Nigeria’s Falling Stars: An Open Letter To National Security Advisor Mallam Nuhu Ribadu

By Emman Usman Shehu

Without a doubt in the Office of the National Security Advisor, the air carries the weight of classified briefings and the low hum of secure phones. Yet beyond those walls, across the dust-choked roads of Borno and the bandit-haunted forests of Zamfara, a different silence has taken hold: the empty chair at the officers’ mess, the folded flag, the sudden absence of men whose shoulders once bore the weight of stars.

Nigeria’s military has never lacked valour. From the blood-soaked jungles of Liberia in the 1990s to the unforgiving Sahel today, its officers have been the backbone of regional stability. But courage alone cannot explain—or excuse—the accelerating toll on the high command. In recent months, colonels, brigadiers, and generals have been lost not in the decisive clashes of conventional war but in the grinding attrition of ambushes, mechanical disasters, and intelligence failures. The latest strike, on April 9 in Benisheikh, Borno State, claimed Brigadier General Oseni Omoh Braimah and several soldiers—an event that feels less like an isolated tragedy than the latest verse in a dirge that Nigeria can no longer afford to ignore.

This is not mere bad luck. It is a symptom of systemic rot. When senior officers are killed with such a spree of lethal precision while on the move, the conclusion is unavoidable: Nigeria is fighting a 21st-century shadow war with 20th-century habits. Insurgents and bandits—whether ISWAP remnants or the kaleidoscopic criminal networks of the Northwest—have shown they can penetrate operational patterns, exploit predictable movements, and, most damningly, cultivate sources inside the very institutions charged with stopping them. The “fifth column” is no longer a Cold War cliché; it is a present danger that turns every convoy into a potential funeral procession.

Your office, sir, is the nerve centre of the nation’s security architecture. Yet the picture it oversees reveals a dangerous disconnect. Tactical intelligence rarely seems to reach the level of executive protection. The institutional memory embodied in these fallen commanders—decades of combat experience, hard-won knowledge of terrain and enemy psychology—is being erased with each star that falls. Every general lost is a library burned.

Nor can hardware be absolved. Helicopters that fail mid-mission, armoured vehicles that become coffins, communication gear that cannot keep pace with the enemy’s agility: these are not footnotes. They are failures of procurement, maintenance, and accountability in a nation that claims to pour billions into defense. When senior leaders must personally lead from the front—not out of strategic brilliance but to compensate for stretched junior ranks and fraying morale—the cost is measured in graves.

There is, too, the Abuja Disconnect: the sense that strategies hatched in air-conditioned conference rooms have yet to grasp the fluidity of a battlefield where the enemy refuses set-piece battles and instead hunts symbols of authority. Killing a general is worth more to them than capturing a dozen villages, and they know it.

This cannot continue. Nigeria does not need louder rhetoric or more aggressive press statements. It needs a protected military worthy of its sacrifice. The moment demands three urgent shifts: First, a ruthless counter-intelligence purge. Root out the insiders who trade coordinates for blood money. No rank, no connection, no sacred cow should be spared. Second, a genuine modernisation of transport security. Reliable maintenance regimes, hardened convoys, and air assets that do not fail at critical moments are not luxuries—they are the bare minimum for preserving command capacity.

Third, a pivot to technology-led command. Persistent drone overwatch, secure real-time data links, and remote decision-making tools must reduce the physical vulnerability of Nigeria’s most valuable strategic assets. Leadership by desperation is not strategy; it is slow-motion attrition which could have disastrous consequences in more ways than one, especially if the military is pushed to save its honour.

The stars on an officer’s epaulets are not decorations. They represent decades of taxpayer investment and personal sacrifice. To lose them in such rapid succession is more than a military setback; it is a national emergency. The flag at half-mast has become an all-too-familiar sight. Condolences are no longer enough. The nation requires consequences—measurable, visible, and immediate reforms that honor the dead by protecting the living.

The silence of those empty seats at the mess table is deafening. It is time, Mallam Ribadu, to answer it not with words, but with the hard, unflinching work of turning vulnerability into strength. Nigeria’s soldiers—and the civilians they defend—deserve nothing less. The exit door is not a bad proposition if this job continues to demystify you.

Respectfully, in the interest of a secure Nigeria.

…Dr Shehu is an Abuja-based writer, activist and educator.
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