At about 2 p.m. on Friday, August 21, Muslims gathered for Juma’at prayers at a mosque in Kpenya, a community in Dekara District of Borgu Local Government Area of Niger State. For the worshippers, it was an ordinary Friday afternoon. Until armed men stormed the community.
Within minutes, worshippers were being marched away towards the surrounding forests.
The attackers also raided nearby communities, including Gidan-Zana and Sabon-Gida. By the time they left, scores of people had reportedly been abducted and about 30 people were dead. Thousands more fled, some across the border into neighbouring Benin Republic.
Then came a disturbing complication. A video circulated showing what appeared to be hundreds of women, children and elderly people being held in a forest by armed men. Residents who watched it said they recognised relatives among the captives. Some estimated that as many as 600 people had been taken.
The exact figure has remained difficult to establish. Initial official accounts put the number abducted at about 60, while the larger figure suggested by the video has not been independently verified. More than two weeks later, the exact number of those abducted remains unclear, and there has also been no news of a mass rescue or release of the captives.
The episode raises a question that goes beyond Kpenya: how can Nigeria stop waiting for the storm before reading the weather?
The question matters because the Niger State attack was not an isolated incident. A report by SBM Intelligence found that 7,825 people were kidnapped in Nigeria between July 2025 and June 2026, with at least 1,142 people killed. Confirmed ransom payments amounted to about $5.79 million, although the real figure is likely higher because many payments are never disclosed.
At those numbers, kidnapping is no longer simply a criminal nuisance. It has become part of Nigeria’s national security landscape.
And that forces us to reconsider what we mean by national security.
Nigeria has become remarkably familiar with the mechanics of crisis response. A village is attacked, troops are deployed. Schoolchildren are abducted, a rescue operation begins. Terrorists strike, security agencies respond. Criminal gangs establish a new corridor, another operation is mounted.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. A state must be capable of responding with force when force is required. Soldiers and police officers cannot be expected to hold seminars with armed men who have entered a community to kill or abduct people.
But a country cannot secure itself indefinitely by arriving after the storm has passed. At some point, it must learn to read the weather.
That means understanding the pressures that precede violence and building institutions capable of detecting them early enough to act. It means asking not only where the next attack is likely to occur, but why that particular place is vulnerable, who is creating the vulnerability, how the networks operate and what intervention could prevent the crisis from maturing.
This is especially important because Nigeria’s security threats are increasingly interconnected. A kidnapping network may depend on access to illegal arms, local intelligence, ransom financing and porous borders. Terrorist organisations can exploit criminal economies. Cybercrime can facilitate financial crime. Communal grievances can be aggravated by disputes over land, resources or political influence. A threat that begins in one part of the system can therefore produce consequences somewhere else.
The threat is interconnected even when the institutions responding to it are not.
Nigeria has begun to recognise this problem. The country is developing its first National Strategy for Combating Organised Crime, covering the period 2027 to 2031. Its emphasis on prevention, intelligence-led disruption, protection and stronger coordination reflects an understanding that organised crime cannot be defeated by chasing individual criminals after they have already established networks.
The challenge, as always, is implementation. In this regard, there are useful lessons elsewhere in Africa.
Ghana has built a National Centre for Coordination of Early Warning and Response Mechanism around the idea that emerging threats should be detected before they become full-blown crises. Its approach brings together government institutions, civil society and other stakeholders.
The important lesson for Nigeria is not that another centre should be created in Abuja. Nigeria already has enough institutions. The real question is whether information scattered across those institutions can be assembled quickly enough to reveal a developing threat, and whether the people receiving the information have the authority and capacity to act on it.
Kenya offers another useful lesson. Its National Counter Terrorism Centre has taken its strategy against violent extremism down to county level through County Action Plans covering all 47 counties. This recognises something that is sometimes lost in national security thinking: threats may be national, but they are experienced locally.
Radicalisation does not happen in an abstract republic. It happens in a neighbourhood. Grievances accumulate in communities. Suspicious movements are first noticed by people who live there. Recruitment networks seek out particular individuals. A local leader may know that a dispute is becoming dangerous long before it reaches a security briefing in the capital.
National security must therefore be national in strategy but local in perception.
Rwanda’s community policing system offers another perspective. Through Community Policing Committees operating at local levels, residents are encouraged to provide information that can assist crime prevention and maintain contact with the police.
To be fair, the Rwandan political and institutional context is very different from Nigeria’s, and its model cannot simply be transplanted. But the underlying principle is relevant: security becomes more sustainable when communities have a stake in producing it.
This is where trust becomes a security asset.
A farmer who notices unfamiliar men moving through his community, a traditional ruler who becomes aware of a brewing dispute, or a teacher who notices a young person becoming vulnerable to criminal recruitment should not be expected to become a vigilante or amateur intelligence officer. What they need is a credible channel through which information can travel safely, quickly and meaningfully.
If people report threats and nothing happens, they eventually stop reporting. If reporting exposes them to retaliation, they become understandably cautious. When communities stop talking to the state, the state becomes less informed and, as a result, less secure.
Information is most valuable before it becomes an emergency.
This is also why national security should be understood in human terms. The ultimate purpose of national security is to secure human beings and the conditions in which ordinary life can continue.
A road that people cannot safely travel is a security problem. A school that children cannot reach because armed groups control the surrounding area is a security problem. A farming community that cannot reach its fields without risking abduction is a security problem. A border through which weapons and criminal networks move freely is a security problem.
The job of national security is not merely to win battles. It is to preserve the space in which citizens can live normal, everyday lives.
This gives added significance to President Bola Tinubu’s recent directive for a comprehensive National Threat Assessment and a rolling five-year Strategic Defence Operations Plan. The importance of the exercise will ultimately depend on what happens after the documents are produced.
A serious threat assessment should help the country establish a hierarchy of risks and make capabilities, spending and operational priorities follow that hierarchy. Not every threat is equally urgent. Not every fire requires the same response. More importantly, some fires can be prevented altogether if the conditions that produce them are recognised early.
That requires intelligence fusion. It requires early warning. It requires trusted community sources. It requires agencies sharing information rather than guarding institutional territories. It requires effective policing and justice systems. And in some places, it requires government to address the economic, social and governance conditions that armed groups routinely exploit.
Most of all, it requires a change in institutional culture.
Nigeria has produced strategies before. The harder task has always been turning strategy into sustained behaviour.
A tactical success can therefore coexist with a strategic failure. Security forces may rescue hostages, eliminate a commander or repel an attack, yet the network survives, recruits new members and returns to the same territory. The operation may have succeeded while the security problem remains.
The objective should therefore be larger than winning the next operation. It should be to make the next operation less necessary.
Nigeria will always need firefighters. No serious security system can dispense with the capacity to respond decisively when violence breaks out. But a mature security system also learns to understand the weather.
After Kpenya, the questions should not stop at how many people were taken or how quickly security agencies can rescue them. We should also ask how the attackers were able to reach the community, what warning signs existed, whether those signs were detected, where the networks obtained their weapons and intelligence, and what could have been done before armed men arrived during Friday prayers.
Those questions take us beyond the immediate crisis. They take us towards a national security doctrine that sees prevention not as an alternative to force, but as the higher purpose of force.
In the end, the real measure of a security system should not merely be its ability to fight fires. It should also be how often it manages to see the storm coming and stops it.
Crispin Oduobuk is a former acting editor of Weekly Trust. He writes from Abuja.
