Nigeria Needs Results, Not Another Security Document
By Aniefiok Victoria Asuquo
I read with interest Blueprint’s endorsement of the newly inaugurated Presidential Committee on the National Threat Assessment and Five‑Year Strategic Defence Operations Plan. The editorial is correct that Nigeria needs anticipation rather than reaction, and that courage on the battlefield has never been enough on its own. But strong support for the idea of foresight should not automatically translate into strong support for a particular committee before it has produced a single report. That distinction matters, and it is one area the editorial appears to overlook.
The first concern is the timeline. Ninety days to produce a comprehensive national threat assessment covering terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, porous borders, irregular migration, religious and ethnic fault lines, threats to democratic stability and other emerging challenges—while also translating these findings into a rolling five‑year strategic defence operations plan—is an extraordinarily compressed period. Work of this scale should ordinarily be handled by standing institutions that continuously gather intelligence, analyse threats and evaluate national security capabilities, not by an ad hoc committee racing against a deadline.
There is a real risk that what emerges after ninety days may be less a new national threat assessment and more a repackaging of documents that already exist within the Office of the National Security Adviser, the Defence Intelligence Agency and other security institutions. If that happens, the “strategic turn” celebrated by the editorial may produce another impressive report without producing meaningful change. Nigeria does not need another document that ends up gathering dust on government shelves.
The editorial’s reassurance about “synergy rather than rivalry” between the Office of the National Security Adviser and the new Special Adviser on Homeland Security also deserves more scrutiny. Nigeria’s security architecture has a long history of overlapping responsibilities and institutional rivalry. Tensions between agencies, disagreements over intelligence and conflicts between federal and state authorities have often undermined coordination. Simply placing the NSA centrally on a committee that includes a newly mandated office does not resolve the question of authority. What happens when the two offices disagree on priorities or intelligence assessments? Who has the final say? The editorial treats the issue as settled by the committee’s composition, but in reality the question of authority has only been deferred. For the committee to succeed, its responsibilities and reporting lines must be clearly defined from the beginning.
The most important concern is implementation. The editorial acknowledges that successive governments have produced policies, plans and strategies, yet insecurity has persisted and, in many respects, worsened. That admission should have been the starting point of the editorial, not a passing observation. Nigeria is not suffering from a shortage of security documents. What has consistently been lacking is the political will and institutional discipline to implement those plans, provide adequate funding, recruit and train personnel, monitor progress and hold officials accountable when targets are not achieved. A strategy is only as useful as the actions that follow it.
Support for the new committee should therefore be conditional on clear answers to three questions. Who will be held accountable if the plan’s targets are not achieved, and what consequences will follow? Will the assessment and strategic plan—or at least a credible public summary—be made available so citizens, researchers and the National Assembly can evaluate progress? And will the committee’s recommendations influence actual budgeting, procurement and security priorities, or will they remain advisory suggestions that can easily be ignored?
Continuity is another concern. Security threats do not disappear when administrations change. A five‑year plan must be designed to survive political transitions and remain subject to regular review as new threats emerge. It should not become another policy associated with one administration and abandoned by the next. Regular monitoring, independent evaluation and periodic public reporting should be built into the framework from the outset.
None of this is an argument against the committee. Nigeria genuinely needs the shift from reaction to anticipation that the editorial rightly champions. An intelligence‑led, properly funded and carefully monitored five‑year framework is far better than another emergency meeting after the next mass‑casualty attack. But strategic planning must be accompanied by strategic implementation.
An editorial page exists to test official enthusiasm against the lessons of experience, not simply to amplify optimism. Given how many “strategic turns” Nigeria has been promised—and how many have eventually returned the country to the same road—the appropriate posture toward this committee should be cautious and conditional support, not unconditional applause.
Nigerians have heard promises that “this time will be different” before. What the public needs now is not another launch ceremony or another document filled with ambitious targets. Nigerians need measurable results: safer communities, fewer attacks, improved intelligence, better coordination among security agencies and genuine accountability. The committee must prove that its work will become more than another report. Its success should ultimately be judged not by the quality of the document produced within ninety days, but by whether that document leads to a safer Nigeria in the years that follow.
Aniefiok Victoria Asuquo is a student of Development and Strategic Communication at Yakubu Gowon University.
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