President Bola Tinubu has ordered the preparation of a full National Threat Assessment alongside a five-year Strategic Defence Operations Plan, in what officials describe as an effort to bring more coordination to Nigeria's sprawling security architecture.
An 11-member committee, coordinated by Special Adviser on Homeland Security Adeyinka Famadewa, has been given 90 days to complete the assessment. Its mandate reportedly covers identifying Nigeria's major security threats — from insurgency in the northeast to banditry in the northwest and farmer-herder conflicts across the middle belt — alongside capability gaps and resourcing needs across the country's defence, intelligence, and police agencies.
The plan is expected to feed directly into medium-term military operations planning as well as longer-term procurement decisions, meaning its findings could shape how Nigeria allocates its security budget for years, not just months.
This kind of consolidated, multi-year security planning exercise is relatively rare for Nigeria, where security responses have often been criticized by analysts as reactive rather than strategic, responding to individual crises as they emerge rather than following a unified long-term plan.
Whether the committee's eventual recommendations translate into real changes in resourcing and coordination will depend heavily on implementation — a point past security reform efforts in Nigeria have often struggled with once initial plans are handed over.
The push for coordination follows years in which security operations have often run through separate agencies and regional commands with limited overlap. That fragmentation matters in practice: a kidnapping network can operate across state lines, intelligence gathered by one agency may never reach another, and a military operation can depend on information collected by police or intelligence officers outside its own chain of command. Tinubu has pointed to recent rescue operations as proof of what coordinated intelligence can achieve, crediting them to what can be achieved when agencies work together.