As insurgency spreads across borders and cultural decay weakens national cohesion, Nigeria faces a critical moment: rebuild its leadership, institutions, and values or risk a future defined by violence and disorder.
Culture does not stand still. It mutates sometimes through growth, sometimes through decay. Today, Nigeria faces a dangerous mutation: a cultural drift that weakens national identity, erodes competence, rewards mediocrity, and undermines the foundations required to confront a new era of insurgency.
We are living in a world where terrorism no longer respects sovereignty, where insurgency has become global even as nations turn inward, and where the weakness of a nation’s internal culture becomes a direct invitation to violence.
Nowhere is this clearer than in our struggle against Boko Haram, ISWAP, the growing bandit–terror nexus, and the widening instability of the Sahel a region increasingly shaped by foreign mercenaries, arms flows, climate pressures, and collapsing borders.
Nigeria is not just fighting criminals.
Nigeria is confronting globalized insurgency in a deglobalized world.
And yet our national response often resembles a poorly rehearsed play disjointed, uncoordinated, and culturally unserious.
The Mutating Threat We Pretend Is Static
Boko Haram was once a local uprising; it is now part of a transnational jihadist ecosystem.
ISWAP was once a splinter group; it is now a quasi-state actor that taxes communities, runs courts, and applies lessons from the Middle East.
Bandit gangs were once opportunistic criminals; they have now merged with extremist networks, strengthened by kidnapping economies, porous borders, and political collusion.
The Sahel is collapsing in real time military coups, ideological radicalization, and shifting geopolitical allegiances are reshaping the region faster than Abuja can draft a policy memo.
Nigeria is not dealing with isolated security threats.
We are dealing with a regional crisis with global fingerprints.
Yet we continue to respond with the cultural complacency of a nation unaware of the scale of the storm it is facing.
Culture and Leadership: Our Soft Underbelly
If insurgency has modernized, why hasn’t our leadership culture modernized with it?
You cannot fight 21st-century terrorism with 20th-century mindsets or with officials chosen not for competence, but as political compensation.
Every time we send unprepared representatives to speak for Nigeria on the world stage, every time we prioritize connections over qualifications, every time the nation normalizes sloppiness, we signal to our enemies that we are unserious.
Insurgency feeds on that signal.
Culture is security.
A nation with fractured values, collapsing professionalism, and brittle institutions becomes easy prey for extremists offering structure, identity, and purpose.
When government loses credibility, insurgents gain legitimacy.
When the state struggles to provide services, insurgents fill the gaps.
When leadership cannot command respect, insurgents command fear.
This is how insecurity becomes unending.
This is how culture becomes weaponized.
Deglobalization and the New Vulnerability
The world is fragmenting. Global institutions are weakening. International cooperation is shrinking. Countries are turning inward.
But terrorists are not turning inward.
They cooperate across borders.
They recruit across continents.
They finance operations through global networks.
They operate like multinational corporations of violence.
In a deglobalized world, a nation survives by the strength of its internal order its culture, its institutions, its intelligence capacity, its leadership discipline.
Nigeria today lacks that internal coherence.
And that is why insurgency persists.
That is why banditry metastasizes.
That is why ISWAP holds ground.
That is why instability from Mali, Niger, and Libya flows toward our borders like an uncontrolled tide.
We are not merely losing territory.
We are losing cultural ground.
A New Order Is Not Optional It Is Survival
Nigeria must become a new kind of nation disciplined, competent, intentional, and culturally fortified.
The New Order Requires:
- Merit as a national doctrine.
Security, diplomacy, intelligence, and communication must be led by the most capable hands not the most connected. - A cultural reset toward excellence.
A society that rewards mediocrity will always be defeated by enemies who reward competence. - Institutions insulated from political interference.
Stability is built by rules, not favors. - A modern security architecture.
Intelligence-driven, tech-enabled, and coordinated across borders, not reliant on outdated approaches. - Leaders who understand global dynamics.
Insurgency in Nigeria is shaped by Libya’s chaos, Mali’s coups, and the Sahel’s collapse. Leadership must be equally global in its understanding. - A revived national identity.
People defend nations they believe in. They do not sacrifice for states that treat them like spectators.
The Somber Truth.
The truth is simple: no nation survives long when its culture decays faster than its enemies advance. Nigeria is confronting insurgents who adapt faster than its institutions, who cooperate across borders while we fight across party lines, and who exploit every weakness we permit in our national character.
We either rebuild a Nigeria worthy of its people serious in its leadership, disciplined in its culture, and courageous in its choices
or we inherit a country slowly slipping out of our grasp.
History will not wait.
Neither will insurgency.
The new order must begin now or there may be no country left to save.
Otunba Segun Showunmi
