When Security Plans Multiply, But Insecurity Remains

President Bola Tinubu’s directive for the preparation of a comprehensive National Threat Assessment and a five year Strategic Defence Operations Plan is difficult to fault on its face. Nigeria needs a clear understanding of the threats confronting it and a coherent framework for deploying its defence, intelligence and security capabilities against them. The President has consequently constituted a committee under the coordination of his Special Adviser on Homeland Security, Major General Adeyinka Famadewa, with the assignment expected to produce the strategic documents within 90 days.

The announcement sounds reassuring. The Nigerian citizen, however, has heard reassuring announcements before.

That is where the mask must come off.

Nigeria’s security problem has never been simply that nobody in Abuja knows what is wrong. The country has produced security assessments, committees, strategies, reviews and institutional reforms for years. What remains painfully unresolved is the distance between what government knows, what government plans and what government actually does when danger arrives.

A national threat assessment can identify the enemy. It cannot by itself stop the enemy.

A defence plan can identify equipment requirements. It cannot by itself put an aircraft in the sky when an attack is unfolding.

An intelligence report can identify a threat. It is worthless to the people in danger if the information does not reach the officer with the authority, capacity and courage to act on it.

This is the central question that should follow the President’s latest initiative. What will make this plan different from the plans that came before it?

The question is not cynical. It is demanded by experience.

Nigeria’s security architecture has for years been weakened by institutional rivalry and fragmented intelligence. Rivalry among security agencies has been identified repeatedly as an impediment to intelligence sharing and an obstacle to the fight against terrorism and banditry. That is not a minor administrative inconvenience. In security operations, information delayed, withheld or trapped inside an institution can become a death sentence for somebody waiting for protection.

The country has too many occasions on which an attack appears to have happened after warning signs were available. Communities have watched attackers approach, kill, abduct, burn and disappear. Farmers have abandoned land. Families have changed their routes because roads have become dangerous. Villages have learned to distinguish the sound of approaching motorcycles from ordinary traffic.

Yet Abuja continues to speak the language of strategy.

There is something profoundly wrong when the sophistication of national security meetings rises while the confidence of ordinary citizens falls.

The proposed plan therefore needs to go beyond another description of threats. It must confront the machinery that turns intelligence into action. Who receives the information? Who decides? How quickly can forces move? Who has operational authority? What equipment is available? Who accounts for delays? What happens when an agency fails to act on information that was available to it?

Those are questions that cannot be buried beneath official language.

The same scrutiny must apply to procurement. Nigeria has spent enormous amounts on security over the years, and rightly so given the scale of the threats. But security expenditure cannot become a permanent black hole into which increasingly large sums disappear without a corresponding increase in public safety.

Hardware matters. Aircraft matter. Armoured vehicles matter. Communications equipment matters. Weapons and surveillance systems matter. But equipment purchased without operational readiness is an expensive monument to administrative failure.

The farmer does not care how much was appropriated for a defence platform if the platform is unavailable when armed men enter his community.

The traveller does not care about the sophistication of a procurement plan if the highway remains a hunting ground for kidnappers.

The family whose relative has been abducted does not measure national security by the number of contracts awarded.

This is why the new strategic framework must establish a direct connection between expenditure and operational outcome.

Nigeria should be able to answer a simple question about every major security investment: what capability did this money create, where is that capability deployed and what measurable improvement has it produced?

Anything less leaves room for the same old habits.

There is also the unresolved question of coordination between the military and civilian security institutions. Soldiers have increasingly found themselves performing duties that would ordinarily fall within the responsibility of the police and other internal security agencies. This has stretched the armed forces while exposing the weaknesses of the institutions designed to maintain civil order.

A country cannot indefinitely solve every internal security problem by deploying the military.

The soldier is trained for a different purpose. The police have a different constitutional and operational role. Intelligence agencies have another. Civil defence institutions have yet another. When these distinctions become blurred without a corresponding system of coordination, everybody appears to be involved while nobody is entirely responsible.

That is precisely the environment in which accountability disappears.

The Federal Government itself has recognised the need to examine the proliferation of security and paramilitary agencies and improve efficiency and coordination. If government is simultaneously reviewing the number and functions of security institutions and designing a new national security framework, the two exercises must speak to each other. Otherwise Nigeria may end up with another document recommending better coordination while the institutional competition remains intact.

The new plan must also resist the temptation to become another Abuja document written beautifully and implemented selectively.

Ninety days is enough time to produce a document. It is not enough to transform a security system.

The real work begins after the document is completed.

It must survive contact with the field.

A commander in a remote location must be able to obtain intelligence quickly. A response unit must possess mobility. Communications must function. Equipment must be serviceable. Personnel must receive the support required to remain operational. Intelligence must move across institutional boundaries. Communities must have channels through which credible information can reach security authorities without exposing informants to retaliation.

And when a preventable failure occurs, somebody must answer for it.

That final point is crucial.

Nigeria’s security debate often concentrates on the courage of soldiers and policemen while paying insufficient attention to the administrators who determine whether those personnel have the intelligence, equipment, logistics and authority required to succeed. We celebrate bravery after tragedy when we should also be examining the decisions that placed people in avoidable danger.

Accountability cannot begin only after the bodies are counted.

The President’s initiative can therefore become useful if it is treated as an opportunity to examine the entire chain of national security responsibility, from threat identification to intelligence sharing, command, deployment, procurement, logistics and evaluation.

Anything less will produce another plan.

Nigeria does not need another plan merely for the comfort of having one.

It needs a security system in which information moves, institutions cooperate, resources reach the field and failures have consequences. The ultimate test is not the quality of the document produced in Abuja. It is whether a farmer can return to his land without hiring a security escort, whether a child can travel a highway without becoming a kidnapping statistic and whether a community can sleep without listening for gunfire.

The security establishment should therefore understand the question Nigerians will eventually ask when the new five year plan has been written, approved and funded.

What became safer?

That is the audit that cannot be postponed.

Until the answer is visible in the lives of ordinary Nigerians, another national security plan remains just that, another plan.

And Nigeria has had enough plans.

The country does not need a more impressive security document. It needs a security system that works when Nigerians need it most.