JUST when Nigerians thought the worst was behind us, the ghosts came back. Last Monday, suicide bombers struck at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital and two markets ,Post Office and Monday Market killing at least 23 people and wounding over 108 others. The bombs went off at the entrance of a hospital. Let that sink in. A place where people go to save lives became a place where lives were snuffed out.
For those of us who lived through the dark years between 2011 and 2015, the images from Maiduguri last week were painfully familiar. Going to church or mosque was an extreme sport. Market women said their prayers before stepping out to sell tomatoes. Barricades became permanent fixtures at the entrance of worship centres. Schools shut down for weeks at a time.
Parents in the northeast were afraid to send their children anywhere. Then gradually, painstakingly, the military pushed Boko Haram back, reclaimed territories, and the suicide bombings reduced. Maiduguri had not seen a major attack since 2021. Nigerians exhaled. We thought we had turned a corner. Maybe we exhaled too soon.
The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) confirmed the toll. Police spokesman Nahum Kenneth Daso said preliminary investigations revealed the attacks were carried out by suspected suicide bombers. “Suspected” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, but we will let the investigators do their work.
What is not in dispute is the pattern. In the last month alone, Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have carried out several attacks on army bases across Borno, killing at least 50 soldiers and seizing weapons. Fifty soldiers. That number should be screaming from every front page in the country but we have become so desensitised to carnage in the northeast that the death of soldiers barely trends for 24 hours on social media before we move on to the next political gossip. A country that does not mourn its fallen soldiers properly has no business pretending to care about national security.
President Bola Tinubu, to his credit, reacted swiftly. He expressed grief, offered condolences, and directed his security chiefs to deploy to Maiduguri and take charge. Good. That is what a Commander-in-Chief should do. But we have been here before. Presidents have ordered security chiefs to relocate to trouble spots more times than I can count.
Former President Muhammadu Buhari did the same thing multiple times and we are still counting dead bodies. The real question is what happens after the cameras leave and the security chiefs fly back to Abuja. Will there be a sustained, intelligence-driven operation or will it be business as usual? Nigerians are tired of the cycle ;attack, outrage, condolence, deployment, then silence until the next bomb goes off.
The bombing happened less than 24 hours after the military repelled a separate militant attack on the outskirts of Maiduguri. So in the space of two days, the city that is widely considered the birthplace of Boko Haram faced two major security incidents. That tells you something about the resilience and audacity of these terrorists. They are not defeated. They are regrouping, adapting, and probing for weak points.
Now to the conspiracy theorists. As predictable as rain in Lagos during July, some people have started peddling the narrative that the bombings were orchestrated to embarrass the Tinubu administration or to stop the President from embarking on his state visit to the United Kingdom.
According to this school of thought, the opposition is afraid the UK visit will strengthen Tinubu’s hand ahead of the 2027 elections. I have heard many ridiculous things in my years of covering Nigerian politics, but this one deserves a special award.
This is the kind of thinking that trivialises the suffering of victims and their families.
Let me be blunt. Anyone who sponsors terrorism for political gain is worse than the terrorists themselves. The terrorist may be driven by a warped ideology, but the sponsor is driven by nothing but raw, cold-blooded ambition. If there is any truth to the claim that some politicians bankroll these groups and I have heard this allegation from credible security sources over the years then the Tinubu administration has no excuse not to go after them. No matter whose ox is gored. We have been paying lip service to the idea of prosecuting terror sponsors since the GoodluckJonathan administration.
How many sponsors have been arrested? How many have been prosecuted? How many are sitting in jail right now? The answer to all three questions is the same ,virtually none.
That is the real scandal. Not who is sponsoring what conspiracy, but why a country that has lost tens of thousands of citizens to terrorism in 15 years has not successfully prosecuted a single major terror financier. The money that buys the explosives, the vehicles, the logistics it comes from somewhere. Follow the money. Arrest the paymasters. Prosecute them publicly. Let Nigerians see that there are consequences.
But it was not all gloom last week. The military also recorded a significant victory in Malam Fatori, Abadam Local Government Area of Borno State. Troops of Operation Hadin Kai, supported by the Nigerian Air Force, repelled a major ISWAP attack, killing at least 75 insurgents. Initial reports had put the number at 61, but updated assessments from mop-up operations pushed the figure higher.
The insurgents had advanced on foot toward the 68 Battalion location, deploying armed drones in an attempt to breach defensive lines. Armed drones. Think about that for a moment ,these are no longer ragtag fighters with machetes, they are deploying technology. But they were detected early and met with devastating firepower. Four precision air strikes were conducted on terrorist withdrawal routes, and allied air assets from Niger Republic also carried out additional strikes on fleeing fighters. Troops recovered a large cache of arms and ammunition.
On the military’s side, only four soldiers sustained minor injuries. That is the kind of result that restores some measure of confidence.
This is the kind of result that shows what our military is capable of when coordination works. The success of that operation was built on intelligence, joint air-ground coordination, and swift response. That is the template. Not reactive deployments after bombings, but proactive, intelligence-led operations that take the fight to the terrorists before they bring it to the civilian population.
The Malam Fatori success also proves another point I have made repeatedly on this page,the military is not the problem. The problem is political will, funding, intelligence infrastructure, and the willingness to sustain pressure over time instead of surging after every headline and then going quiet. Our soldiers are dying in that northeast bush in numbers that would cause a political crisis in any other country. The least we owe them is a government that is serious about ending this war, not just managing it.
The return of suicide bombings is a wake-up call that we cannot afford to ignore. The insurgency in the northeast has lasted nearly two decades. It has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced over two million people. Maiduguri, a city that should be thriving as a commercial hub in the Sahel, has instead become synonymous with terrorism. The people of Borno have suffered more than any community should in peacetime. They have buried too many children, rebuilt too many markets, attended too many funerals. They deserve better. And they deserve a government that treats their security as a priority, not an afterthought that only gets attention when bombs go off.
President Tinubu needs to move beyond condolences and deployment orders. Three things need to happen and they need to happen now. One, a renewed and sustained military campaign that does not stop after the headlines fade. The Malam Fatori operation showed us what is possible when coordination works ,make that the standard, not the exception.
Two, a serious, public effort to identify and prosecute terror sponsors and financiers not whispered intelligence reports but actual arrests and trials that Nigerians can see. Three, a long-term investment in deradicalisation, education, and economic opportunities in the northeast to drain the swamp that breeds these extremists. You cannot bomb your way out of an insurgency that feeds on poverty, illiteracy, and hopelessness.
The ghosts of suicide bombings past are back. The question is whether this government will put them to rest permanently or whether we will keep mourning, keep issuing condolences, and keep waiting for the next explosion. These are the issues.
- Nda-Isaiah is a political analyst based in Abuja and can be reached on jonesdryx@gmail.com. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Saturday.