A Steering Council for a Drifting Republic, by Dakuku Peterside

2026-02-24 - 00:46

Nigeria’s security crisis no longer announces itself only in the familiar theatres of the North-East. It is now rewriting the map in quieter places—villages that once believed geography was protection. When gunmen swept through Woro and Nuku in Kaiama Local Government of Kwara State, torching homes and killing scores, it was not just another atrocity; it was a message that extremist violence can plant itself wherever the state is thin, and communities are left to negotiate survival alone. The tragedy did what national briefings rarely do: it exposed how quickly “remote” can become “next.” Days later, Niger State echoed the same warning. In Borgu and neighbouring corridors, residents described dawn raids and killings, with attackers moving across communities and escaping into forests and routes that feel borderless in practice, even when they sit within Nigeria on paper. The pattern is painfully consistent: violence arrives with coordination; government response arrives with delay. We dispatch troops after the dead are counted, not before the first shot is fired. Then the world, distracted by Gaza’s devastation, debates ceasefires and reconstruction architecture. Into that debate, Donald Trump has floated a “Board of Peace”—a compact steering model meant to coordinate stabilisation and rebuilding, however controversial its politics or membership rules may be. Reuters reports FIFA has even partnered with the Board on a football-linked reconstruction plan, complete with fundraising targets and infrastructure deliverables. Nigeria should resist the temptation to sneer at the messenger and instead interrogate the method: a tight, disciplined mechanism that treats peace as an engineering problem—clear authority, defined roles, measurable outputs, relentless coordination. Because Nigeria’s failure is not a shortage of agencies; it is a shortage of coherence. Think of Kaiama. After such an attack, the country typically produces condemnation, a visit, and a deployment—important, yes, but often isolated: the military moves, humanitarian relief lags, intelligence remains compartmentalised, arrests are rare, prosecutions rarer, and survivors are left with ashes and speeches. Now imagine a different script. Within hours of the first reports, a properly empowered Federal–State Security and Peace Council convenes as an operational steering room, not a condolence committee. It issues one unified threat picture, one incident command structure, and one coordinated response plan: immediate protection, evacuation corridors, a joint investigative team with time-bound deliverables, an integrated relief package, and a public accountability update every 72 hours until the perpetrators are identified and networks disrupted. The point is not bureaucracy; it is tempo. Terror moves fast. The state must move faster. But tempo alone is not enough if legitimacy is missing. In too many communities, government is either absent or present in ways that feel extractive. That is where violent groups thrive—not only by killing, but by competing for authority: controlling roads, taxing locals, deciding who is “safe,” and punishing those who resist. The Kaiama tragedy reportedly followed community refusal to accept extremist demands—proof that citizens sometimes resist first, and the state arrives later. A serious peace architecture would build protection around that courage, not memorialise it afterwards. This is why Nigeria needs a Village-to-State Peace Architecture that is real, not rhetorical. In Borgu, residents said attackers operated freely, and security presence was thin. A functioning local peace and early-warning chain would not magically stop every raid, but it would change the odds: community watch structures tied to formal security desks; trusted reporting channels that do not expose informants; local leaders—traditional, religious, youth—integrated into prevention and stabilisation, not summoned only for burial prayers. When early warnings are treated as intelligence rather than gossip, you start intercepting recruitment, movements, and supply routes before they harden into massacres. Niger State’s own response around the Kainji Lake axis hints at what “state presence” can look like when the government recognises a corridor’s strategic importance. The state issued a two-month ultimatum for communities around Kainji Lake to vacate for resettlement as part of efforts to flush out criminals operating in the area. Whether one agrees with every detail, the example matters: the government is acknowledging that ungoverned spaces become criminal economies. The national question is why such recognition is not standard doctrine everywhere insecurity spreads—why we keep treating each theatre as a separate emergency rather than a connected system. And the system is regional. Forest corridors and arms routes do not stop at state boundaries; they certainly do not stop at national borders. That is why Nigeria’s response cannot be purely domestic. A Lake Chad–West Africa Security Coordination Council—Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Benin—should function like a standing operations alignment table: shared intelligence protocols, synchronised patrols, agreed border triggers, and a single combined strategy against networks that relocate at the moment pressure rises. Without that, you clear one corridor and watch violence reappear across the nearest seam. Still, no council—however efficient—wins a war that poverty keeps recruiting for. In the same communities where gunmen raid, young people also negotiate joblessness, collapsed schooling, and a future that feels closed. If all the state offers is force, the gun remains a competing employer. Nigeria needs examples that touch lives: mobile vocational training hubs in high-risk LGAs; rapid apprenticeship schemes tied to local construction and agro-processing; small grants linked to real mentorship and markets; rehabilitation pathways that separate coercion from ideology, and ideology from criminality. This is not charity. It is stabilisation—turning vulnerable youth from targets of recruitment into stakeholders in order. The hardest lesson in all this is humility. The world is experimenting—sometimes clumsily—with new peace and reconstruction models, while Nigeria remains stuck in reactive routines. The lesson is not to import Trump’s temperament. It is to borrow the discipline of a focused steering structure and adapt it to our constitutional reality: authority without arrogance, inclusivity without paralysis, force with legitimacy, and security fused to livelihoods. Until we build that kind of coherence, we will keep counting bodies after raids, issuing statements after flames, and calling it governance—while the republic bleeds, village by village, into a future it can no longer afford. •Dakuku Peterside is the author of two best-selling books, Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface.