Nigeria’s non-state actors and their sponsors are betting that political obligation, elite fear, and institutional complicity will shield them from consequences. They believe their industry of insecurity will remain undisturbed. That bet must fail.
The country’s insecurity is no accident. It is organized and managed by sponsors with names, addresses, and phone numbers known to those in power. What Nigeria faces is not a lack of government response—though gaps exist—but organized predation under the cover of institutional protection, political patronage, and the silence of those who profit from disorder.
Bandits in Zamfara, Sokoto, Katsina, and Kebbi don’t operate from caves with crude weapons. They move in motorcades, use tactical formations, and have intelligence on troop movements. Ransoms are negotiated via intermediaries with phones and bank accounts. They are not invisible; they are protected.
Terrorists in the North-East don’t conjure weapons from thin air. Supply chains, financiers, and sympathizers exist—men in flowing robes, boardrooms, and legislative chambers who attend state funerals while funding national despair. While isolated copycat groups exist, the main perpetrators have sponsors with human faces and a history of impunity.
So, we must ask: Why hasn’t President Bola Ahmed Tinubu moved against these actors with the full weight of state power? Why does the state stop short of a terminal blow? This is not an embarrassing question for democracy—it’s a patriotic one. If the state cannot protect citizens with deterrent ferocity, the social contract strains, as it does now.
Tinubu is no timid man. His career shows strategic force and surgical use of power. He navigated Lagos through dangerous waters and faced federal intimidation without flinching. The question is not courage but will, constraint, and the invisible geometry of elite networks.
This is why terminal action against insecurity remains ineffective, despite valiant military operations. To destroy the infrastructure, we must target sponsors, not just recruits. Until then, the government treats symptoms, not the disease.
The uncomfortable truth: In some theatres, non-state actors function as they do not because of superior firepower or intelligence, but because power is relational. Their relations run upward into political finance, electoral arithmetic, ethnic networks, and elite bargaining. The state and anti-state are not always opposites; sometimes they are business partners in the same building.
Insecurity in Nigeria is not just a problem to be solved—it’s a resource to manage, a tool to deploy, an industry to sustain. It generates revenue through ransoms, extortion, and illicit extraction, laundered into real estate and campaign financing. It suppresses voter turnout and serves as a negotiating chip. It distracts a population from asking who gets rich.
To suppress this architecture requires political courage of historical order. It means accepting elite fracture, losing powerful friends, and following the money with forensic determination. The money leads to people with titles and connections who can make life uncomfortable for those who disturb their arrangements.
Tinubu’s bold economic reforms are painful but courageous. Yet an economy cannot be rebuilt on mass insecurity. Investment capital flees carnage. The middle class doesn’t expand when highways are survival lotteries. Human capital doesn’t flourish when parents pray children return from school alive.
It also means restructuring security agencies, where collaboration with criminals has become a survival strategy for underpaid personnel. It means confronting informal economies in the North-West—cattle, mining, cross-border trade—where banditry and commerce are interwoven.
Above all, it requires transparent, public, legally rigorous accountability. Name the sponsors. Prosecute financiers in open court. Let sentences be exemplary, asset forfeitures total, and the message unmistakable.
The non-state actors and their sponsors hope the web of obligation and complicity shields them. They bet their industry of insecurity won’t be disturbed. That bet must fail.
