In October 2022, several foreign embassies and missions in Nigeria classified the country as unsafe for their citizens. In Nigeria, they said, the threats of violent attacks seem to be on the increase. According to data from the Nigeria Security Tracker (NST) there was a 48 per cent increase in violent attacks across the country in September. In the report, a total of 149 persons died of one form of a violent attack or the other across the country. Of those killed, 122 were armless civilians. This represents 82 per cent of those killed.
Further search on the NST database shows that there were 10,329 cases of violence between January 2014 and December 2022. There were a total of 73,773 deaths from these incidents during the period. The conflicts lasted 2,971 days – with 2014 (825), 2015 (388), 2016 (661), 2017 (257), 2018 (197), 2019 (279), 2020 (218) and 2021 (146) according to the Nigeria Watch (NW) database.
The figure above shows cases reported in the media. This is because the NST database relies solely on media reports as its basis of data gathering. This means that we may never know how unsafe our rural areas will probably be beyond what we know from media reports.
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The cases of violence today are not restricted to any part of the country. In the country’s North-West, bandits in the North have gotten so emboldened that they now attack military facilities including the country’s elite training college, Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) in Kaduna. The bandits also showed their worst when they attacked moving train between Abuja and Kaduna state.
In the North-Central, communal clashes in the form of farmer-herder conflicts have become nearly a regular occurrence. According to NST and NW databases, Benue, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Plateau, and Taraba states account for over 60 per cent of incidents of communal conflicts in the country.
If North-Central has become nearly synonymous with communal clashes, the North-East is just recovering from the years of devastation from insurgency.
In the South, kidnaping and criminal activities like armed robbery have become rampant in the South-West. The worsening security situation has led the 6 state governments to institutionalize the “Operation Amotekun” to cope with security threats in the region. Things have not fared better in the South-South where armed robbers roam the streets largely unchecked. The situation in the South-East shows near state collapse due to the activities of non-state actors under the guise of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
This year alone, we have seen the convoy of the nation’s President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces being attacked in his home state. Does this mean the president is not safe even in Katsina state?
In all these, it is difficult to classify Nigeria as a “safe” place because almost nowhere is safe in the country. Our citizens need to feel safe to engage in productive activities in a depressed economy. The country needs to be safe to attract foreign and domestic investments.
This piece recommends that the President and Commander-in-Chief takes full responsibility of the security situation in the country. We understand the need for a total review of the country’s security architecture to ensure its adaptability to modern threats. Also, there is the need for the leadership to address socio-economic issues like unemployment, poverty, food price inflation to cope with the rising youth unrest across the country. These are some of the urgent, immediate solutions to the challenge of insecurity in Nigeria today.