I read with an interchange of intense pleasure and intense pain, the

insightful lecture which the much decorated Lt Gen (Rtd) Abdulrahman

Dambazau delivered on the 4th of November 2025.  That 7th Annual

Public Lecture of the “Just Friends Club of Nigeria” (JFCN), with the

theme, “Nigeria’s Security Challenges and the Quest for National

Cohesion: A New Paradigm for Internal Security Architecture”, should

have so engaged the attention of the nation that it should have given

rise to a national discourse on Nigeria’s present security tragedy.

This is because Dambazau as a former Chief of Army Staff and Minister

of Interior at different times must know the national security terrain

expertly. He is also superlatively educated; holds a PhD degree in

Criminology and he is also the Pro-Chancellor, Capital City

University, Kano, so he must have been interfacing with Professors.

So, it is curious that his most topical lecture didn’t elicit a

national discourse.

In a sense, Dambazau didn’t disappoint; he traversed the field

expertly, espousing every aspect of it in a way that would make a

layman an expert. Hear him:

“Security must be approached from a comprehensive and holistic

perspective, as a concept centered on people rather than territories

and on investment in human development rather than armaments, a

broader construct that extends beyond traditional military concerns to

encompass the protection of individuals’ lives, property, and their

overall well-being.

Military security is primarily concerned with protecting a nation’s

territorial integrity and sovereignty against external threats,

typically using armed forces and defence strategies. Being

state-centric, it focuses on safeguarding the state from military

aggression, invasion, or armed conflict. In contrast, human security

is people-centric and encompasses a broader range of concerns. It

emphasizes the protection of individuals’ lives, properties, and

overall well-being.

 

Human security addresses threats such as poverty, illiteracy, disease,

unemployment, corruption, and environmental degradation, issues that

cannot be resolved by military force alone but require effective

governance and social investment. In the Nigerian context, these

threats pose significant human security challenges.

 

Nigeria is confronted with a range of complex security challenges that

demand a robust and adaptive internal security architecture. Foremost

among these are threats to the safety of lives and property. This

“freedom from fear” has been eroded by the activities of groups such

as Boko Haram, bandits, IPOB, Yoruba Nation agitators, militants,

urban criminal gangs, and other violent offenders engaged in armed

robbery, murder, and ritual killings.

 

In addition to physical threats, Nigeria faces significant human

security challenges that undermine its survival and livelihoods-

poverty, unemployment, hunger, disease, and illiteracy have denied

many citizens their “freedom from want.” Despite its abundant

resources, Nigeria continues to rank low on the United Nations Human

Development Index.

 

For instance, extreme poverty is expected to rise from 30.9% in 2018

to 46% in 2024, with approximately 90 million Nigerians living below

the poverty line. Multidimensional poverty, encompassing deprivation

in health, education, and living standards, affects 63% of the

population and is exacerbated by inflation, economic stagnation,

insecurity, regional disparities, and inadequate social protection.

Population growth further compounds these challenges, with projections

indicating that Nigeria’s population will exceed 400 million by 2050,

and over 70% of the population is young, including approximately 10

million out-of-school children”.

 

Freedom from want? This should remind us of the “Four Freedoms of Man”

as articulated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. They

are universal principles for a just world: Freedom of Speech, Freedom

of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear, representing

essential democratic values that should exist everywhere, and

inspiring global Human Rights ideals like those in the UN’s Universal

Declaration of Human Rights.

 

It is actually from here that I began to disagree with Gen. Dambazau.

He attributed the problem to: “The proliferation of firearms, driven

by porous borders, regional instability, and illicit local production,

the widespread availability of unregistered and unmarked weapons has

fueled insurgency, banditry, armed robbery, and other violent crimes.

Reports indicate that Nigeria accounts for a significant share of

illegal weapons in West Africa, with the Lake Chad region remaining a

hotspot for arms trafficking and local manufacture of arms, including

components used by groups such as Boko Haram.

 

2; Root Causes, Triggers, and Drivers of Insecurity: The persistence

of Nigeria’s security challenges can be attributed to a complex

interplay of root causes, triggers, and drivers. A significant factor

is the tendency to oversimplify complex issues, often influenced by

emotions, sentiments, and the denial of reality. Religious and ethnic

intolerance frequently clouds objective reasoning, leading to a

fragmented national perspective and undermining collective efforts to

address insecurity.

 

Key drivers include poor governance, inadequate welfare for security

personnel, insufficient coordination among security agencies and

underdeveloped criminal justice institutions. Additional factors, such

as limited legislative oversight, corruption, inconsistent enforcement

of law and order, an overstretched military, misallocated police

resources, underutilized civil defence units, and the absence of a

comprehensive strategy for rural security, further exacerbate the

situation”.

 

All the points he mentioned above could have contributed to Nigerian

terrorism, but it is curious that Gen. Dambazau could have left off

listing killer cattle herders among the terrorist groups just as he

left off fundamental Islamic influences among the triggers of that

terrorism. He failed to condemn the calls for cattle routes and

government-provided cattle settlements or colonies or Rural Grazing

Areas (RUGA), a controversial government project for cattle herders. I

say this for two strong reasons. One, a militia apparently exists for

the sheer purpose of fighting for the interests of the Fulani cattle

herders. Such a militia or militias visit mayhem on villages and towns

in furtherance of cattle herders’ interests around the Middle Belt

area. They appear suddenly, do their deadly deed and disappear

instantly.

 

Two, if animal husbandry is a personal business, what is wrong with

requiring those in that business to sequester their cattle in personal

ranches? The government could provide the initial take-off loans.

Government-sponsored RUGA is like robbing Peter to pay Paul. No

personal business should be so subsidized. And to talk about Cattle

Routes in year 2025 is to escape from modernity and leap into the dark

ages. Introduce Cattle Ranches and the so-called farmers and cattle

herders’ clashes will disappear as cattle will stop destroying farms

and cattle herders will stop moving with A.K 47 assault weapons

because they won’t be moving about at all, let alone other economic

fruits.

 

Yes, Northern Muslims have experienced insurgency but the explanation

for this is clear; as the terrorists become more and more confident,

they exert territorial controls and impose taxes. It requires force to

impose such and that explains the troubles the non-Christians in the

North-West and North-East face. But to deny that there is an

orchestrated attack or even genocide against Christians in Nigeria, as

Dambazau did, will fall flat against the evidence.

 

And what is this evidence? For starters, the religious terrorists are

all unpretentious Islamic jihadists going by their names. Second,

their roots go far into history, especially the escalating events like

the 1980s Maitatsine riots, the introduction of Sharia law in the

North (starting from 1999), and the rise of Boko Haram, have been

creating cycles of violence over resources, identity, and governance,

impacting stability despite coexistence efforts. Unfortunately,

religious crisis didn’t begin with Boko Haram. It just happened that

despite the failures of the earlier attempts, Boko Haram’s attempt has

given rise to a full-fledged terrorism. The Armed Conflict Location &

Event Data Project (ACLED) reported that, as of 2025, just under

53,000 Muslims and Christians had been killed in targeted political

violence since 2009. Organisations that monitor political violence in

Nigeria have reported that the majority of victims of jihadist groups

are Muslim. According to ACLED’s 2022 report, although Christians

constitute roughly 50% of the population, violence explicitly

targeting Christians on the basis of religion accounted for only 5% of

reported civilian-targeting events”.

 

In the face of such indices, why would anybody, including the American

President, Donald Trump claim otherwise? The answer is this: Religious

conflict in Nigeria, when it befalls the Christians, religion and not

mindless theft and mayhem is often the issue. From the Wikipedia comes

this: “This was the case of the mayhem in Tafawa Balewa town to 1948.

The 1980s saw an upsurge in violence due to the death of Mohammed

Marwa (“Maitatsine”). In the same decade, the military ruler of

Nigeria, General Ibrahim Babangida, enrolled Nigeria in the

Organisation of the Islamic Conference. This was a move which

aggravated religious tensions in the country, particularly among the

Christian community. In response, some in the Muslim community pointed

out that certain other African member states have smaller proportions

of Muslims, as well as Nigeria’s diplomatic relations with the Holy

See.

 

Thus, when Boko haram began, it clearly had religion as its aim. And

the various groups are affiliated to known Islamic fundamentalist

organs from the Middle East. Boko Haram wasn’t fighting against bad

governance nor hunger and want per see, it fought because of Islam

trying to impose its own version on other people. I must add that

although direct conflicts between Christians and Muslims were rare,

eruptions often happened as in October 1982 when Muslim zealots in

Kano were able to enforce their power in order to keep the Anglican

House Church from expanding its size and power base. They saw it as a

threat to the nearby Mosque, even though the Anglican House Church had

been there forty years prior to the building of the Mosque.  Two

student groups came into contestation; the Fellowship of Christian

Students and the Muslim Student Society. In one instance there was an

evangelical campaign organised by the FCS and brought into question

why one sect should dominate the campus of the Kaduna State College of

Education in Kafanchan. This quarrel accelerated to the point where

the Muslim students organised protests around the city and burned a

Church within the college. The Christian majority at the college

retaliated on March 9. Twelve people died, several Mosques were burnt

in that war.

Since the restoration of democracy in 1999, the Muslim-dominated

Northern states have implemented strict Sharia law. Religious conflict

between Muslims and Christians has erupted several times since 2000

for various reasons, often causing riots with several thousands of

victims on both sides. Since 2009, the Islamist movement Boko Haram

has fought an armed rebellion against the Nigerian military, sacking

villages and towns and taking thousands of lives in battles and

massacres against Christians, students and others deemed enemies of

Islam; not enemies of bad governance.

 

So, the religious tension has been rife for decades before Boko Haram

emerged. But it emerged because the ground was fertile enough to

nurture it. On this, I give the last word to Wikipedia: “Despite

Mohammad Marwa’s death, Yan Tatsine riots continued into the early

1980s. In October 1982 riots erupted in Bulumkutu, near Maiduguri, and

in Kaduna, to where many Yan Tatsine adherents had moved after 1980.

Over 3,000 people died. Some survivors of these altercations moved to

Yola, and in early 1984 more violent uprisings occurred in that city.

In this round of rioting, Musa Makaniki, a close disciple of

Maitatsine, emerged as a leader and Marwa’s successor. Ultimately,

more than 1,000 people died in Yola and roughly half of the city’s

60,000 inhabitants were left homeless. Makaniki fled to his hometown

of Gombe, where more Yan Tatsine riots occurred in April 1985. After

the deaths of several hundred people Makaniki retreated to Cameroon,

where he remained until 2004 when he was arrested in Nigeria. Some

analysts view the terrorist group Boko Haram as an extension of the

Maitatsine riots”.

Gen Dambazau did not go this far in his analysis of the Boko Haram

problem. Please, remember that in 1991, the German evangelist Reinhard

Bonnke was accused of attempting to start a crusade in Kano, a

religious riot ensued killing 12 persons. That would not have been the

work of miscreants who were simply worried about their poverty and bad

governance. Religion was involved. And religion runs through Nigeria’s

present insurgency.