A former military commander, Major General Rogers Nicholas (retd.), has said Nigeria cannot overcome its worsening insecurity without urgently securing its borders, warning that the country is facing an existential threat rather than a conventional socio-economic crisis.

He made the remarks while appearing on Channels Television’s end-of-year special programme, 2025 In Retrospect: Charting a Pathway to 2026, which focused on politics, security, and the economy.TV channel subscription

Nicholas, a former Commander of Operation Lafiya Dole (North-West) and ex-Chief of Civil-Military Affairs at the Army Headquarters, argued that President Bola Tinubu already has access to practical solutions to the security crisis but has yet to fully deploy them.

“There are some basic things to do. I want to tell the President that the key solution to this problem of insecurity is right there in his office.

“When his Chief of Staff was Speaker of the House of Representatives, a comprehensive national security retreat was conducted, and the communiqué issued afterwards was very detailed. Everything that needed to be done to address insecurity is in that document. It is unfortunate that those ideas have remained largely unimplemented,” Nicholas said.

The retired general also faulted the absence of a border security focus in current defence planning and budgeting, despite repeated warnings by senior security officials over the years.

“The current Minister of Defence, (Christopher Musa) when he was Chief of Defence Staff, spoke clearly about border security. He stated that you cannot have a secure Nigeria without secure borders.

“He was criticised at the time, yet today we are still operating budgets that do not adequately capture border security. If we do not secure our borders, there can be no security,” he said.

The ex-commander rejected arguments that Nigeria’s security crisis can be solved mainly through economic interventions.

“I am not a student of the liberal security theory that only talks about bread-and-butter security. What we are facing today is an existential threat. It does not respond to bread and butter solutions,” he added.

Nigeria’s extensive land and maritime borders have been identified as contributing factors to the country’s security challenges, largely due to their porous nature and ungoverned spaces.

Security agencies say extremist groups such as Boko Haram and ISWAP exploit northern border routes linking Nigeria with Niger, Chad, and Cameroon to move fighters and weapons, amid existing banditry, kidnapping, and communal violence in the country. (Channels TV, but headline rejigged)