President Tinubu Government’s proactiveness towards Nigeria’s Security Continues

By Dada Olusegun

Insecurity has been a major challenge in Nigeria in the past two decades and has always manifested in many faces. At the dawn of our fourth Republic, Nigeria grappled with brazen highway and bank robberies, kidnapping for ransom mostly in the South, cult violence, and sectarian conflicts in many parts of the country leading to wanton destruction of lives and properties including the sacking of entire communities. Places like Plateau, Taraba, Benue etc became hotbeds of deadly communal conflicts.

The insecurity monster however continued to evolve into new faces and suddenly we found ourselves fighting a brutal insurgency in the Sahel region of the country, wholesale kidnapping for ransom also became a lucrative business for bandits across large swathes of savanna plains and forests in the North West. These added to the activities of crude oil thieves in the Niger Delta and IPOB militia in the Eastern enclave meant that the nation has on its hands, a full plate of complex insecurity issues to deal with on multiple fronts.

President Bola Tinubu on May 29, 2023, inherited a country still reeling from the fangs of insecurity in many of its ugly forms despite the outstanding efforts of President Muhammadu Buhari, who apart from overseeing the biggest equipping of our military with modern assets also dealt a devastating blow on the terrorists in the northeast, degrading their capability to mount any significant attack. For example, it appeared as if banditry was the new gold in the North West with increased reports of daring kidnapping of travellers and poor civilians from their communities.

President Bola Tinubu, though a lifelong civilian with no prior stint in the military or paramilitary, identified security as a key priority for any meaningful economic development to be achieved. He immediately put on his Commander-in-chief garb and got down to the task of curbing insecurity wherever its ugly head is raised to the barest minimum. The President appointed two Defence Ministers from the North West region where banditry seemed to be rising exponentially. He also broke from tradition and appointed an accomplished policeman and anti-corruption czar to serve as his National Security Adviser.

With competent individuals appointed as heads of the different arms of Nigeria’s military and other security agencies, the president set the tone for an effective onslaught against the increasing spate of insecurity across the country. One year down the line, the Tinubu administration’s proactive steps to tackle insecurity are yielding very visible results across many theatres of operation. In fact, following a shake-up in strategies and intelligence gathering, the heat is now bearing down pretty hard on kidnappers, terrorists, bandits and other criminal elements terrorising innocent Nigerians.

In just three months spanning April to June 2024, the Nigerian military neutralized 2,245 terrorists in operations against Boko Haram/ISWAP and other criminal gangs. During these operations, 1,993 individuals who were kidnapped for ransom were rescued while 2,783 weapons and a significant amount of ammunition belonging to the terrorists were seized by the security forces. In the same June 2024, the Nigerian Police also revealed that officers and men of the force arrested no fewer than 35,496 suspects, for their participation in various crimes, rescued 1,907 kidnapped victims, recovered 2,750 firearms, 22,569 ammunition, and 1,540 vehicles nationwide, in one year.

The military is taking the offensive to the enclave of these criminals as shown by the back-to-back successful decimation of wanted notorious bandits (some of whom were previously boasting on TikTok as being invincible) which the military has been recording recently. These evil and unhinged criminals are now living in fear knowing that in a split second, the fire and fury of Nigeria’s Airforce assets can descend from the sky and consume them. These feats are thanks to improved intelligence gathering.

Something happened in a Borno LGA recently that perhaps captures the present vigour with which the Nigerian military goes about defending the nation and its citizens from the hands of soulless terrorists. Boko Haram terrorists who feel they have managed to resupply and regroup sufficiently from their fleeing positions inside Chad started threatening activities against inhabitants of the Kukawa Local Government Area and even issued them a vacation order. This led to a mass exodus of residents of Kukawa who once again fled the town and adjoining villages in fear. Kukawa LGA is on the northmost point of Borno State and shares a border with the Chad Republic.

The military command immediately swung into action. The Joint Task Force (JTF) North East Operation HADIN KAI began mobilising assets and troops to conduct a stabilisation operation in the general area of this critical border LGA. As part of the operation, the military conducted sustained intensive patrols and clearance offensives neutralising many of the terrorists, root scanning of the area as a preventive measure to counter any IEDs the terrorists may have laid and detonation of many IEDs they discovered. The military erected entry and exit gates in the Kukawa town itself and mounted long-range military-grade surveillance cameras and watchtowers to easily detect any advancing hostiles and give the troops advanced warnings.

Thanks to the troops of Operation HADIN KAI, the stabilisation of Kukawa was greatly achieved and thousands of people who earlier fled their homes returned to a more secure homeland and didn’t end there, the military erected boreholes to provide clean drinking water to the residents, undertook a free medical outreach and is working with the Borno State government to build societal resilience into the general population as they return to total normalcy.

This Kukawa episode is just an example of the enormous amount of planning and resources that go into ensuring Nigerians are safe across many areas. President Bola Tinubu’s government has not spared resources in ensuring the military and the other security agencies are equipped and provided with the capability to dominate criminals. The recent successful onslaught against notorious bandits by troops of Operation Hadarin Daji in the North West is giving residents in the affected areas (which are mostly rural communities) hope that the era of living in constant fear and at the mercy of the kidnapping gangs is coming to an end. From Zamfara to Sokoto, to Kaduna, Katsina and beyond, the bandits are feeling the wave of the relentless march of troops of Operation Hadarin Daji with air support.

Ensuring sustained security of lives and properties is a fluid affair, especially in a country like Nigeria. The security dynamics are constantly shifting and that is because of the unrelenting efforts of our military forces to deny criminals the absolute freedom to commit crimes and go scot-free. The President gets security briefings daily and sometimes summons the service chiefs to appraise strategies and see where to tweak things, this is simply because of the need to stay ahead of the criminal non-state actors who have taken to a life of criminality and depriving their fellow citizens of peace. The President as of today is pleased by the general success our security agencies have recorded in maintaining relative law and order across the country.

In various niches, relevant security agencies are tackling criminal activities be it kidnapping, crude oil theft, illegal mining, maritime crimes, vandalism or even petty crimes. The ultimate goal of President Bola Tinubu’s administration is to get to a point where it becomes unattractive for criminals to engage in violent crimes because of the certain capabilities of the security agencies to smoke them out and bring them to justice dead or alive. The President wants to ensure that criminals are denied the space to operate and enjoy the proceeds of their nefarious activities. This informed the recent efforts to review our security architecture especially as it relates to intelligence gathering and utilisation.

Today we have seen incidences of crude oil theft on a swift decline as well as vandalism of oil facilities thanks to renewed efforts of the military to tackle this menace with the setting up of a Joint Monitoring Team by the Chief of Defence Staff comprising 12 security forces. There has also been a noticeable reduction in the spate of crimes by IPOB-affiliated militias in the Southeast in recent times thanks to the continued presence and sustained clearance operations by the joint security forces under Operation UDO KA.

In the North Central, which is an important agricultural belt, reports of insecurity have also declined considerably, allowing more farmers to cultivate their lands without fear of bandit attacks. This is thanks to a sustained military operation in the zone to protect farmers and local communities. Also, incidents of farmers-herders clashes have been very subdued in the North Central axis. The South West region also has been relatively peaceful with the police largely taking charge of maintaining law and order. Isolated kidnapping incidents that occurred recently in the region have been relatively dealt with by the police and local vigilantes. Even the last nationwide protest that threatened to degenerate into another thing was professionally managed by the police and other security forces and Nigeria returned to normalcy shortly after.

All the above reports point to the fact that the proactiveness of the Tinubu administration in the area of security bears highly visible fruits. As a man who is always razor-focused on achieving his priorities, President Bola Tinubu will not relent until Nigerians feel that sense of security not just in our urban environment but in the remotest parts of our dear country. It is only then that the promises of greatness that come with the other economic steps being taken by the President under the Renewed Hope agenda would be felt by all and sundry. In President Bola Tinubu’s diary, no village no matter how remote or scarcely populated deserves to be left behind. He sees every Nigerian no matter where they reside as deserving a safe and secure homeland from where they can partake in the shared prosperity that we envisage in the medium and long term.