction is crucial. Intelligence agencies collect and analyse information; the armed forces generate combat power; the police enforce the law; financial-intelligence institutions track illicit financial flows; and other agencies perform specialised statutory functions.
Effective national security does not require these institutions to become identical. It requires them to operate from compatible intelligence, clearly assigned responsibilities and shared strategic objectives.
For years, institutional stove-piping has weakened Nigeria’s security architecture. Agencies have sometimes collected fragments of the same intelligence, protected information within bureaucratic silos, pursued separate priorities and arrived at different assessments of the same threat.
The consequence is duplication in some areas and dangerous intelligence gaps in others.
That fragmentation is increasingly unaffordable.
Nigeria faces jihadist insurgency in the North-East, bandit-terrorist networks and mass kidnapping in the North-West, communal and farmer-herder violence in the North-Central region, separatist militancy in the South-East, piracy and hydrocarbon-related crime in the maritime domain, organised crime nationwide, cyber threats, illicit arms proliferation, terrorist financing and vulnerabilities around critical infrastructure.
The scale of the challenge is sobering. The 2026 Global Terrorism Index ranked Nigeria fourth among the countries most affected by terrorism, recording 171 terrorist incidents in 2025, compared with 120 in 2024. Nextier’s 2025 conflict assessment recorded at least 4,654 fatalities and 3,141 kidnappings across 1,274 violent-conflict incidents, with banditry accounting for 2,724 deaths.
These figures are more than crime statistics. They represent a sustained contest over territory, freedom of movement, rural economies and the state’s monopoly over legitimate coercive force.
Recent violence figures similarly demonstrate the tempo of the challenge and the need for intelligence capable of generating strategic warning before hostile networks move from intent to capability and action.
Nigeria’s thcreat assessment must also extend beyond its borders. Instability across the Sahel has created strategic depth for jihadist organisations, illicit arms networks, smugglers and criminal facilitators.
The designation of the Lakurawa as a terrorist organisation, citing its cross-border activities in parts of Sokoto and Kebbi, demonstrates why the North-West can no longer be analysed simply as a domestic banditry problem.
A serious National Threat Assessment must therefore do more than catalogue threats. It should rank them according to intent, capability, probability, vulnerability, strategic impact and time horizon.
A document that labels every threat “critical” would be analytically useless. Scarce national resources must be directed first toward threats with the greatest potential consequences.
The assessment should produce a national threat matrix identifying immediate, emerging and latent risks; geographic centres of gravity; adversary capabilities; indicators and warnings; critical vulnerabilities; likely courses of action; and the consequences of intervention or inaction. It should also establish Priority Intelligence Requirements so that intelligence collection is driven by presidential and operational decision needs rather than by whatever information happens to be easiest to obtain.
Famadewa’s coordinating role is particularly significant because of his previous experience at the Office of the National Security Adviser and his association with the Intelligence Fusion Centre, established to facilitate cooperation among intelligence and security institutions.
His assignment reflects an important principle: separately held information becomes strategically valuable only when it is fused, analysed and converted into coordinated action.
However, Nigeria already possesses several strategic security documents, including the National Security Strategy 2019, the National Counter Terrorism Strategy, the Policy Framework and National Action Plan for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, and the NCTC Strategic Plan 2025–2030.
The challenge has therefore never been simply the absence of strategy. It has been the translation of strategy into tasking, collection, targeting, budgeting, force generation, execution and measurable operational outcomes.
The National Threat Assessment should also remain broader than a purely military defence assessment. National security encompasses terrorism, organised crime, political stability, food and energy security, maritime security, cyber resilience, border integrity, economic sabotage, critical infrastructure and other strategic vulnerabilities.
The five-year Defence Operations Plan should then define how military capabilities contribute to managing those threats.
This makes the absence of the Inspector-General of Police from the publicly named participants worthy of consideration. Kidnapping, organised crime, communal violence and much of Nigeria’s internal-security burden ultimately require policing, investigation and prosecution.
The same principle applies to immigration, customs, civil defence, financial intelligence, cybersecurity and other specialised institutions. The committee should make extensive use of its authority to co-opt relevant agencies.
The next requirement is a genuinely common operational picture. Human intelligence, signals intelligence, geospatial intelligence, financial intelligence, open-source intelligence and law-enforcement reporting must be fused rapidly enough to support decisions. Intelligence that arrives after an operation has failed may be accurate, but it is operationally useless.
Jointness must also extend beyond intelligence sharing. Overlapping theatres require clear command relationships, secure communications, interoperability, deconfliction procedures and agreed mechanisms for converting intelligence into operations. Without these, inter-agency cooperation risks remaining a conference-room aspiration rather than an operational capability.
The proposed five-year plan provides an opportunity to introduce genuine capability-based defence planning. Nigeria should not begin with procurement wish lists.
The sequence should be threat, mission, capability, force structure and only then acquisition. Procurement should address verified gaps in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, secure communications, mobility, counter-IED capability, night operations, unmanned systems, border surveillance, cyber defence, medical evacuation and precision engagement.
Sustainment must receive equal attention. Equipment without spare parts, trained personnel, ammunition, maintenance cycles, secure data links and resilient logistics eventually becomes an expensive inventory of unavailable capability.
A credible five-year plan must therefore calculate whole-life costs rather than concentrating only on acquisition.
The scale of expenditure makes this imperative. Nigeria’s 2026 budget proposal allocated ₦5.41 trillion to defence and security, while SIPRI estimated military expenditure at about $2.1 billion in 2025. Although the figures are calculated differently, they underline a fundamental question: not simply how much Nigeria spends on security, but what operational effect each naira produces.
Military power, however, cannot defeat every threat. Counterterrorism requires financial disruption, border intelligence, prosecution and prevention of violent extremism. Banditry requires policing, arms interdiction, community intelligence and disruption of ransom economies.
Farmer-herder conflicts require early warning, justice and local conflict-management mechanisms. The security plan must therefore integrate kinetic and non-kinetic lines of effort.
Human security must remain central to this framework. When communities fear security forces as much as violent actors, human-intelligence networks deteriorate.
Professional conduct, civilian protection, accountability and respect for the rule of law are therefore not obstacles to effective intelligence operations; they are force multipliers.
The 90-day deadline is ambitious but achievable if the committee builds on existing intelligence, strategies and institutional databases. It should produce a high-level strategic estimate and operational framework, not attempt to recreate every dataset, doctrine and procurement schedule from scratch.
The deadline should compel focus rather than superficiality.
The assessment should also undergo red-team analysis and alternative-futures testing. Planners must consider scenarios such as cooperation between terrorist and criminal networks, further militant movement from the Sahel, simultaneous crises in multiple theatres, or cyber and maritime attacks against critical infrastructure. Strategy becomes stronger when assumptions are tested against developments policymakers would rather not contemplate.
Most importantly, the five-year framework must genuinely be “rolling.” Threat assessments decay as adversaries adapt, technologies evolve and operational conditions change.
The plan should therefore be reviewed annually and supported by quarterly strategic-warning assessments, with measurable indicators such as attacks disrupted, territory denied to hostile actors, kidnappings reduced, response times improved, weapons interdicted, networks dismantled and civilian confidence strengthened.
The greatest danger is that bureaucratic self-interest will outlive presidential urgency. Agencies may protect sources, defend budgets, resist common standards or interpret jointness as a threat to institutional autonomy.
Overcoming this requires sustained presidential authority, an empowered coordinating mechanism and consequences for deliberate obstruction of intelligence sharing or agreed operational priorities.
Tinubu’s directive could therefore become more significant than another security reshuffle. Properly executed, it could move Nigeria from a system in which institutions too often fight parallel wars to one in which they share a common threat picture, allocate capabilities according to agreed priorities and convert intelligence into coordinated action.
The success of the 90-day exercise will not ultimately be measured by the sophistication of the document submitted to the President.
It will be measured by something harder to manufacture: how quickly warning becomes decision, decision becomes action, and action makes Nigerians safer.
Bassey is the President, African Council on Narcotics and Security Specialist
