NIGERIA is bleeding in places the nation rarely names until the funerals force a headline. In just the past two weeks, insurgent violence has torn through Kaiama Local Government in Kwara State and the Borgu–Agwara axis in Niger State frontier territories that now look less like “outliers” and more like previews of a wider, entrenched security crisis that has outlived slogans, committees, and annual budget lines.
On Wednesday, no fewer than 33 residents of Bui District in Arewa LGA of Kebbi State were killed by Lakurawa terrorists in a reported attempt to rustle cattle. Zamfara State was on Friday thrown into mourning as bandits reportedly killed no fewer than 50 residents of Dutsin Dan Ajiya village, Anka Local Government area of the state.
The familiar cycle repeats: attack, outrage, official visit, troop deployment, a brief lull, then the next rupture—often in the same corridors, often with the same pattern of impunity. A country that should be planning growth is instead managing grief.
It is hard not to notice the cruel contrast: while the world scrambles to de-escalate agony in Gaza and argue over ceasefires, reconstruction plans, and post-war governance, Nigeria’s own war of attrition expands quietly, almost domesticated by repetition. Into that global argument walks an unexpected proposal from Donald Trump: a “Board of Peace” blueprint—an attempt, however controversial, to build a tight steering structure for conflict resolution and post-war rebuilding.
One can distrust the man, question the motives, reject the branding, and still admit the underlying logic is worth examining: a small, decisive council with a narrow mandate, a clear chain of command, measurable outcomes, and the audacity to treat peace not as sentiment but as engineering.
Nigeria’s mistake has never been a shortage of institutions. There is a shortage of coherence. We have agencies, commands, task forces, operations with dramatic names, and overlapping mandates that multiply paperwork but dilute accountability. We do not consistently have one authoritative table where the federation federal and state can look itself in the eye, agree on a doctrine, align intelligence, coordinate response, and hold political actors to a shared discipline that outlasts party cycles and personality clashes. Insecurity thrives in the seams: between federal and state jurisdictions, between communities and formal security, between military operations and civilian stabilisation, between border management and regional diplomacy. When policy is fragmented, violence becomes organised.
This is where the “Board of Peace” idea—stripped of foreign ideology—becomes a useful mirror. Its core proposition is not moral superiority; it is structural seriousness. It says: stop pretending that endless deliberation is a strategy. Build a steering mechanism that can decide, direct, and deliver. Nigeria needs a version of that seriousness at home: a Federal–State Security and Peace Council with real executive weight and firm legislative anchoring, designed not for photo opportunities but for operational clarity.
Its mandate should be brutally practical: harmonise national and subnational security policy; set triggers for rapid response; enforce inter-agency coordination; publish routine performance summaries that make failure visible and success measurable. Not a committee that “meets” when tragedy strikes, but a council that governs security the way a serious country governs inflation—continuously, transparently, and with consequences.
Yet structure alone cannot defeat terror if the country remains politically fractured at the moment it needs unity most. Terrorism and bandit networks feed on distrust: distrust between regions, between faiths, between parties, between citizens and security forces. Fragmentation is not just a political problem; it is a tactical advantage handed to criminals.
No insurgency is defeated by a divided society arguing over whose pain counts more. Nigeria must learn the hardest lesson of counter-terrorism: unity is not a slogan, it is a security requirement. The country has to mobilise across party lines, religious lines, ethnic lines, and class lines—because violence does not respect any of them. If we cannot build a minimum national consensus on what constitutes an attack on all of us, we will keep reacting as separate camps to a shared catastrophe. When terrorism was rife in Pakistan, they called a council of all political parties to tackle the problem and they succeeded.
And then there is the deeper question that Nigeria often avoids because it is uncomfortable: legitimacy. Guns do not only kill; they compete. Armed groups compete with the state for authority—by imposing fear, collecting taxes, controlling routes, arbitrating disputes, and offering a perverse kind of “order” where the state is absent or despised.
In many of our threatened spaces, the state is either missing, inconsistent, or present in ways that feel predatory. Where government is absent, violent actors fill the vacuum. Where government is present but corrupt or brutal, citizens withdraw their loyalty. Where justice is slow or selective, resentment becomes recruitment fuel. This is why counter-terrorism cannot be only kinetic. If legitimacy collapses, security becomes a temporary occupation rather than a durable peace.
A Nigerian adaptation of a “Board of Peace” mentality must therefore start from the ground up, not just top-down. We need a Village-to-State Peace Architecture that integrates local legitimacy into the formal security chain: local peace committees linked to security desks; traditional rulers and faith leaders treated as structured partners in early warning, not ceremonial mourners; youth councils empowered to intercept recruitment pathways, not summoned for occasional “engagement” sessions that produce photos and no protection.
This kind of architecture does three things Nigeria urgently needs: it rolls back extremist narratives by making communities authors of their own defence; it rebuilds trust by creating predictable channels of response; and it strengthens early warning so threats are disrupted before they become mass graves.
But Nigeria’s crisis is not only internal; it is regionalised.
Forest corridors do not stop at state lines, and arms markets do not respect borders. The Borgu–Agwara–Kaiama frontier is not just a domestic security map; it is a cross-border reality of routes, hideouts, and supply chains. The Lake Chad theatre has long proven that insurgency becomes durable when national efforts are undermined by neighbouring safe havens, inconsistent joint operations, and fragmented intelligence.
A serious steering model must therefore have a regional spine: a Lake Chad–West Africa Security Coordination Council that brings Nigeria together with Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and Benin in a disciplined operational design—shared threat picture, joint patrol frameworks, real-time intelligence protocols, synchronised operations, and a clear division of responsibilities between kinetic actions and stabilisation. The objective is simple: replace the current patchwork of overlapping initiatives with a coordinated system where militants cannot simply relocate across the nearest seam.
Still, no council can end insecurity if the country keeps mass-producing vulnerability. Nigeria’s violence is sustained by an economics of despair: poverty, joblessness, a huge youth bulge, uneven development, and rural neglect that turns grievances into markets for recruitment. Every time we treat development as a separate conversation from security, we miss the point. Skills, jobs, infrastructure, and basic services are not charity; they are tools for stabilisation.
A Nigeria that wants peace must invest like it wants peace: expand TVET and vocational training in the most vulnerable regions; tie that training to real labour demand; invest in rural roads, power, water, primary healthcare, and education as pillars of state presence; build credible pathways for young people to see a future that is not mediated by a gun. Without this, every tactical victory is temporary, because the soil that grows violence remains fertile.
Porous borders and small-arms proliferation complete the trap. They are not merely security gaps; they are symptoms of weak governance and weak regional coordination. When rifles travel more freely than citizens’ rights, when smugglers outrun the state, when illicit arms flow into local conflicts and turn them into massacres, the nation is not simply unsafe it is ungoverned.
A Nigerian “Board of Peace” logic must therefore treat border management and arms control as national priorities: deploy modern border technology, fund joint patrols, enforce regional agreements, and prosecute trafficking networks with the seriousness reserved for financial crimes. Security gains cannot hold if the border remains a revolving door.
There is another sting Nigerians should not ignore: the symbolism of being left out. The emergence of new ad hoc global steering initiatives—however controversial—signals a shifting world where influence increasingly belongs to those considered stable, credible, and bankable. When Nigeria is absent from such circles, it is not always because we lack size or resources; it is often because volatility has become our export brand. A country that cannot secure its own highways and villages gradually loses the moral leverage to speak loudly in global peace conversations, even when it has the population, diplomacy, and endowments to matter.
Credibility is not inherited; it is maintained. Tunisia is a good example. At the heat of terrorism in Tunisia, the strengthen governance, rule of law, political and institutional structures, and human rights processes. This stifled terrorism and entrenched peace.
So the lesson is not to imitate Trump’s temperament or import authoritarian instincts. The lesson is to borrow discipline: the form of a focused steering council that combines authority with inclusivity and measures success by outcomes rather than announcements. Nigeria needs a security architecture that looks less like a chain of ad hoc responses and more like a coherent system—one that unifies the federation, rebuilds legitimacy from the village up, seals regional seams, couples force with opportunity, and treats borders and arms as the strategic bloodstream of this crisis.
Until then, the republic will keep bleeding one “remote” community at a time, while the world drafts blueprints for other conflicts and quietly moves on without us.
- Dr Dakuku Peterside is the author of bestsellers, Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Monday.