Tinubu’s emergency needs emergency overhaul

Sonala Olumhense

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Last Sunday, I explored the subject of an effective response to the burgeoning insecurity in Nigeria.

Soon afterwards, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared a state of emergency.  I commend him for waking up, but his response is a weak one, lacking rigour and a unified strategy for the different theatres and species of conflict that Nigeria faces. His approach is also primarily quantitative, such as adding police officers, when the problem is qualitative. It further fails the usual Nigerian test of accountability, intelligence, logistics, and police or military reform.

“Those who want to test our resolve should never mistake our restraint for weakness,” he said. “This administration has the courage and determination to keep the country safe and ensure our citizens live in peace.”

For an administration that has been in place for two and a half years, that is a bizarre claim. Restraint? “Those” people test and challenge the Tinubu administration for fun!

And “beefing up security” sounds laudable until you consider that it ignores our core failures: endemic military corruption, collusion between political elites and criminals (especially in illegal mining), lack of intelligence-driven operations, porous borders, millions of illegal weapons in circulation, and poor leadership.

Tinubu’s declaration also ignores political-economy drivers: banditry has become a structured, profit-seeking industry generating billions of naira in ransoms. Criminal groups control forests and mineral-rich areas with elite complicity. Several major military campaigns have failed because, just like Tinubu’s emergency, they treated symptoms, not causes.

As I wrote last Sunday, we cannot succeed unless we develop a realistic plan anchored in fully understanding the history of our insecurity. We must address our intelligence failures, systematic impunity, purge corruption, and tackle the political-criminal nexus. More troops may sound good on television or in those sectors of the government where manipulators are salivating over giant new military contracts, but it will not fix state-capacity failures.

To meet this moment, we must begin by acknowledging the following:

And so, because Nigeria’s insecurity is far more complicated than Tinubu’s emergency suggests, a comprehensive international review is inescapable.

Then, we need a multi-dimensional strategy with three phases, complete with distinct reporting timelines: immediate, medium, and long-term.

In the immediate—Phase I (the first 90 days), and with the collaboration of relevant international partners, the government should:

Phase III (1–3 years):

Nigeria’s problem, then, is whether Tinubu can institute such a rigorous, selfless programme to arrest two decades of insecurity.  Because the best that may be said of his emergency declaration is not that it demonstrates true vision or grasp or grit, but that it is a political signal with some tactical steps.

Think about this: Only one week after he announced his emergency declaration, Tinubu was reported to be distributing luxury vehicles for the 2027 election.

The irony is that accepting the challenge of insecurity, and demystifying and ending it, would be the only electoral campaign he truly needs. It would finally affirm that he is the man he boasted he was when he lampooned President Goodluck Jonathan.

But maybe he is more interested in lording it over a fractured country than living in a safe one.

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