The Body Count Delusion
Another week, another headline shouting about "scores killed" in a Nigerian military strike. The press releases from Abuja read like a grim accounting firm’s ledger—tallies of neutralised militants, recovered AK-47s, and destroyed camps. The media swallows it whole. They frame it as a "clash," an "intensification," or a "crackdown."
They are missing the point entirely.
Measuring progress in an asymmetric conflict by the number of bodies on the ground is a relic of 20th-century conventional warfare. It is the same spreadsheet-driven myopia that lost the United States the war in Vietnam. When you are fighting an ideology fueled by perceived injustice and economic despair, a higher body count isn't a victory. It’s a recruitment poster.
I have watched defense budgets in West Africa balloon for a decade while the actual security perimeter shrinks. We are spending billions to kill people who are easily replaced, while the structural rot that creates them remains untouched. If you think killing thirty "bandits" in a forest changes the risk profile of a logistics route or a mining operation, you don't understand the market of violence.
The Market of Violence
We need to stop calling this "terrorism" or "insurgency" for a moment and look at it as a distorted labor market. In the Northwest and Northeast of Nigeria, the state has effectively exited the chat. When the state provides zero security, zero infrastructure, and zero judicial recourse, a power vacuum doesn't just sit there. It gets filled by whoever can project force.
Militancy in this region is a career path. For a young man with no prospects, picking up a rifle is a rational economic decision.
The military's current strategy is a supply-side solution to a demand-side problem. They are trying to reduce the supply of militants by killing them. But the demand—the systemic need for protection, income, and identity—is infinite. You cannot shoot your way out of a demand curve.
The Tactical Win vs. The Strategic Drain
Every time a Nigerian Air Force jet drops a payload on a suspected camp, they win a tactical engagement. The "enemy" is dispersed. The immediate threat is neutralized. But let’s look at the secondary effects:
- Displacement as a Force Multiplier: These strikes rarely "wipe out" a group. They fragment them. Smaller, more desperate cells move into new areas, spreading the contagion of kidnapping and extortion to previously stable zones.
- The Intelligence Black Hole: Kinetic operations of this scale often destroy the very human intelligence networks needed to find the leadership. Dead men tell no tales, and they certainly don't flip on their commanders.
- Collateral Radicalization: Even the most "precision" strike in a rural setting carries a cost. When a village loses its youth or its livelihoods to "collateral damage," the military isn't seen as a liberator. It is seen as just another gang—the one with the louder guns and the green uniforms.
The Myth of the "Decisive Blow"
The "lazy consensus" in the media is that the military just needs more "robust" equipment. They want more Tucano jets, more drones, more heavy armor. They believe there is a tipping point where, if we just kill enough people fast enough, the insurgency will collapse.
This is a fantasy.
History shows us that insurgents don't need to win; they just need to not lose. They win by surviving. The Nigerian military, conversely, loses by not winning decisively. Every day the conflict continues, the legitimacy of the state bleeds out.
I’ve seen high-level security summits where the focus is entirely on "hardware synergy." It’s theater. They talk about "technological landscapes" while the soldiers on the ground are underpaid, underfed, and using maps that haven't been updated since the 1990s.
The Economic Incentive of Forever War
There is a dirty secret in the defense industry that nobody wants to admit: war is profitable. Not just for the manufacturers, but for the middle-tier bureaucracy.
When a conflict is "intensifying," budgets are easier to justify. Oversight is relaxed in the name of national security. Emergency procurement becomes the norm. If the military actually "solved" the militant problem tomorrow, thousands of people in the security apparatus would lose their "security votes"—those opaque, un-audited funds that keep the wheels of the elite turning.
We aren't seeing a failure of military capability. We are seeing the success of a self-sustaining conflict economy.
The "People Also Ask" Fallacy
If you look at the common questions surrounding the Nigerian conflict, they are almost all framed incorrectly:
- "Is the Nigerian military winning?" This assumes there is a scoreboard. In a guerrilla war, the only metric that matters is "Does the average citizen feel safe enough to plant crops?" The answer is no. Therefore, the military is losing, regardless of how many camps they burn.
- "Why hasn't the government stopped the bandits?" Because "bandits" are not a monolithic group you can sign a treaty with. They are a decentralized manifestation of state failure. You don't "stop" them; you out-compete them by providing a better alternative.
- "Will more foreign aid help?" Only if you want to subsidize the status quo. Foreign hardware often arrives with strings and maintenance requirements that the Nigerian military isn't equipped to handle, leading to "hangar queens"—multi-million dollar jets that can't fly because of a missing $500 sensor.
The Counter-Intuitive Path Forward
If the goal is actually peace—and that’s a big "if"—the strategy has to flip.
1. Stop the Kinetic Obsession
Pull back on the air strikes. Every bomb dropped is a confession that your ground intelligence has failed. You don't win hearts and minds from 20,000 feet. The focus should be on "Clear, Hold, and Build." But the Nigerian state usually skips the "Hold" and "Build" parts because they are expensive and boring. They just "Clear" and then leave, allowing the militants to move back in before the smoke has cleared.
2. Legalize and Regulate the Informal Security Sector
The "Civilian Joint Task Force" and various local hunters are already doing the heavy lifting. Instead of treating them as a temporary nuisance or a threat to the military’s monopoly on force, formalize them. Turn them into a localized, accountable constabulary. They have the "Experience" the regular army lacks: they know who the militants are because they grew up in the same villages.
3. Attack the Money, Not the Men
Militancy in Nigeria is a liquidity business. It’s about kidnapping ransoms, illegal mining, and "protection" taxes on farmers. If you want to kill the movement, freeze the flow of cash. This doesn't happen in the forest; it happens in the banks in Lagos and Abuja. But that would mean investigating the people who fund these groups—people who often sit in the same rooms as the policymakers.
The High Cost of the Truth
The contrarian take is uncomfortable because it suggests that the solution isn't "more" of what we’re doing. It’s "less."
Less reliance on heavy weaponry. Less focus on body counts. Less centralization of security power.
The downside to my approach? It’s slow. It doesn't produce "Breaking News" banners. It doesn't allow a General to stand in front of a pile of captured rifles for a photo op. It requires the state to actually do the hard work of governance—providing schools, clinics, and roads—instead of just sending in the infantry.
We are currently watching a tragedy of repetition. The military "intensifies" its strikes. The media reports the "scores killed." The militants regroup. The cycle restarts.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. By that metric, the current Nigerian security strategy is the most successful psychological experiment in history. It has convinced an entire nation that a pile of bodies equals a safer country.
It doesn’t. It just makes the soil bloodier for the next generation of insurgents to grow in.
The strikes will continue. The headlines will remain the same. And the people will continue to die, not in spite of the "intensified" military action, but because of the fundamental lie that force can replace a functioning state.
Stop looking at the body counts. Start looking at the abandonment of the rural poor. That is where the war is being lost.
