Can a new national peace policy fix Nigeria’s security problems?

Filed 17h ago · Via Global Voices · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Goblin Tinker Soldier Spy

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Diplomatic Security Service from Washington, D.C., United St · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Nigeria is reviewing a National Peace Policy meant to coordinate conflict prevention as insurgency, banditry, and mass kidnapping persist across the country, with at least 7,825 people abducted between July 2025 and June 2026. Military spending rose 55 percent to USD 2.1 billion even as President Tinubu approved 28,000 more soldiers, part of a pattern of expanding force without resolving the underlying violence.

Officials meeting in Abuja, Kano, Enugu, and Lagos are trying to finish what a 2012 draft policy never accomplished: formal adoption. The policy's architects, including OSPRE director-general Chris Ngwodo, openly concede it will not solve the security crisis, framing it instead as a shift toward addressing governance failures, injustice, and neglect.

A presidential adviser told the same gathering that Nigeria cannot ‘shoot its way out’ of the problem, a notable admission given the country's own recent troop expansion.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A country can write a peace policy in a conference room in Abuja a lot faster than it can fix the reasons people go hungry or unheard. The last one sat on a shelf for over a decade while the shooting went on regardless, and nobody in this new round of meetings pretends different documents write different outcomes on their own. Give credit for the honesty of the adviser who admitted force alone won't do it. Now watch whether the follow-through matches the memo.

Source: Read the original at Global Voices → Scored: Goblin Tinker Soldier Spy · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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