Two dispatches from Nigeria arrived in the same news cycle this week, and together they paint a portrait of a country whose security situation defies simple categorisation. BBC News reported that more than 50 schoolchildren, including toddlers, had been kidnapped in Nigeria — the latest in a series of mass abductions targeting schools that have haunted the country since the original Chibok girls kidnapping in 2014. Almost simultaneously, the Guardian and NPR reported that President Trump had announced the killing of an Islamic State leader in a joint US-Nigerian military operation, with Trump calling it a major counterterrorism success. A country whose military can conduct sophisticated joint operations with the US special forces is apparently unable to protect its own schoolchildren from being snatched in broad daylight. That tension demands examination.
The received wisdom
The mainstream liberal-progressive analysis of Nigeria’s security collapse focuses on structural factors: poverty, climate-driven desertification in the north pushing herders and farmers into violent competition for shrinking land, decades of governance failures and state capture, and a military that has historically been better at staging coups than protecting civilians. In this framing, the kidnappers are not primarily ideological actors but economic ones — the ransom model has become a de facto industry in parts of north-west Nigeria, with criminal gangs (locally called “bandits”) having largely displaced the original Boko Haram ideology with pure extraction logic. More troops and better US partnership, this analysis suggests, will not fix the underlying structural conditions that generate the kidnappings.
There is real explanatory power here. The wave of school abductions has indeed shifted from Boko Haram’s Islamist agenda to what analysts call “banditry” — organised criminal networks with no particular ideological programme beyond extortion. The state’s failure to provide basic economic alternatives in the north-east and north-west is a genuine driver. Western governments’ tendency to throw counterterrorism dollars at the symptom (armed groups) rather than the cause (state failure) is a legitimate critique.
A different read
Yet the structural explanation, while not wrong, can become a form of analytical paralysis. It explains so much that it ends up excusing everything. And crucially, it cannot account for the jarring juxtaposition of this week’s news.
Consider what the joint US-Nigeria IS operation actually demonstrates. The Nigerian military, in coordination with US intelligence and special operations capacity, located, tracked, and killed a senior IS commander — a complex, intelligence-intensive operation requiring sustained collection, precise targeting, and inter-agency coordination across two governments and multiple time zones. The same country that achieved this cannot apparently stop groups of armed men from walking into schools and driving away with fifty children. The capability asymmetry is not primarily explained by poverty or climate. It is explained by political economy and incentive structures.
The dark reality of counterterrorism assistance to weak states is one that conservative foreign policy thinkers — from Walter Russell Mead to the late Charles Krauthammer — have grappled with directly: American security partnerships often strengthen the specific capabilities that serve American interests (finding and killing designated terrorists) while doing very little to build the generalised state capacity that would protect ordinary citizens. The Nigerian military’s ability to run a successful joint op with AFRICOM is a tribute to American training and intelligence sharing. Its inability — or unwillingness — to protect northern Nigerian schools reflects a different set of institutional incentives. Governors in kidnapping-affected states have often been accused of tolerating or even covertly funding banditry networks for political reasons. Federal military resources get deployed where they serve federal political interests, which is not always where children are being taken.
The Chibok kidnapping of 2014 illustrated this with devastating clarity. The abduction of 276 girls by Boko Haram generated the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign, produced enormous international pressure, and eventually resulted in some girls being released — largely through negotiations, not military rescue. Eleven years later, mass school abductions continue on a regular cadence. That tells you something important: that the phenomenon is not primarily a function of Boko Haram’s specific capabilities or ideology but of a permissive security environment in which abduction is low-cost and high-reward.
The uncomfortable implication for US policy is that celebrating the IS commander’s killing — which Trump did, loudly — while the news cycle simultaneously carries images of abducted toddlers, reveals the limits of a counterterrorism model that prioritises headline kills over institution building. A serious US Africa policy would condition security assistance on governance benchmarks: accountability for local commanders who fail to respond to kidnapping alerts, prosecution of officials implicated in ransom facilitation, sustained investment in the community intelligence networks that actually protect vulnerable schools. The current model rewards the Nigerian military for conducting the operations Americans want to see while leaving it free to neglect the operations Nigerians need.
What to watch
Whether any of the 50+ newly kidnapped children are recovered quickly will signal whether the Nigerian government has changed its operational posture toward banditry — or whether the pattern of prolonged negotiation and partial releases continues.
The US reaction matters: if the Trump administration pairs its counterterrorism congratulations with any conditionality on how Nigeria handles the kidnapping response, it would signal a more sophisticated approach to the partnership. Silence on the kidnappings, in contrast, would confirm the pattern.
Watch Nigeria’s 2027 election dynamics. President Tinubu’s government has staked its legitimacy partly on restoring security, and continued mass abductions will feed opposition movements that are already gaining traction in the north.
— J