Beyond reaction: Rethinking security in Nigeria, by Dakuku Peterside,
On the evening of March 16, 2026, Maiduguri was once again forced to confront a familiar horror. Coordinated suicide bombings struck the Monday Market axis, the post office corridor, the entrance to the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, and the Kaleri area, killing and injuring ordinary people who had simply been trying to end the day in peace. It was another painful reminder that insecurity in Nigeria is not an abstract policy issue. It is a direct assault on human life, on dignity, on livelihoods, and on the fragile sense of normalcy that citizens struggle to maintain.
Yet the deeper lesson of Maiduguri is not only about how the country responds after tragedy. It is about what Nigeria must do before tragedy happens. Too often, insecurity is treated as an event to be managed after the fact rather than a danger to be reduced through foresight, planning, and long-term investment. Condemnations, troop movements, and emergency meetings may be necessary in the aftermath of violence, but they are not substitutes for prevention. A serious country must learn to ask not only how to respond to attacks, but how to make them less likely in the first place.
Prevention begins with recognising that insecurity rarely appears without warning. Violent attacks do not emerge from a vacuum. They grow in places where intelligence is weak, public trust is broken, institutions are overstretched, and early signs are ignored. In regions that have endured years of insurgency, these warning signs often become normalised. Suspicious movements, growing fear in communities, recruitment efforts among vulnerable youths, rising displacement, and renewed militant coordination may all be visible long before an explosion occurs. The problem is not always the absence of signals. It is often the absence of a system that takes those signals seriously enough to act on them early.
That is why prevention must start with better local intelligence rooted in communities, not only in formal security structures. People living in vulnerable areas are often the first to sense when something is wrong. They notice unfamiliar faces, unusual patterns, shifting tensions, and silent changes in behaviour that outsiders may miss. But for such information to matter, citizens must trust that reporting threats will lead to protection, not retaliation or indifference. This means building a genuine relationship between security agencies and local communities, one based on credibility, consistency, and respect. A frightened population cannot be an effective partner in prevention. A trusted one can be.
But intelligence alone is not enough. Prevention also requires reducing the conditions that make violence easier to spread. Insecurity feeds on exclusion, despair, weak governance, and abandoned spaces. Where young people see no path to education, work, or social mobility, extremist groups and criminal networks find fertile ground. Where public institutions are absent or corrupt, violent actors can present themselves as alternatives. Where displaced people live for years without stability, trauma and frustration deepen. In that sense, preventing insecurity is not only a military task. It is also a social, economic, and political one.
This is why governments must think more broadly about security. A school that remains open and safe, a primary healthcare centre that functions, a road that allows communities to stay connected, a local economy that offers young men and women a reason to invest in the future, these are not separate from security policy. They are part of it. Prevention is strongest when people feel they have something real to lose by choosing violence and something real to gain by choosing peace.
Urban preparedness is another neglected aspect of prevention. Markets, transport hubs, hospitals, schools, and worship centres in high-risk regions should not be left exposed until after an attack reveals their vulnerability. Risk mapping, visible screening systems, trained local volunteers, coordinated emergency drills, surveillance where appropriate, and faster information-sharing between agencies can all reduce exposure. Prevention does not mean turning every city into a fortress. It means thinking carefully about where people are most vulnerable and acting before attackers exploit those weaknesses.
The same principle applies to public communication. Citizens should not hear about threats only after lives have been lost. Governments need credible alert systems that inform without creating panic, educate without sounding routine, and help people recognise danger signs early. Public awareness is often treated as secondary, but informed citizens are harder targets. Where people know how to report suspicious activity, where to seek safety, and how to respond in moments of danger, the cost of insecurity can be reduced.
There is also a moral dimension to prevention. A state reveals how much it values human life not only by mourning the dead, but by protecting the living. Preparedness is a form of respect. Early intervention is a form of empathy. Long-term investment in vulnerable regions is a declaration that some communities will not be left to endure endless cycles of violence while the rest of the country moves on. Prevention says to citizens: your lives matter enough for the state to act before your names become statistics.
Maiduguri should therefore not be remembered only as the site of another tragedy. It should be seen as a warning about the cost of a reactive culture. A nation that waits for bloodshed before becoming serious about insecurity is always a step behind those who exploit its weaknesses. Nigeria cannot defeat violence merely by responding faster after attacks. It must become better at making those attacks harder to organise, harder to carry out, and harder to sustain.
That requires patience, discipline, and political seriousness. It means strengthening intelligence, deepening community trust, investing in education and livelihoods, protecting vulnerable public spaces, supporting displaced populations, and treating every warning sign as a chance to prevent pain rather than merely document it later. Insecurity is not solved only on the battlefield. It is reduced in classrooms, in local councils, in clinics, in markets, in the design of institutions, and in the everyday choices of a state that decides prevention is wiser than spectacle.
The most important shift Nigeria needs is therefore mental before it is operational. The country must stop treating insecurity as a recurring emergency and begin treating prevention as a permanent national responsibility. That is how vulnerability is reduced. That is how lives are protected. And that is how a nation honours its people before grief becomes the price of delayed action.
•Dakuku Peterside is the author of two best-selling books, Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface.
The post Beyond reaction: Rethinking security in Nigeria, by Dakuku Peterside appeared first on Vanguard News.
,
On the evening of March 16, 2026, Maiduguri was once again forced to confront a familiar horror. Coordinated suicide bombings struck the Monday Market axis, the post office corridor, the entrance to the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, and the Kaleri area, killing and injuring ordinary people who had simply been trying to end the day […]
The post Beyond reaction: Rethinking security in Nigeria, by Dakuku Peterside appeared first on Vanguard News.
, , Emmanuel Okogba, {authorlink},, , Vanguard News, March 24, 2026, 1:15 am
