Abuja – Nigeria is facing renewed violence from armed groups as the country heads towards elections, with assaults in the northeast killing high-ranking officers and analysts warning of the entrenchment of foreign jihadists in the west.
Insecurity has long been an issue, from “bandit” kidnapping gangs, farmer-herder violence, a smouldering southeastern separatist conflict and a 17-year jihadist insurgency.
President Bola Tinubu, up for re-election in January, has staked much of his political project on vast economic reforms — but has also overseen the deployment of US troops to the country as major bouts of violence attracted international scrutiny.
“There’s been an increase in violence, be it killing of civilians, of the military, and of course, kidnapping,” Mohammed Ali Ndume, a senator in northeastern Borno state, the epicentre of Nigeria’s jihadist insurgency, told AFP.
Some 400 of his constituents, from the village of Ngoshe, are being held captive by jihadists, he said, kidnapped earlier this month.
Nigeria’s jihadist conflict kicked off with Boko Haram’s 2009 uprising and peaked a decade ago when it held swathes of territory. Security forces now fight a myriad of splinter, sometimes rival, jihadist groups.
The war has worsened over the last year, researchers say, with two brigadier generals killed in five months.
Two suicide bombing attacks in Borno capital Maiduguri, including one at a mosque in December, marked bloody urban strikes that many residents thought were a thing of the past.
Data from US-based monitor ACLED recorded some 4,518 people killed in jihadist incidents in 2025 — the most since 2015 — in a count that includes civilians, state forces, other armed groups, and jihadists themselves.
In Borno, more than 500 civilians were reportedly killed last year by jihadist groups, compared to 299 in 2024, ACLED said.
Ndume blamed the increase in violence in part on “revenge” attacks, following a state of emergency declared in November that saw the “army put on the heat on”.
Mike Ejiofor, a retired director of Nigeria’s domestic intelligence agency, the State Security Service, told AFP “when elections are coming up, there tends to be this upsurge in attacks”.
The government wants “to see that this is brought to a halt,” he said. “Whether they are doing enough is left to be seen.”
– Security reforms –
US President Donald Trump has criticised Abuja for not doing enough to protect Christians specifically — a framing long used by the US political right but which experts say muddies the waters in Nigeria, where civilians are killed across religious lines.
Tinubu has turned pressure from Washington into increased arms deals, intelligence sharing and the deployment of US troops on a training mission.
But Nigeria’s strategy since 2019 of concentrating soldiers in fortified “super camps” has long left rural areas vulnerable.
As jihadists have adapted, attacks by Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) on garrison towns have found repeated success with the aid of night-vision equipment and drones, researchers say.
The government has pushed some reforms, including creating a new Forest Guard service.
Tinubu also ordered police to be taken off the often cushy duty of providing private security for politicians, businessmen and other VIPs — though Malik Samuel, an Abuja-based researcher at Good Governance Africa, told AFP that the policy “went into effect only on paper”.
A spokesman for Tinubu did not respond to a request for comment.
– Sahelian jihadists dig in –
Meanwhile, some analysts warn that two of the largest jihadist groups in the Sahel are entrenching themselves in western Nigeria.
Videos emerged earlier this month appearing to show militants from JNIM and rival Islamic State Sahel Province — active in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — fighting each other in Nigeria’s Kebbi state.
Neither has made an official claim, though they rarely announce such inter-jihadist conflicts.
Both groups “are free to roam and do whatever they want” in the borderlands of Niger, Nigeria and Benin, Wassim Nasr, a researcher with the Soufan Center research group, told AFP.
He noted that ISSP appears to be trying to firm up its presence in northwest Nigeria to consolidate its links with ISWAP, which operates in the northeast.
James Barnett, a researcher on Nigerian conflicts and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, said it appears “each side feels relatively comfortable in that area, in terms of they feel like they’ve established a strong enough presence to challenge other groups”.
The biggest threat to their continued expansion, meanwhile, might not be from the Nigerian security forces.
“The most important threat to each comes from the other,” said Nasr.
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Source: AFP
