Over the last few weeks, Nigeria has once again witnessed a painful resurgence of coordinated attacks by Islamic terrorist groups across several states. These incidents coming after the declaration of the country as a “Country of Particular Concern” by US President, Donald Trump seem to have become even more vicious and sadistic. Just last week, Brigadier General Muhammed Uba, Commander of the Nigerian Army’s 25 Task Force Brigade was captured and killed in Damboa, Borno State. This week gun-wielding terrorists invaded a church in Eruku, Kwara state, and kidnapped a number of church goers. Also this week 25 girls were kidnapped from the GGCSS, Maga, Kebbi State. Each of these incidents brings grief, and the reminder that the country’s security architecture is still struggling to stay ahead of fast-evolving threats.
The Nigerian Army, overstretched and courageously holding the line, cannot win this fight alone. It is time for Nigeria’s digital institutions—the Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, and the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), and the Ministry of the Interior take their rightful place in our national security strategy.
In Nigeria, terrorism has moved beyond the battlefield. Terror groups now recruit online, coordinate operations via encrypted channels, move funds digitally, and exploit gaps in national identification systems. The capture of General Uba by the terrorists in particular shows that the fight against terrorists them must therefore evolve beyond guns, boots on the ground, and conventional intelligence. Nigeria’s response must be digital, data-driven, and proactive.
The Ministry of Communications and NITDA are uniquely positioned to enable this shift. They control the levers of national digital infrastructure, cybersecurity frameworks, identity systems, innovation ecosystems, and telecommunications regulation. By working hand-in-hand with the military and intelligence services, they can transform Nigeria’s counter-terrorism posture in five concrete ways.
Nigeria must strengthen its national digital surveillance and intelligence layer. Terror groups thrive partly because our security agencies do not always have real-time visibility into their movements. The Ministry should coordinate nationwide deployment of smart CCTV hubs, drone surveillance in ungoverned spaces, and satellite image integration from NASRDA.These can feed into a single command-and-control centre accessible to the military and DSS. This is not science fiction—Kenya, India, and even smaller African nations already use such systems to guide security responses within minutes.
Telecommunication companies must be more tightly integrated into national security. There is no modern counter-terror operation without telecom intelligence. The Ministry of Communications should mandate telcos to provide real-time geolocation data of suspicious numbers, expand compliance with biometric SIM verification, and support emergency network shut-offs in high-risk zones when needed. With proper safeguards, call metadata—not content—can be enough to uncover entire operational cells.
Nigeria desperately needs a tamper-proof national identity backbone. Terror networks thrive on fake identities, unregistered SIMs, and falsified documents. In Nigeria at the moment, there is no coordination between the various agencies demanding citizen data. Integrating NIN, BVN, voter ID, passport and telco data into a blockchain-based national registry would drastically reduce anonymity. The Army and other security agencies should have secure field access to verify identities in seconds. Without fixing identity fragmentation, Nigeria cannot fix insecurity. Here is where the Ministry of Communication and the Digital Economy and the Ministry of Interior should visibly be collaborating and showing a united front to solve this problem, but both ministries have decided to work in silos, each doing its own thing while the elephant in the room remains unaddressed.
We must bring Nigeria’s tech ecosystem into the security conversation. All over Nigeria world-class innovators building drones, AI models, cybersecurity tools, and mapping systems. But none of these are systematically connected to defence needs. Through NITDA, the government can fund defence-tech innovation challenges, commission startups to build surveillance or predictive intelligence tools, and ensure that innovation serves national stability, not just commercial markets.
Beyond the technology itself, the digital institutions must also invest in training the Nigerian Army. Digital literacy, drone operation, OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) analysis, and GIS-mapping skills should become standard in military training schools. A modern army cannot rely solely on traditional intelligence; it must interpret data, use data, and act on data.
Some may argue that the military already has intelligence units. True. But no modern nation secures itself by siloing security institutions from digital institutions. Terrorism today is not just a military problem, it is a technological problem, an information problem, and a data management problem. The Ministry of Communications, The Ministry of Interior and NITDA must become core pillars of national defence.
However, all the talk about using technology to solve all these security challenges, there must be a concerted effort by the government itself to attack these issues at the root. That based on current evidence has been absent from the governments at all levels, particularly the federal government. The war against terror is much more a war of hearts and minds as much as it is a war of technology. All the cyber gadgets in the world cannot win a war in which the commander in chief himself seems to be nonchalant, the army is stretched to its limit in terms of resources, and the police and other internal law enforcement agencies are at sea as to what their role is in the whole security architechture against insurgencies.
Nigeria cannot keep reacting to attacks after lives have been lost or people have been kidnapped. And whatever economic and technological milestones the government may claim to have achieved is ultimately worthless if the country’s security is not secure.
The future of national security lies in prevention, prediction, and digital dominance. If we do not adapt, terrorists will continue exploiting our technological weaknesses. But if the Communications Ministry, NITDA and the Ministry of Interior step forward boldly, aligning Nigeria’s internal security, data management, and digital capabilities with its security machinery, we can finally shift from being one step behind to being two steps ahead.
The battlefield has changed. Our response must change with it.
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