{"id":20442,"date":"2026-02-23T16:55:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T16:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/?p=20442"},"modified":"2026-02-23T16:58:35","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T16:58:35","slug":"board-of-peace-bleeding-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/2026\/02\/23\/board-of-peace-bleeding-republic\/","title":{"rendered":"Board Of Peace, Bleeding Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"

written by Dakuku Peterside, PhD.<\/a><\/p>\n

Nigeria is bleeding in places the nation rarely names until the funerals force a headline. In just the past two weeks, insur\u00adgent violence has torn through Kaiama Local Government in Kwara State and the Borgu\u2013Agwara axis in Niger State\u2014 frontier territories that now look less like \u201coutliers\u201d and more like previews of a wider, entrenched security crisis that has outlived slogans, committees, and annual budget lines. On Wednesday, no fewer than 33 residents of Bui District in Arewa LGA of Kebbi State were killed by Lakurawa terrorists in a reported attempt to rustle cattle. Zamfara State was on Friday thrown into mourning as bandits reportedly killed no fewer than 50 residents of Dutsin Dan Ajiya village, Anka Local Government area of the state.<\/p>\n

The familiar cycle repeats: attack, out\u00adrage, official visit, troop deployment, a brief lull, then the next rupture\u2014often in the same corridors, often with the same pattern of impunity. A country that should be planning growth is in\u00adstead managing grief.<\/p>\n

It is hard not to notice the cruel contrast: while the world scrambles to de-escalate agony in Gaza and argue over ceasefires, reconstruction plans, and post-war governance, Nigeria\u2019s own war of attrition expands quietly, almost domesticated by repetition. Into that global argument walks an unexpected proposal from Donald Trump: a \u201cBoard of Peace\u201d blueprint\u2014an attempt, how\u00adever controversial, to build a tight steer\u00ading structure for conflict resolution and post-war rebuilding. One can distrust the man, question the motives, reject the branding, and still admit the under\u00adlying logic is worth examining: a small, decisive council with a narrow mandate, a clear chain of command, measurable outcomes, and the audacity to treat peace not as sentiment but as engineering.<\/p>\n

Nigeria\u2019s mistake has never been a shortage of institutions. There is a shortage of coherence. We have agen\u00adcies, commands, task forces, operations with dramatic names, and overlapping mandates that multiply paperwork but dilute accountability. We do not consis\u00adtently have one authoritative table where the federation\u2014federal and state\u2014can look itself in the eye, agree on a doctrine, align intelligence, coordinate response, and hold political actors to a shared discipline that outlasts party cycles and personality clashes. Insecurity thrives in the seams: between federal and state jurisdictions, between communities and formal security, between military operations and civilian stabilisation, be\u00adtween border management and regional diplomacy. When policy is fragmented, violence becomes organised.<\/p>\n

This is where the \u201cBoard of Peace\u201d idea\u2014stripped of foreign ideology\u2014be\u00adcomes a useful mirror. Its core proposi\u00adtion is not moral superiority; it is struc\u00adtural seriousness. It says: stop pretending that endless deliberation is a strategy. Build a steering mechanism that can decide, direct, and deliver. Nigeria needs a version of that seriousness at home: a Federal\u2013State Security and Peace Coun\u00adcil with real executive weight and firm legislative anchoring, designed not for photo opportunities but for operational clarity. Its mandate should be brutally practical: harmonise national and sub\u00adnational security policy; set triggers for rapid response; enforce inter-agency co\u00adordination; publish routine performance summaries that make failure visible and success measurable. Not a committee that \u201cmeets\u201d when tragedy strikes, but a council that governs security the way a serious country governs inflation\u2014 continuously, transparently, and with consequences.<\/p>\n

Yet structure alone cannot defeat ter\u00adror if the country remains politically fractured at the moment it needs unity most. Terrorism and bandit networks feed on distrust: distrust between re\u00adgions, between faiths, between parties, between citizens and security forces. Fragmentation is not just a political problem; it is a tactical advantage handed to criminals. No insurgency is defeated by a divided society arguing over whose pain counts more. Nigeria must learn the hardest lesson of counter-terrorism: uni\u00adty is not a slogan, it is a security require\u00adment. The country has to mobilise across party lines, religious lines, ethnic lines, and class lines\u2014because violence does not respect any of them. If we cannot build a minimum national consensus on what constitutes an attack on all of us, we will keep reacting as separate camps to a shared catastrophe. When terrorism was rife in Pakistan, they called a council of all political parties to tackle the problem and they succeeded.<\/p>\n

And then there is the deeper ques\u00adtion that Nigeria often avoids because it is uncomfortable: legitimacy. Guns do not only kill; they compete. Armed groups compete with the state for author\u00adity\u2014by imposing fear, collecting taxes, controlling routes, arbitrating disputes, and offering a perverse kind of \u201corder\u201d where the state is absent or despised. In many of our threatened spaces, the state is either missing, inconsistent, or pres\u00adent in ways that feel predatory. Where government is absent, violent actors fill the vacuum. Where government is present but corrupt or brutal, citizens withdraw their loyalty. Where justice is slow or selective, resentment becomes recruitment fuel. This is why count\u00ader-terrorism cannot be only kinetic. If legitimacy collapses, security becomes a temporary occupation rather than a durable peace.<\/p>\n

A Nigerian adaptation of a \u201cBoard of Peace\u201d mentality must therefore start from the ground up, not just top-down. We need a Village-to-State Peace Archi\u00adtecture that integrates local legitimacy into the formal security chain: local peace committees linked to security desks; traditional rulers and faith leaders treated as structured partners in early warning, not ceremonial mourners; youth councils empowered to intercept recruitment pathways, not summoned for occasional \u201cengagement\u201d sessions that produce photos and no protection. This kind of architecture does three things Nigeria urgently needs: it rolls back extremist narratives by making communities authors of their own defence; it rebuilds trust by creating predictable channels of response; and it strengthens early warning so threats are disrupted before they become mass graves.<\/p>\n

But Nigeria\u2019s crisis is not only inter\u00adnal; it is regionalised. Forest corridors do not stop at state lines, and arms markets do not respect borders. The Borgu\u2013Ag\u00adwara\u2013Kaiama frontier is not just a do\u00admestic security map; it is a cross-border reality of routes, hideouts, and supply chains. The Lake Chad theatre has long proven that insurgency becomes durable when national efforts are undermined by neighbouring safe havens, inconsis\u00adtent joint operations, and fragmented intelligence. A serious steering model must therefore have a regional spine: a Lake Chad\u2013West Africa Security Co\u00adordination Council that brings Nigeria together with Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and Benin in a disciplined operational design\u2014shared threat picture, joint pa\u00adtrol frameworks, real-time intelligence protocols, synchronised operations, and a clear division of responsibilities between kinetic actions and stabilisa\u00adtion. The objective is simple: replace the current patchwork of overlapping initia\u00adtives with a coordinated system where militants cannot simply relocate across the nearest seam.<\/p>\n

Still, no council can end insecurity if the country keeps mass-producing vulnerability. Nigeria\u2019s violence is sustained by an economics of despair: poverty, joblessness, a huge youth bulge, uneven development, and rural neglect that turns grievances into markets for recruitment. Every time we treat devel\u00adopment as a separate conversation from security, we miss the point. Skills, jobs, infrastructure, and basic services are not charity; they are tools for stabilisation. A Nigeria that wants peace must invest like it wants peace: expand TVET and voca\u00adtional training in the most vulnerable regions; tie that training to real labour demand; invest in rural roads, power, wa\u00adter, primary healthcare, and education as pillars of state presence; build credible pathways for young people to see a future that is not mediated by a gun. Without this, every tactical victory is temporary, because the soil that grows violence re\u00admains fertile.<\/p>\n

Porous borders and small-arms pro\u00adliferation complete the trap. They are not merely security gaps; they are symptoms of weak governance and weak regional coordination. When rifles travel more freely than citizens\u2019 rights, when smug\u00adglers outrun the state, when illicit arms flow into local conflicts and turn them into massacres, the nation is not simply unsafe\u2014it is ungoverned. A Nigerian \u201cBoard of Peace\u201d logic must therefore treat border management and arms con\u00adtrol as national priorities: deploy mod\u00adern border technology, fund joint patrols, enforce regional agreements, and prose\u00adcute trafficking networks with the seri\u00adousness reserved for financial crimes. Security gains cannot hold if the border remains a revolving door.<\/p>\n

There is another sting Nigerians should not ignore: the symbolism of being left out. The emergence of new ad hoc global steering initiatives\u2014however controversial\u2014signals a shifting world where influence increasingly belongs to those considered stable, credible, and bankable. When Nigeria is absent from such circles, it is not always because we lack size or resources; it is often because volatility has become our export brand. A country that cannot secure its own highways and villages gradually loses the moral leverage to speak loudly in global peace conversations, even when it has the population, diplomacy, and en\u00addowments to matter. Credibility is not inherited; it is maintained. Tunisia is a good example. At the heat of terrorism in Tunisia, the state strengthened gov\u00adernance, rule of law, political and insti\u00adtutional structures, and human rights processes. This stifled terrorism and entrenched peace.<\/p>\n

So the lesson is not to imitate Trump\u2019s temperament or import authoritarian instincts. The lesson is to borrow dis\u00adcipline: the form of a focused steering council that combines authority with inclusivity and measures success by outcomes rather than announcements. Nigeria needs a security architecture that looks less like a chain of ad hoc responses and more like a coherent sys\u00adtem\u2014one that unifies the federation, rebuilds legitimacy from the village up, seals regional seams, couples force with opportunity, and treats borders and arms as the strategic bloodstream of this crisis. Until then, the republic will keep bleeding one \u201cremote\u201d community at a time, while the world drafts blueprints for other conflicts and quietly moves on without us.<\/p>\n

*Dakuku Peterside is the author of 2 best selling books, Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

written by Dakuku Peterside, PhD. Nigeria is bleeding in places the nation rarely names until the funerals force a headline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19367,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-grassroots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20442"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20445,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20442\/revisions\/20445"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}