The anatomy of a managed crisis, By Bámidélé Adémólá-Olátéjú

Nigerian soldiers on the frontline

The non-state actors and their sponsors terrorising Nigeria hope that the web of political obligation, the fear of elite fracture, and the inertia of institutional complicity will continue to insulate them from terminal consequence. They are betting, with the calm confidence of men who have been right before, that their industry of insecurity will not to be disturbed. That bet must be made to fail.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Nigeria’s insecurity is organised and managed by sponsors, who have names, addresses, coordinates of power, and telephone numbers that are known to certain people in high places. What Nigeria is experiencing is not a lack of government response as such, although significant gaps exist. Those gaps are real, but they are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is organised predation operating beneath the protective canopy of institutional cover, political patronage, and the calculated silence of those who profit most from the architecture of disorder.

The bandits of Zamfara, Sokoto, Katsina, and Kebbi do not operate from mud caves with bows strung from the tree bark. They move in motorcades, hundreds strong, in tactical formations that presuppose intelligence they should not possess — intelligence about troop movements, deployment schedules, and the precise windows of state inattention. They negotiate ransoms through intermediaries who carry telephones, maintain bank accounts, and exist in the traceable world of human transactions. They are not invisible, they are protected.

The terrorists of the North-East do not conjure their weapons from the harmattan wind. Supply chains exist. Financiers exist. Sympathisers exist. These are men draped in the flowing babanriga of respectability; men who occupy positions in boardrooms and legislative chambers; men who attend state funerals and national prayer breakfasts, while funding the machinery of national despair. True, isolated self-sponsored copy-cat groups exist, but the main perpetrators of terrorism across the land do not hang mid-air or operate in a vacuum. They have sponsors, who have human faces, titles, and a history of operating with impunity.

The Question that Refuses to Be Silenced

And so, we must ask plainly, with the moral urgency of a people whose sons and daughters are being consumed alive. Why has President Bola Ahmed Tinubu not moved against these actors with the full, merciless, constitutionally authorised weight of state power? Why does the machinery of the Nigerian State, with all its battalions and brigades, all its intelligence architecture and surveillance infrastructure, all its constitutional warrants and presidential authority, stop perpetually short of the terminal blow? Why does the predator always seem to know that the hunter will not follow the spoor all the way to the lair? This is not a question that should embarrass a democracy. It is the most urgently patriotic question available. Because if the state cannot protect its citizens with the kind of deterrent ferocity that makes the cost of predation existentially prohibitive, then the social contract will be heavily strained as it is now.

President Tinubu is not a timid man. His career is a monument to the disciplined art of strategic force, the patient accumulation of leverage, the surgical application of power at the moment of maximum effect. He navigated Lagos State through decades of dangerous political waters. He stared down federal intimidation at the height of his own persecution and did not blink. He understands power in its full dimensionality, its application, its consolidation, its theatre, its cost. The question is, therefore, not one of personal courage, but one of will, constraint, and the invisible geometry of the intricate web of elite network.

This is why decisive, terminal action against the infrastructure of insecurity remains ineffective, despite military operations conducted with genuine valour by men and women in uniform. To truly destroy this infrastructure would require going after the sponsors of terrorism, not just those recruited into it. Until this is done, the government will continue to treat the symptoms and not the real disease.

Are They More Powerful Than the State?

The uncomfortable answer is this; in certain operational theatres, and within certain entrenched political economies, these non-state actors currently function as though they are. Not because bandits command greater firepower than the Nigerian Army; they manifestly do not. Not because insurgents possess a superior intelligence apparatus to the SSS, the NIA, and Defence Intelligence combined; they do not. But because power is not merely military. It is profoundly relational. And the relations that sustain these actors do not run only downward into the dust of the savannah. They run upward into the architecture of political finance, electoral arithmetic, ethnic solidarity networks, and the unwritten rules of Nigerian eli…