- Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar warned that while sophisticated terrorist networks aggressively study their own operational successes and failures to refine their raids, the Nigerian government remains trapped in a stagnant, counterproductive national security playbook.
- The opposition leader observed that the state failed to internalize critical early warning indicators from past national traumas like the Chibok abductions, directly paving the way for recent mass student kidnappings across Oyo State.
- To break the cycle of reactionary governance, Atiku proposed establishing regional Counterterrorism Fusion Centres and a formal Terrorism Violence Peer Review Mechanism to rapidly integrate grassroots intelligence into national security planning.
Former Vice President and 2027 presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has issued a comprehensive critique of the President Bola Tinubu administration’s national defense framework.
Eko Hot Blog reports that in a detailed press release issued on Thursday, June 4, 2026, through his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Mr. Phrank Shaibu, Atiku argued that the geographical dispersion of terrorism, banditry, and kidnapping into entirely new regions of the country serves as definitive proof that the current federal strategy is completely failing to keep pace with mutating adversarial tactics.
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He asserted that while highly organized criminal syndicates consistently analyze their vulnerabilities to strike with precision, the political leadership of the country continues to rely on a routine, “business-as-usual” approach that yields no meaningful structural improvements.
The veteran politician highlighted a tragic and highly repetitive pattern within the country’s security architecture, where major violent events are consistently met with superficial public mourning, empty official promises, and investigative panels, only for fresh tragedies to strike without any operational lessons being deployed.
Recalling the permanent national scar left by the Chibok schoolgirls’ abduction years prior, Atiku lamented that classrooms and rural communities across Oyo State and the Middle Belt remain acutely vulnerable because the federal government continues to implement centrally designed, foreign-inspired defense models instead of listening to the direct experiences of communities on the front lines of violent extremism.
He emphasized that despite the state budgeting trillions of naira for defense over the last decade, ordinary citizens have become significantly less secure, indicating a profound crisis of accountability, operational coordination, and strategic leadership rather than a mere shortage of physical resources.
To completely overhaul the broken apparatus, the Wazirin Adamawa outlined a series of structural reforms aimed at building an intelligence-led, domestic reality-based counterterrorism framework.
Foremost among his proposals is the creation of localized Counterterrorism Fusion Centres across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones to facilitate frictionless, real-time intelligence pooling between the military, the police, the Department of State Services (DSS), the Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), customs, immigration, and local vigilante units.
Furthermore, he advocated for a Terrorism Violence Peer Review Mechanism to systematically archive data from past attacks alongside local leaders, while establishing a National Victims and Survivors Support Framework to provide long-term psychosocial, economic, and educational rehabilitation to devastated border towns.
Atiku concluded his assessment by warning the Tinubu administration that the war against asymmetric threats cannot be won through endless military deployments alone, urging the government to aggressively disrupt terrorist financing networks, secure porous state borders, and confront the underlying governance challenges of poverty, unemployment, and systemic state neglect that fuel insurgent recruitment.
