1. One of the first things that President Buhari did was to move the military command center to Maiduguri. This is supposed to improve the speed of decision-making and coordination by the military’s high command, and remove the distance between them and the situation on the ground. When the Chief of Operations, Chief of Budget and Accounts, Chief of Logistics and Ordnance Corps Commander are on ground in the area of responsibility, reports of strange orders, unpaid allowances, poor provisioning for fighting men and ammunition shortages are likelier to abate than becoming exacerbated.
2. President Buhari has also ordered that all checkpoints outside of the states vulnerable on the frontline of the war against insurgents should be dismantled. Whereas the general trend of the outcry in cities such as Abuja and Kaduna against these checkpoints has shown that complainants believe them to create needless traffic bottlenecks, it remains to be seen if their removal would not allow insurgents to take advantage of this reality to operate more freely.
3. The upswing in violence has as much to do with the insurgents’ change in operations. Nigeria seemed to be making headway against the insurgents between the months of March and May 2015, close to the national elections. The escalation in suicide bombings in urban centres of the North East since the inauguration on May 29th appears to coincide with a shift by the insurgents. No longer attempting to hold territory, the insurgents are either slipping back into more remote towns and blending into the communities for cover, or using sleeper cells of terrorists resident in urban centres and continuing the fight on a familiar front.
4. Remote towns in the North East are very much still in danger. The insurgents still continue to prey on vulnerable villagers for food and to scare them away from cooperating with security forces by providing human intelligence on their activities.
5. Boko Haram has pledged itself to ISIS. This development is not one to be dismissed with a wave of the hand given the fact that ISIS are active in eastern Libya. For centuries, goods and persons have moved back and forth between Greater Borno (Borno and Yobe states) and Libya across the Sahara desert and it continues to this day. Chad and Niger, two other countries that have experienced Boko Haram attacks, are both neighbors with Libya. Thankfully, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and Benin are involved in a collaborative regional security effort. If that effort is followed through with the seriousness it deserves, it presents the allied nations with their best chance of checking the infiltration of ISIS guerrillas from Libya into the region and the uncontrolled movement of weaponry and insurgents between the regional partners allied against Boko Haram.
6. Finally, President Buhari has sought support from European countries and the United States to fight insurgency in the region. More help will definitely be needed to forge synergies for improved training and operational capabilities of the military, as well as focus on the acquisition of military hardware.
