Marte, the headquarters of the eponymous Local Government  Area, LGA, on the western floodplains of the Lake Chad in Borno State, North-East Nigeria, has been a site of lingering contest between Nigerian troops on the one hand and Islamist insurgents of Boko Haram on the other for over one decade.  At 3,154 km 2, Marte LGA  is just a little under the size of all of Lagos State.

For a while between 2014 and 2015, Boko Haram reportedly bivouacked in Marte on its way to its more permanent operational headquarters in the Sambisa Forest. For much of 2015, control of the town exchanged hands in succession between the Nigerian  Army and Boko Haram.

Around May 2015,  Boko Haram reportedly took back the city  from the Nigerian troops who had held it for three months from February of the same year.

For the most part, Nigeria has controlled Marte thereafter with the exception of a brief duration in 2021, when the Islamic State West  Africa Province, ISWAP,  temporarily visited  havoc upon a military base  in Marte.

All that appears to have changed recently.  Around Monday, 12 May 2025, Islamist insurgents reportedly attacked the Forward Operating Base of the 153rd  Task Force Battalion in Marte, resulting in considerable carnage. Sources familiar with the early morning attack reported that “over 10 soldiers were killed and hundreds of personnel deserted. The (terrorists) burnt down armoured tanks and made away with arms and ammunition.” The beleaguered governor of Borno State, Babagana Zulum, has been left appealing to his ruling  All Progressives Congress, APC, to ensure that Marte does not fall back into the hands of Boko Haram and its allies.

In the same week that they attacked Marte, the insurgents  also attacked the 3rd Battalion base  in Rann, in Kala Balge district, killing at least five soldiers and leaving at least four others  reportedly injured. The intensity and scope of the attacks by Boko Haram in Borno State in the past six months led the state governor to raise an alarm last  April, suggesting that the country was “losing ground” in the fight against Islamist terror.

National Security  Adviser, NSA, Nuhu Ribadu, a retired  Assistant Inspector-General of the Nigeria Police Force, who has run for and is credibly rumoured to retain ambitions for another tilt at the presidency, ostensibly failed to get the governor’s memorandum.  Addressing the National Summit, so-called, of the  APC, the NSA  claimed to have killed 13,543 Boko Haram elements in the first two years of the administration and recovered over 11,000 arms from them.

He notably did not mention the haul of arms the insurgents have been busy harvesting from Nigerian military formations. Over the same period,  he claimed  “124,408 Boko Haram fighters and their families” also surrendered.

It is unfortunate that the ruling party has chosen to make national security a party political matter. It is even more tragic that the wannabe political opposition have allowed them to get away with it. The result is a vacuum of leadership in the security sector filled and fed with an atrocious body count of Nigerian casualties whose death and suffering barely registers on the priorities of the people supposed to protect the country, its people and communities.

The central problem is a failure of strategy.  To understand this, it is necessary to explain that the presidency is many jobs in one.  A  president is – among other things – party leader, chief marketer of the country, head of government, and Commander-in-Chief of the  Armed Forces.

Every one of these roles of the president can be delegated except the last.  As Commander-in-Chief, the president sets security strategy.

For over 50 years, Nigeria’s national security strategy docked onto the neighbourhood of the Economic Community of West  African States, ECOWAS.  There was good reason for that.

The country’s northern boundaries feed into the southern rim of the Sahel. With Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger to its north as founding members of ECOWAS, the country could count solidly on friendly neighbours as buffers against the historical brutalities of Sahelian violence.

This understanding was at the heart of the transformation of the ECOWAS from an economic integration arrangement envisioned at its foundation in 1975 into a  collective security  arrangement  in 1981. For much of the period since then, this arrangement held together.

However, following the military coup in Niger Republic in July 2023, the country lost its marbles and decided to bite its nose in order to spite its sovereign face. On behalf of ECOWAS, President Tinubu committed the blunder of threatening to invade another member of the ECOWAS collective security arrangement. He alone knows what he was thinking.

The hubris of President Tinubu’s handling of the coup crisis in Nigeria is inexplicable.

With a landmass of over 1.267 million km2, Niger Republic constituted about 22 percent of the 5.8 million km 2 of the landmass of ECOWAS.  The idea of an invasion of the country in order to militarily restore the ousted administration of President Mohamed Bazoum was always worse than bluster; it was plainly unviable.

In invoking war against Niger on behalf of ECOWAS, President  Tinubu managed in one stroke to violate the prohibition against the use of force in international law; create the impression that Nigeria’s Sahelian neighbours did not matter; and suggest that France was a more important factor to Nigeria’s neighbourhood strategy than its immediate neighbours.

That much should have been evident to the people who thought up the idea. But the damage was beyond a resort to fantastic bluster where hard-nosed rationality was needed. The costs have been prohibitive and rising; and the result has been devastating.

In September 2023, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger  created their own collective security  arrangement  and orbited off into the realm of Russia’s mercenary diplomacy. Since then, the  consequences for Nigeria have been stark. In the period since September 2023 and despite the fantasies of NSA  Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s internal security situation has disintegrated into mayhem.

In the North-West states of Sokoto and Kebbi, a new terror group,  Lakurawa, has taken root. South of Kebbi, in Kwara State,  another new terror group, Mahmuda, runs murderously rampant. To the east of Kwara in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, vast swathes of territory and communities in Benue, Nasarawa, and Plateau states are being emptied in intense attacks credited to so-called “foreign herdsmen.”

The politicians are reluctant to acknowledge what is obvious and the soldiers have been trained not to say that their Commander-in-Chief has left them in an insecurity pickle. But that is exactly what President Tinubu has done with the way he has brought about the transformation of ECOWAS from an integrated security arrangement for the region into a rump of an association of  Atlantic West  African States, AAWAS.

The evidence is everywhere in the rising casualty count which NSA  Nuhu Ribadu will not acknowledge.  According to monitoring coalition, Nigeria Mourns, 4,416 people were killed in atrocities in Nigeria in 2023. In 2024, President Tinubu’s first full year in office,  the number  rose 21.2 percent to 5,353, including 308 security personnel. And 88.5 percent of these killings occurred in Northern Nigeria.  Another  5,171 were abducted. Behind these numbers are people, families, communities, traumas that both Nuhu Ribadu and the ruling  APC will not allow Nigerians to see, hear, acknowledge or mourn. They are the experiences of loss and indignity that the dissolute wannabes in the Peoples  Democratic Party, PDP, and the Labour Party, LP, cannot bring themselves to ask the  APC to account for or acknowledge.

On 28 May, the civic Coalition  Nigeria Mourns  invites all Nigerians wherever they may be to spare a thought for all these victims and their loved ones in a  National Day of Mourning,  NDoM,  “to rage, resist, and demand action from the government” in memory of all who have  been killed or violated.  A  more responsible government would not have waited for a group of un- armed, un-elected citizens to remind them.

*A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at  [email protected]

Economic patriotism: The Abdul Samad and Aliko Dangote example

By OTEGA OGRA and TEMITOPE AJAYI

There is a particular kind of 

silence that greets progress in Nigeria—when food prices fall, inflation slows, the country is positively recognised, debts paid, or things begin to work. It is the kind of silence that would rather keep a good story buried than be told. But make no mistake. What we see in the market today is not magic. It is the outcome of vision, backed by execution, from the Tinubu-Shettima administration.

When President Bola Tinubu signed off on a six-month waiver to allow the importation of select food items, it was not an act of political showmanship. Rather, it was a visionary economic strategy at play. That singular decision broke a cartel of hoarders who had turned food insecurity into an immoral enterprise. But strategy alone does not and cannot lower the cost of rice. What does is when industry leaders respond with urgency.

Last week at the Aso Villa, the seat of the Presidency in Abuja, Abdul Samad Rabiu, did not just show up to thank   President Bola Tinubu, he came prepared and showed up with results. He brought evidence—bag by bag, commodity by commodity—of how Mr. President’s policy met action. Rice that once sold for N110,000 for 50kg bag now sells for less than N70,000. Flour is down. Maize is down. And for once, the loudest people in the room are the ones who used to profit from scarcity, not the ones out to end the criminal   profiteering.

What happened here was disruption. The BUA team, as well as other major Nigerian manufacturers and industrialists who heeded President Tinubu’s call, understood the assignment. They flooded the market, shattered the economics of hoarding, and exposed a truth few want to say: sometimes, the real enemy is not the system. It is the silence and sabotage that follow reform.

But Alhaji Rabiu did not stop at food. He announced a second move upon the advice of fellow billionaire industrialist Aliko Dangote, which was just as consequential. In an economy that is recovering from FX volatility, energy price surges, and imported inflation, cement manufacturers have decided to freeze the price of cement, not for everyone, but for every contractor working under the government’s Renewed Hope infrastructure projects. This is not charity at play. This is alignment. Our two big businessmen understand the time, and they are doing their businesses conscious of the need to balance profitability with social responsibility. We have Aliko Dangote and Abdul Samad Rabiu to thank for leading the way and showing how to be worthy examples to Corporate Nigeria. The truth is that the business environment has been quite challenging. While this is so, there is also the problem of arbitrariness in how prices of goods and services have moved in the last two years. Many businessmen and women have taken undue advantage of Nigerians to engage in price gouging, unduly raising   the cost of living for average Nigerians.  

Cement isn’t just a product. It is the bloodline of infrastructure. By holding the price steady for public works under the Renewed Hope Agenda, Dangote Cement, BUA Cement, Lafarge, and new entrant like Mangal Cement didn’t just make a corporate gesture. They bought the government fiscal room, time, and momentum. That is what nation-building looks like when it wears a private-sector face.

It gets deeper. Working with Aliko Dangote, Abdul Samad Rabiu in the same spirit of putting country first, other cement manufacturers are partnering with the two prime movers in the cement manufacturing sector to resuscitate the Cement Technology Institute of Nigeria, pledging up to N20 billion annually to train artisans, real human capacity, not PowerPoint plans. We live in Nigeria, where, for the longest time,   conversations about growth rarely touch skills.     This novel move is, therefore, a bet on people because when people are trained, projects do not just get built but they endure.

President Tinubu alluded to something important during that meeting. He did not just commend BUA, he called the actions of the private sector who have taken a bet on Nigeria throughout this period, “economic patriotism.” Whilst many sit on the sidelines waiting for stability before they act, it matters when Nigerians step in to create it.

Nigeria does not just need big men, it also needs bold moves. What Rabiu, Dangote, and their peers are doing from freezing prices and disrupting hoarding to funding technical skills is not corporate PR. It is policy execution, and that is what separates firms that extract value from those that build it.

In this phase of Nigeria’s transformation, we will need more of the latter. Our country can make do with more businessmen and women who understand that the private sector is not a spectator sport; that stability is not gifted but engineered. And that to win the confidence of 250 million people, you must show, not tell, that the future of Nigeria is under construction.

And if we tell these positive stories loud enough and well, if we stop whispering good news while bad actors shout, we may just shift the national mood from that of despair and hopelessness to productivity.  

We make bold this statement because, when industry starts to move like this, it is more than just a market correction. It is a clear signal that the tide is turning positively.  

Our country must be a nation of strong, hopeful, and productive people. While some of the challenges of nation-building still persist, we must never shy away from telling those who take undue advantage of fellow citizens that businesses can still make fair and decent profit and not overburden citizens.

President Tinubu knew from his first day in office that the task of reforming and retooling our economy for optimum performance would not be easy. He also knew what would be his place in history if he refused to take the difficult but necessary decisions that would create medium – and long-term sustainability and prosperity for Nigerians.  

Truly, the last two years have posed some economic challenges for Nigerians. As the reforms kick in, the macroeconomic variables are turning positive. The fiscal space is becoming more robust. National and subnational debts are being repaid, investors’ confidence growing faster at higher rate than last decade. Nigeria is getting more favourable credit rating from global institutions, inflation slowing down and the country is in stronger balance of trade position with more robust foreign reserves.  

All these positive indicators point to how effective the policy prescriptions have been. The government is also working hard to tackle insecurity across the country with remarkable progress.   At the same time, the government is investing in critical infrastructure such as   roads, energy, rail, ports, irrigation, and social services.

Overall, the economy recorded 3.84 percent GDP growth in Q4 2024, the highest in three years. The President Tinubu-led administration restored a new wave of final investment decisions into the oil and gas sector by signing an executive order that shortened the contracting cycle and free up more fiscal incentives. On the back of these, the hydrocarbon economy has been bolstered by over $8 billion in new investments from SHELL, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies.  

The economy prospects are very bright, and the shared prosperity promised by President Tinubu is crystalising. Nigeria only needs more patriotic and passionate citizens who will always commit to national development and advancement.

As the President has always said, the future of Nigeria will be one built by Nigerians, for Nigeria, and indeed, for Africa. No one, but ourselves, will build the Nigeria of our collective dream or Africa for us. The time to build together is now!