Rekpene Bassey
The attack came with coordination and intent. Fighters from Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) descended on the headquarters of the 29 Task Force Brigade, overwhelming defences in what military sources would later describe, quietly and off record, as a “sophisticated assault.”
By dawn, Brigadier-General Oseni Braimoh was dead. So were several of his men.
But it is the detail that followed: mundane, almost absurd, that has lingered in the accounts of those familiar with the incident.
According to multiple sources, the general attempted to escape in an armoured vehicle that failed to start. Requests to repair it had reportedly gone unanswered. Emergency fuel was unavailable.
In the language of war, such details are often dismissed as incidental. In reality, they are diagnostic.
Because wars are rarely lost in the moments that make headlines. They are lost in the quiet accumulation of neglect: missed maintenance schedules, diverted funds, broken logistics chains, and institutional indifference.
What happened in Benisheik was not merely a tactical setback. It was a systems failure, briefly illuminated by violence.
Officially, Nigeria’s Defence Headquarters described the attack as repelled. Unofficially, field accounts painted a different picture of a base overrun, of soldiers retreating, of a commander abandoned by the machinery meant to sustain him. The divergence is not unusual. It has become a defining feature of the war.
And it is within that divergence that the deeper question emerges: Why, after nearly two decades, does this war not only persist, but appear increasingly resistant to resolution?
To understand the persistence of Nigeria’s insurgency, one must first understand its geography, not merely in physical terms, but in administrative absence.
The northeastern theatre of operations is vast, porous, and unevenly governed. Forests stretch across state lines. Borders blur into neighboring countries. Entire communities exist in spaces where the state is visible only intermittently, if at all.
In such an environment, military offensives function less as decisive engagements and more as temporary disruptions.
Troops move in, clear areas, establish control, and then, often, move on. What follows is predictable. Insurgents return. Communities adapt. The cycle resets.
Seventeen years into the conflict, more than two million Nigerians have been displaced. Thousands have been killed. Yet the war resists closure because it lacks a defined perimeter. It expands and contracts, but never disappears.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has acknowledged the challenge, calling for the creation of forest guard units to reclaim ungoverned spaces. It is an implicit recognition that the terrain itself has become an ally of the insurgents.
But geography alone does not explain endurance. Many wars have been fought in difficult terrain and concluded. The deeper issue lies in what sustains the conflict beneath the surface.
In recent testimony before lawmakers, Nigeria’s military leadership conceded what soldiers in the field have long understood: resources are insufficient for the scale of the mission.
This insufficiency manifests not only in troop numbers or equipment shortages, but in something more corrosive – unreliability.
Vehicles break down and remain unrepaired. Fuel supplies are inconsistent. Equipment is deployed beyond its service life. Soldiers are asked to improvise where systems should provide certainty.
The consequences are cumulative. In Benisheik, a vehicle failed to start. Elsewhere, patrols are delayed, reinforcements arrive late, and intelligence cannot be acted upon because the means to act are compromised. Over time, these failures erode operational confidence.
War, at its core, is an exercise in organized reliability. When systems fail unpredictably, even well-trained forces become reactive rather than proactive. They defend rather than dominate. They survive rather than control.
And in that shift, from initiative to reaction, the strategic balance tilts.
For years, Nigeria’s counterterrorism strategy was framed around ideology. Boko Haram, and later ISWAP, were understood as extremist movements driven by religious doctrine and insurgent ambition.
That understanding is now incomplete.
What has emerged instead is a hybrid threat: part insurgency, part organized crime, part opportunistic violence. Kidnapping for ransom, illegal mining, cattle rustling, arms trafficking, and protection rackets have fused into a decentralized but resilient network of profit-driven activity.
Recent investigative findings have suggested that this network does not exist entirely outside the state. Allegations, some substantiated, others contested, point to the involvement of individuals within political, financial, and even security institutions.
If true, the implications are profound. A conflict sustained by internal complicity cannot be resolved solely through external force. It becomes self-reinforcing, protected not only by geography and arms, but by silence, denial, and selective enforcement.
This is why tactical victories often fail to accumulate. Fighters can be killed. Camps can be destroyed. But the underlying system: the flow of money, the channels of supply, and the networks of protection remains intact. The war, in effect, regenerates itself.
In modern conflict, information is not merely a tool of communication. It is a domain of warfare. Nigeria’s counterterrorism effort has increasingly been challenged in this domain.
Official statements frequently emphasize success: attacks repelled, insurgents neutralized, territory secured. Yet these accounts are often contested by local witnesses, independent observers, and, critically, by insurgent propaganda.
ISWAP, in particular, has demonstrated a sophisticated media capability. Its releases: videos, communiqués, and battlefield footage are designed not only to inform but to persuade. They offer detailed accounts of operations, often contradicting official narratives.
The result is a growing credibility gap. When communities begin to doubt official statements, the consequences extend beyond perception.
Intelligence gathering suffer. Civilian cooperation diminishes. Trust – arguably the most valuable currency in counterinsurgency, is eroded. This erosion has strategic implications.
Because counterterrorism is not only about eliminating threats. It is about isolating them. And isolation requires legitimacy. Without it, the state finds itself competing not only for territory, but for belief.
Clearing Without Holding
Military doctrine has long recognized a fundamental principle of counterinsurgency: clearing territory is only the beginning. Holding it is the true challenge.
In Nigeria’s northeast, this principle remains inconsistently applied. There have been moments of success. Towns retaken. Communities resettled. Markets reopened. In such moments, the narrative shifts toward recovery, toward normalcy, toward hope.
But these moments are fragile. Without sustained presence and security governance, and services, the conditions that allowed insurgency to take root re-emerge. Insurgents exploit the vacuum. Attacks resume. Civilians are once again caught between flight and survival.
Programs designed to address the non-military dimensions of the conflict exist, but they seem to be unevenly implemented.
Deradicalization initiatives, community engagement efforts, and rehabilitation programs often depend on external funding or lack integration into a coherent national strategy.
The result is fragmentation.
Military operations proceed on one track. Political and social interventions on another. Coordination is routine rather than systemic.
And in that fragmentation, opportunities are lost.
Perhaps the most unsettling dimension of the war is its economic logic. Conflict, in the affected regions, has become a source of revenue.
Kidnapping yields ransom. Control of territory enables illegal resource extraction. Arms circulate through established networks. Even displacement creates opportunities for aid diversion, for land appropriation, and for political leverage.
In such an environment, violence is not merely a means to an end. It is an end in itself.
This creates a perverse incentive structure. Armed groups are motivated not only by ideology or grievance, but by profit. And as long as that profit remains substantial, the conflict retains its momentum.
The state’s response has often been reactive. Attacks are followed by deployments. Kidnappings by negotiations. Each response, while necessary in the moment, risks reinforcing the underlying logic; that violence compels engagement.
To reverse this, the economic foundations of the conflict must be disrupted. Financial networks must be traced and dismantled. Enablers must be prosecuted. Revenue streams must be cut.
Without such measures, the war functions less as a campaign against terrorism and more as a system that inadvertently sustains it.
Beyond the battlefield, there is a growing recognition among security analysts, that Nigeria’s counterterrorism strategy, while operationally active, remains conceptually constrained.
It treats terrorism primarily as a military problem. And military problems, by definition, invite military solutions.
But the conflict that now exists defies that simplicity. It is at once a security challenge, an economic system, a governance failure, and a crisis of legitimacy. Addressing one dimension while neglecting others ensures persistence.
This is not to diminish the role of the military. On the contrary, it remains indispensable. But it cannot, on its own, deliver expected resolution.
What is required is integration: intelligence must inform operations. Governance must follow security. Communication must reinforce credibility. Policy must align incentives.
In essence, the war must be fought not only on the battlefield, but within the systems that sustain it.
The death of Brigadier-General Braimoh, like many before it, will be recorded in military archives as a casualty of conflict. But it is also something more. It is an audit.
An examination, under the harshest conditions, of whether the systems designed to support the state are functioning as intended. In Benisheik, the answer, at least in that moment, was no.
An armoured vehicle that fails to start is a technical issue. But in war, technical issues are rarely isolated. They are symptoms of procurement failures, of maintenance lapses, and of accountability gaps.
When such symptoms accumulate, they become systemic. And when systems fail, outcomes follow.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion. So why does this war refuse to end?
Not because it cannot be won in principle. But because, in practice, it is being fought in ways that allow it to continue.
It is fought with insufficient material reliability. Against an enemy that has evolved beyond its original definition. Within a narrative space where credibility is contested. Across a landscape where gains are not consistently held. And within an economic framework that rewards, rather than deters, violence.
These are not insurmountable challenges. But they are structural ones.
And structural problems do not yield to tactical solutions. They require political will, institutional reform, and sustained coherence; qualities that are difficult to mobilize, and harder to maintain.
President Tinubu has expressed confidence that Nigeria will overcome terrorism. It is a necessary statement, and perhaps a sincere one. But confidence is not a strategy.
Victory, in conflicts such as this, is not declared. It is constructed. Piece by piece, system by system, decision by decision.
Until those pieces align, the war will refuse to end, not because it is unwinnable but, because it is seemingly being fought in a way that does not allow it to be won. And Benisheik will not be an exception. It will be a warning.
Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics and a Security Specialist.
