Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Chima Nnadi-Oforgu, contributing analyst to USAfricaLive.com, is the Editor of Oblongmedia in Owerri, Nigeria.
Evidently, Nigeria has reached a level of insecurity where a foreign power, the United States, feels confident enough to launch military operations against Africa’s most populous country. Regardless of how Nigerian officials and leaders in Abuja frame it, the symbolism is stark.
For a country that prides itself on sovereignty and regional leadership, this moment should trigger deep national introspection.
On Christmas Day of 2025, the U.S carried out strikes at terrorist targets in Sokoto State, marking a disturbing escalation in Nigeria’s long-running security crisis. The air strikes, ordered and announced by President Donald Trump, reiterated his position that the Islamic State-linked groups, including Boko Haram factions, have been involved in the mass killings of Christians in Nigeria. He promised to stop the killings and vowed continued action. The U.S Africa Command confirmed that the operations were conducted in coordination with Nigerian authorities.
The political and economic atmospherics of the past few months feel eerily familiar. They seem redolent of some of the problems of 2014 and 2015, when insecurity overwhelmed state capacity and Nigeria appeared to be sliding out of control.
Crises are now unfolding almost in synchrony. Three especially stand out:
— Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province are resurging in the northeast.
— Mass kidnappings have increased in the northwest and north central zones. The northeast remains an area of major violence, even with reduced frequency.
— Coordinated banditry now plagues major transport corridors across multiple regions.
Each threat has existed before. What is alarming is their simultaneous intensification across the areas mentioned and other sections of the country.
Such rarely happens unless something systemic has broken down or they are plotting from a similar or the same playbook.
In 2014, former Governor of Lagos State, now the incumbent President of Nigeria, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was a key opposition leader in Nigeria and the major financial backer and strategist in the formation of the All Progressives Congress (APC). He was a very potent voice of the opposition. He hounded former President Goodluck Jonathan for incompetence and indecision, demanded his resignation, and argued that any president who allowed Nigerian territory to fall under insurgent control had forfeited legitimacy. Many Nigerians agreed with him.
Fast forward to 2024 through 2025, under Tinubu’s presidency, jihadists and several armed non-State actors have carved out de facto fiefdoms from Sokoto through Zamfara and into parts of Niger and Kwara states. Mass abductions of schoolchildren that once symbolized the Jonathan era now occur with terrifying regularity under Tinubu’s watch.
Nigeria’s security system remains centralized, sluggish and reactive. Predictably, the same chorus of political rivals calling for resignation has returned, now directed at Tinubu.
To understand why Nigeria remains trapped in this recurring cycle, one must follow the incentives that sustain insecurity.
In 2014, Boko Haram financed most of its insurgency through robbery, looting, cattle rustling, bank raids and forced taxation of occupied communities.
In the northwest, a different conflict economy took root. What began as local clashes between armed herders and farming communities evolved into an expansive banditry ecosystem. Kidnapping proved more profitable than cattle rustling. Negotiators professionalized. Camps were established. Ransom payments moved through informal financial channels. Corrupt intermediaries flourished.
By 2020, analysts were describing Nigeria’s kidnap economy as a mature market with predictable cycles. When cash ran low, criminals looted harvests or taxed miners. When security forces pressured one corridor, gangs migrated to another. When public outrage dulled, mass abductions were staged to restore leverage. The crisis became self-sustaining.
What sustains this national theatre of insecurity is not mysterious. Corruption drains operational resources and creates incentives for some actors to tolerate prolonged instability. Youth unemployment supplies endless recruits. Intelligence systems remain weak. Law enforcement is politicized. Communities that cooperate with the state are left exposed to reprisals. Simplistic religious and ethnic narratives obstruct honest diagnosis.
Yet this cycle is not irreversible.The kidnap economy must be treated as a financial crime, requiring surveillance of ransom flows, strict enforcement of laws against money laundering, and prosecution of collaborators who profit from terror.
Nigeria’s armed forces must purge procurement fraud and prioritize intelligence-led operations that protect civilians rather than advertise body counts. Schools require real protective infrastructure, not ceremonial safe school pledges. The state must rebuild trust with communities through consistency and accountability, not episodic raids that are abandoned after a few weeks!
Nigeria must also confront uncomfortable options. One such option is the controlled use of foreign military contractors. In 2015, Jonathan engaged South African and Eastern European specialists who helped reclaim territory from Boko Haram. That arrangement was later cancelled out of nationalist pride, and the momentum evaporated. Given today’s scale of threat and the reality of foreign powers now conducting strikes on Nigerian soil, specialized external support under strict oversight deserves sober reconsideration. Saving lives must matter more than protecting political ego.
The US strikes in Sokoto should not be mistaken for a solution. They’re symptomatic of the main problems. They signal how far Nigeria’s security credibility has eroded and how vulnerable the State now appears.
Ten years ago, Nigerians demanded that children be safe in school and villages be free from occupation by armed groups. A decade later, they are making the same plea. If it was fair in 2014 to argue that no leader should preside over the occupation of Nigerian communities by non-State actors, it is fair to say the same, today, the final days of 2025
Nigerians want what they have always deserved: a country where sending a child to school is not an act of faith in divine mercy. They yearn for a government that will treat abductions and killings as intolerable crises rather than routine inconveniences. Nigerians deserve an end to an insecurity nightmare that seems scripted to repeat itself. This pattern can be broken. Whether it will be is the question now hanging over the republic.
