The Director, Abuja School of Social and Political Thought, and Arise Analyst, Professor Sam Amadi warns that Nigeria’s failure to clearly assess security risks is weakening its response to attacks.
The Analyst said this while speaking with ARISE NEWS on Friday.
“I’m not a soldier, I’m a policy strategist, so I could say straight away that there seems to be no clarity as to assessment of the risks and the challenges we are facing”, he said.
Adding, he noted that APC came to power over PDP’s failure on terrorism, but nearly ten years in, persistent insecurity reflects unclear risk assessment and weak strategy.
“The reason why APC came to power was largely that PDP failed, quote and unquote, failed to arrest the trend of terrorism and security, and Nigeria was, you know, listed as one of the most fragile, terrorized countries in the world. And so you would expect that the APC government, starting from President Buhari, would have had a clarity as to the level of threat that we face.
“So if, for example, after eight years and more, getting to ten years, we are not seeing a diminution of the threat, we are not seeing strategic leadership in terms of overcoming, and then it becomes sporadic, then that tells a story around clarity as to first, assessment of risk and the strategy that we have deployed to manage them”, he explained.
Amadi noted that terrorists appear increasingly bold against the military, attributing this partly to leadership that has over-promised and under-delivered.
“Sitting back and saying, why are these terrorists seeming to be stronger or trying to challenge critically the military? It could be several factors. One of the things that is clear is that the leadership has promised, over-promised and under-delivered.
“When Christopher Musa was, you know, appointed to replace the Minister of Defense, the impression was that we’re getting a swashbuckling general who understands what it takes to win this war.
“And after many months, people are still raising an eyebrow whether, you know, where’s the new strategy? So for me, as somebody who is not a soldier but somebody who understands campaigns—never forget that leadership and strategy came from military; campaigns are the same, even though the tools of engagement might be different—you have to have clarity as to the level of risk you face”, he said.
Stressing leadership’s lack of clarity, Amadi said viewing terrorists as “brothers” undermines decisive action and proper threat assessment.
“We have to also have clarity and commitment to vanquish the enemy. What I see in Nigerian leadership are a little bit conflicted around definition. So we start with: who is the terrorist? What are our objectives towards them? How do we categorize them? And so when you hear things like maybe the NSA saying ‘some of our brothers,’ then there’s a moral complexity for him because you cannot deal maximum violence as the military—I mean, this is not a general American concept—but when the Minister of Defense talked about the deployment of war, and what I just liked in theory is that lethality. The reason why we have a military is that we must be lethal and we must deal with the enemy straight-forward”, he urged.
Reiterating the need for clarity, Amadi said the state cannot act decisively without defining terrorists and setting clear objectives.
“So if we can’t define who the terrorist is, and we see the terrorist as one of us and our brother or our sister, whether in the Southeast or Northwest or somewhere, you’re not going, as a state, be very clear and decisive in how you deal. So for me, the first problem is lack of clarity as to diagnosis, definition of problem, assessment of what to do, and clear objective of how to deal with it”, he noted.
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