By Olive Aniunoh & Chinecherem Nneli
Being fixated on one thing for too long may cause troxler fading, a form of blindness that comes from staring too long at one thing. In the context of Nigeria’s national security establishment, those ‘things’ on which many have been fixated include “the insurgents” in the North East, “the bandits” in the North West, and “the separatists” in the South East. These groups have become real threats, and the cost incurred in terms of loss of life and displaced persons is indeed catastrophic. In recent years, Nigeria’s response to insecurity has been largely shaped by a kinetic, military-first approach to threat management, from Operation Hadin Kai in the North East to Operation Udo Ka in the South East. But by building a security system solely predicated on fighting these threats, Nigeria has made itself vulnerable to other sorts ofthreats that cannot be eliminated with an AK-47, but whichcontinue to unleash fever, drought, or grid darkness in the country. Beyond conventional security threats, issues such as Lassa fever outbreaks, climate-induced drought, and persistent energy insecurity continue to pose significant risks to human and national security, yet they have received comparatively limited attention within Nigeria’s national security framework. There is no escaping the impact of this blinkered vision any longer. This article provides insight into the evolving national security in Nigeria, examining the forces that have ensured Nigeria’s security system is confined to the realm of military thinking, and the imperative for multi-disciplinary thinking to meet these varied threats.
- A Virus Nigeria’s Security System Cannot Shoot.
Consider Lassa fever, in 2025 alone, Nigeria recorded 1,148 confirmed cases and 215 deaths across 22 states, and while the total number of suspected cases fell marginally compared to 2024, the case fatality rate rose to 18.7 per cent, up from 16.3 per cent the previous year. That worsening mortality figure is instructive. The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention identified late presentation of cases as a major contributor, driven by poor health-seeking behaviour linked to the high cost of treatment, inadequate environmental sanitation, and low awareness in high-burden communities. In other words, the disease is not becoming more lethal, but rather the state is becoming less capable of containing it.
Between 2018 and 2023, Lassa fever spread from 20 to 34 of Nigeria’s 37 states, underscoring its endemic nature. This is not a localised outbreak to be managed by a state health commissioner. It is a territorial erosion of the government’s ability to protect citizens from harm, which is, at its core, what national security means. And yet when Nigerians speak of national security, the conversation gravitates almost reflexively toward troop deployments and procurement budgets.
Inadequate early detection, weak surveillance systems, and economic constraints continue to exacerbate the burden on Nigeria’s healthcare infrastructure, while climate change-induced shifts in temperature and precipitation patterns have disrupted rodent habitats, increasing human exposure to the virus. Here, in one sentence, is a security problem that requires epidemiologists, climate scientists, urban planners, and development economists, not a brigade commander.
- The Hunger That Destabilises
Lassa fever is only the most vivid illustration of a broader pattern. Food insecurity in Nigeria has reached dimensions that any serious security analyst would classify as a systemic threat to state cohesion. A food security analysis led by the World Food Programme projected that 35 million Nigerians would face high levels of acute food insecurity during the lean season of 2026, an alarming rise of four million people from the same period the previous year, driven by economic hardship, record-high inflation, the effects of climate change, and persistent violence in the northeastern states. The North East, particularly Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states, remains the epicentre of the crisis, with nearly 5.8 million people facing severe food insecurity in 2026, including 15,000 people in Borno State expected to face catastrophic hunger and famine-like conditions. The circular relationship between hunger and instability is well-established in the academic literature: food crises feed crime and recruitment into armed groups, accelerate displacement, and corrode the social contracts that hold communities together (Hendrix and Brinkman 2013). Nigeria’s security planners understand this at an intellectual level. Their institutional architecture, however, suggests otherwise.
The country’s power sector compounds the situation. As a result of the chronic electricity shortfall, where Nigeria’s grid supply is always below 4,000 megawatts despite a population of 220 million people, health centres, vaccine cold chain systems, and small businesses that can employ youth prone to insurgency recruitment are affected. Energy insecurity is a national security threat. The connection is not metaphorical but causal, measurable, and well-documented. Yet it sits outside the remit of the country’s principal security coordinating office.
- The ONSA’s Narrow Corridor
The NSA is a statutory member of the National Security Council and the Federal Executive Council, and chairs meetings of Nigeria’s intelligence agencies. The office is supported by executive staff drawn from intelligence services, the armed forces, law enforcement and paramilitary units. This list of staff sources is, almost entirely, a list of people trained to think about physical coercion.
Historically, appointment to the office has been held by senior police officers and the top brass of military officers, including three- and four-star generals. The most recent exception of note is Nuhu Ribadu, a former anti-corruption official appointed in 2023, but even his background is rooted in law enforcement and intelligence rather than, say, public health governance or climate adaptation policy. Before him, Mohammed Babagana Monguno, a retired military general who served as National Security Adviser from 2015 to 2023, brought deep operational experience in military intelligence but no apparent training in epidemiology, food systems, or energy policy. This is not a criticism of individuals but a structural observation about institutional design. The problem is not that military officers are unqualified but that no single military or police background, however distinguished, can encompass the full range of threats that now constitute genuine national security.
- A Concept Designed for a Different Century
The intellectual framework underlying Nigeria’s security architecture was largely inherited from the colonial and early post-independence period, refined during successive military governments, and calcified by the institutional culture of those governments’ security agencies. Nigeria’s counter-terrorism framework, for instance, designates the Office of the National Security Adviser as the coordinating body for all counter-terrorism efforts, an appropriate mandate, but one that has drawn the office’s attention and resources relentlessly toward violent non-state actors.
The academic literature on security studies moved beyond this narrow conception decades ago. The United Nations Development Programme’s landmark 1994 Human Development Report introduced the concept of human security, encompassing health, food, economic, environmental, personal, community, and political dimensions, precisely because the end of the Cold War had made it obvious that most threats to human welfare did not come from foreign armies. Nigeria, despite ratifying various international frameworks that implicitly acknowledge this broader view, has not restructured its domestic security architecture to match. The result is a mismatch between the threats Nigerians actually face and the instruments the state deploys against them. When Lassa fever kills 215 people in a year across 22 states, when 33 million people face acute hunger, when the power grid fails hospitals in the middle of surgical operations, these are not background conditions that security policy must work around. They are the security problem.
- The Case for Enlarging the Corridor of the National Security Council
What would it mean to take this seriously? At minimum, it would mean reconceiving the NSA role as one that requires breadth of analytical competence rather than depth of operational military experience. A retired general knows how to coordinate troop movements and interpret signals intelligence. But advising a president on the full spectrum of threats to state and human security requires fluency in epidemiology, public health systems, macroeconomic stability, food supply chains, climate science and infrastructure resilience. These are disciplines cultivated in universities and research institutions, not in barracks.
Other countries have begun to make this shift. The United States National Security Council has, since the Obama administration, included formal structures for endemic preparedness and climate security, staffed by scientists and public health experts, not only generals. The United Kingdom’s National Security Council explicitly integrates economic, health, and energy security into its threat assessments, as shown in the National Security Strategy 2025. Nigeria’s equivalent body lacks such an architecture.
The reconstitution of the ONSA to include academics, public health specialists, economists, or climate scientists in senior roles within the office, or indeed to the position itself, under appropriate conditions, would not weaken Nigeria’s security posture. It would widen it. The concern that such appointments would leave military matters underserved is easily addressed: the Chief of Defence Staff and the service chiefs are specifically constituted to manage military operations. The NSA’s role, properly understood, is to integrate and coordinate across domains, precisely the skill that a multi-disciplinary scholar or policy intellectual is trained to provide.
- The Cost of Tunnel Vision
Nigeria is a country where a febrile child in Ondo State may die of Lassa fever because the nearest treatment centre lacks a diagnostic laboratory; where a farmer in Borno State faces simultaneous threats from jihadist insurgents and catastrophic harvest failure; where a generator-dependent hospital in Lagos fears the inability to perform surgery rather than invasion. The threats are plural, interactive, and systemic. They do not respect the organisational boundaries of a security establishment designed in 1986. Lassa fever’s transmission peaks during the dry months when food scarcity drives rodent-human interactions, a sentence that captures, in miniature, the entanglement of climate, poverty, and disease that defines Nigeria’s actual security environment. Addressing it requires a security establishment capable of thinking across all intersections.
Nigeria does not lack the human capital for this reform. Its universities produce capable epidemiologists, economists, and policy scholars. What it lacks is the institutional imagination to deploy them where it matters most. Until the country’s national security architecture reflects the full breadth of threats its citizens face, the guns and boots will keep winning battles while the deeper war against disease, hunger, darkness, and despair goes largely unfought.
Recommendations
Nigeria does not need to abandon its military strength but needs to rebalance its understanding of security. Beyond threats of insurgency, issues that undermine citizens’ welfare are also threats to the nation’s security. The starting point of this rebalance is institutional reform.
- The Restructuring of the Office of the National Security Adviser: The office of the national security adviser should be a genuinely multi-disciplinary hub, not a predominantly military-intelligence space. This means formally integrating public health experts, climate scientists, economists and infrastructure specialists into its core decision-making structure, not as external consultants but as embedded actors with equal voice.
- Recognition of Other Aspects of Security Concerns: Nigeria should adopt a national security framework that explicitly recognises human security threats; health, food, energy and environment risks as co-equal with traditional military threats. This can be operationalised through a revised national security strategy that mandates cross-sector coordination and measurable targets, for example, epidemic response time, food system resilience and energy reliability.
- Budgetary Realignment: As long as security spending is overwhelmingly skewed towards kinetic responses, the system will reproduce the same blind spots. Dedicated funding for health surveillance systems, early warning mechanisms for food security, and climate adaptation infrastructure should be treated as security investments, not social spending.
- Strategising Leadership Selection: The role of the National Security Adviser should focus on strategic breadth rather than operational specialisation, emphasising qualifications, field experience, and equality in appointment. This approach encourages candidates with multi-disciplinary expertise who can integrate knowledge across sectors and anticipate complex, interconnected risks.
Nigeria is not struggling in the war against insecurity because it lacks courage or firepower. It is struggling because it is fighting only the wars it knows how to see. The real threats confronting Nigerians today are not confined to battlefields. They are found in under-resourced hospitals, in failing harvests, in unstable power systems, and in the slow violence of climate change and economic exclusion. These threats do not announce themselves with gunfire, but they erode state legitimacy and human life just as profoundly. A security system that cannot see these dangers will continue to win tactical victories while losing strategic ground. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to strengthen Nigeria’s security apparatus, but to reimagine it, moving from a narrow, force-driven model to one that protects lives in the fullest sense. Until that shift happens, Nigeria risks remaining trapped in a cycle in which visible enemies are confronted, but the deeper conditions that sustain insecurity are left to grow.
(Olive Aniunoh is a Senior Legal, Policy and Research Analyst at Nextier, working at the intersection of governance, peace, security, and development. Chinecherem Maryjames Nneli is a Bilingual Policy and Research Analyst at Nextier, working on global issues of peace, conflict, gender, and social inclusion)
