The Battle Against “Unknown Gunmen” – Not Yet uhuru.

Penultimate Friday, I was at Uli, Ihiala local government area of Anambra State, for the burial of the father of a colleague. That visit was personally significant to me being that I was once again able to visit a town which I couldn’t have dared venture into barely some months ago and be sure of returning alive. I last went to Uli in September or October 2020 for the traditional wedding of my then student, and soon after, the town became a no-go territory as criminals took over, forcing many residents to flee while the once peaceful town got turned into a dark enclave of murder and pillage.

Uli was one of the worst-hit victims of the belligerent and inciteful approach adopted by the protagonists of the secessionist movement championed by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). The community had the misfortune of becoming one of the territories captured by criminal gangs who purported to be the watchdog against enemies of the Biafra struggle, including the “saboteurs” who violate the infamous sit-at-home exercise.

As I went through the interior of the community heading to the family house of the bereaved after the requiem mass at St. Theresa’s Parish along the Onitsha-Owerri expressway led by His Lordship Most Rev. Thomas Ifeanyichukwu Obiatuegwu, the Auxiliary Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Orlu (incidentally an indigene of Uli), I could not but be fascinated seeing how the once near-ghost town was bubbling with activities once again. Shops were selling, bars serving drinks, and salons giving haircuts. It was all the more enlivening learning that the very part of Uli where the bereaved family live was indeed the fortress of the criminal gangs that held the town hostage for over three years, meaning that it would have been unthinkable to hold the funeral let alone receive guests there just months ago.

Thanks to the tenacity of the Anambra State Government led by Prof. Chukwuma Charles Soludo, the Nigerian military, the police, the SSS, and state-backed vigilantes for the feat. Several other communities have been cleared of criminals in Ihiala, Nnewi South, and Orumba South LGAs. Impressive progress has also been made in Imo State in this regard – Anambra and Imo being the worst-hit by the plague.

While everyone should be happy about the recovery of territories and improved security, it should, however, be warned that it is not yet time to celebrate. We, as a nation, are still quite far from having entrenched a robust security architecture that would keep us secure from such catastrophic collapse any time in the future.

The fact that several portions of our territory could become captured by ungodly elements who rendered them unlivable and ungovernable for years is an eye-opener to the disastrous level of the weakness of our security architecture. The truth of this assertion is incontestable: insecurity of such size and dimension does not happen suddenly; it is a result of an extended period of strategic movement of persons and weapons and their cumulative concentration at certain locations until the area becomes infested with criminals who have dug in, thus acting with swagger and intractable manoeuvring capability. So, one may ask: were our intelligence agencies – the police intelligence unit and the SSS – when all the movements, amassing of weapons, and settling in at locations were happening.

This is the same question that should be asked in relation to how large swathes of territories in the Northwest and Northeast of the country became inhabitable and ungovernable for years running. Where were the security agencies as Boko Haram and bandits amassed men and weapons and established bases. Were they asleep when all this build-up was happening?

As I have written several times in this column, the Achilles’s heels of our security architecture is their intelligence deficiency. Intelligence is the bedrock of security services; it is the invisible foundation upon which all other security efforts rest. When intelligence fails, every other layer of security collapses like a house built on sand. Good intelligence prevents wars before they start; it dismantles criminal networks before they mature; it detects conspiracies before they erupt into crises. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s intelligence system has been largely reactive instead of proactive. We respond to problems only after they explode, rather than preventing them when they are still manageable.

Our intelligence institutions must therefore be re-engineered to serve as early warning systems rather than post-mortem analysts. This requires more than just technology; it demands coordination, professionalism, and political will.

The successes achieved at Uli and elsewhere should thus be seen as temporary relief, not victory. They demonstrate what can be done when government mobilizes resources and political will, but they do not guarantee sustainability. If we do not follow them up with deep structural reforms, we risk sliding back into chaos. What we need is a robust and dynamic security architecture capable of detecting and neutralizing threats in their formative stage. Such a system must prioritize intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination as its first line of defence.

The pursuit of this strategy should be holistic, encompassing all relevant arms of our security set-up – including the police, the SSS, the customs, the immigration, and the military. In a recent article, I have written about how myopic and unrealistic it is to continue to focus our scrutiny on the police alone as we confront our unending security woes whereas a body like the Customs has not been able to detect and intercept illegal arms being continuously imported into the country, and the Immigration has consistently failed to stop the influx of irregular migrants, including terrorists, through our incurably porous borders. In that article, I pointed out the fact that security does not begin and end with the immediate actions of the police, rather certain agencies have roles that are antecedent to the role of the police, and they must play this, otherwise the police will have more than it can handle. Needless to say, security threats today are networked, dynamic, and transnational. Only a truly integrated security system backed by a strong intellegience machinery can match that complexity.

Generally, we need a total overhaul of our security architecture in terms of organization, philosophy, training, strategy, equipment, and funding. This admonition ought to be taken seriously. Events in the past couple of years have shown that no part of the country is immune to the sort of security collapse where criminals capture and rule a territory. It is this way because the entire nation is being policed by the same weak security architecture that cannot detect threat until its metamorphosis is complete – from a tiny harmless creature to a monster of colossal destructiveness.

We must therefore act now, not later. The relative calm in parts of the Southeast should not lull us into complacency. The battle is far from over. We must consolidate on the gains, strengthen our institutions, and rebuild trust between the security agencies and the citizens they serve. Until we do, it is not yet uhuru — not yet freedom, not yet peace, and certainly not yet the end of our struggle for safety in our homeland.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.