“Security shall be the top priority of our administration because neither prosperity nor justice can prevail amidst insecurity and violence,” the new president declared in his inauguration speech at Eagle Square, Abuja, promising to overhaul the sector. “To effectively tackle this menace, we shall reform both our security doctrine and its architecture. We shall invest more in our security personnel, and this means more than an increase in number. We shall provide better training, equipment, pay, and firepower,” he added.
It was not the first time Mr. Tinubu would make promises of improved security. He had made such assertions in countless pre- and post-election appearances.
However, one year after he assumed office as president, almost all parts of the country still suffer one form of insecurity or another. Although one year may not be enough to judge the success or otherwise of an administration, there has been no significant improvement in the security sector from where Mr. Tinubu’s predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, left it.
Indeed, the menace continued unabated, resulting in more than 4,556 fatalities and 7,086 abductions between May 29, 2023, and May 22, 2024, according to data gathered from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a global data hub that collects real-time conflict-related data. These statistics, when compared to the previous year’s data, show that more people were killed across Nigeria in the first year of the Tinubu administration than in the preceding year.
According to another ACLED data analyzed by PREMIUM TIMES, 2,606 Nigerians were killed while 3,523 others were abducted between May 29, 2022, and May 29, 2023.
Two months after his inaugural pledge to improve national security, Mr. Tinubu expressed satisfaction with the performance of the service chiefs he had just appointed barely a month earlier. “We have seen that we are recording positive results in our security challenges because of your dedication, commitment and steadfastness,” he told the Chief of Defence Staff, Christopher Musa, and three other service chiefs at their decoration ceremony in Abuja.
But killings and abductions keep making headlines.