Marte, the headquarters of the eponymous Local Government Area (LGA) on the western floodplains of the Lake Chad in Borno State, north-east Nigeria, has been a site of lingering contest between Nigerian troops on the one hand and Islamist insurgents of Boko Haram on the other for over one decade. At 3,154 km2, Marte LGA is just a little under the size of all of Lagos State.
For a while between 2014 and 2015, Boko Haram reportedly bivouacked in Marte on its way to its more permanent operational headquarters in the Sambissa Forest. For much of 2015, control of the town exchanged hands in succession between the Nigerian Army and Boko Haram. Around May 2015, Boko Haram reportedly took back the city from the Nigerian troops who had held it for three months from February of the same year.
For the most part, Nigeria has controlled Marte thereafter with the exception of a brief duration in 2021, when the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) temporarily visited havoc upon a military base in Marte.
All that appears to have changed recently. Around Monday, 12 May 2025, Islamist insurgents reportedly attacked the Forward Operating Base of the 153rd Task Force Battalion in Marte, resulting in considerable carnage. Sources familiar with the early morning attack reported that “over 10 soldiers were killed and hundreds of personnel deserted. The (terrorists) burnt down armored tanks and made away with arms and ammunition.” The beleaguered governor of Borno State, Babagana Zulum, has been left appealing to his ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to ensure that Marte does not fall back into the hands of Boko Haram and its allies.
In the same week that they attacked Marte, the insurgents also attacked the 3rd Battalion base in Rann, in Kala Balge district, killing at least five soldiers and leaving at least four others reportedly injured. The intensity and scope of the attacks by Boko Haram in Borno State in the past six months led the state governor to raise an alarm last April, suggesting that the country was “losing ground” in the fight against Islamist terror.
National Security Adviser (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu, a retired Assistant Inspector-General of the Nigeria Police Force, who has run for and is credibly rumoured to retain ambitions for another tilt at the presidency, ostensibly failed to get the governor’s memorandum. Addressing the National Summit, so-called, of the APC, the NSA claimed to have killed 13,543 Boko Haram elements in the first two years of the administration and recovered over 11,000 arms from them. He notably did not mention the haul of arms the insurgents have been busy harvesting from Nigerian military formations. Over the same period, he claimed, “124,408 Boko Haram fighters and their families” also surrendered.
It is unfortunate that the ruling party has chosen to make national security a party political matter. It is even more tragic that the wannabe political opposition have allowed them to get away with it. The result is a vacuum of leadership in the security sector filled and fed with an atrocious body count of Nigerian casualties whose death and suffering barely registers on the priorities of the people supposed to protect the country, its people and communities.
The central problem is a failure of strategy. To understand this, it is necessary to explain that the presidency is many jobs in one. A president is – among other things – party leader, chief marketer of the country, head of government, and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces. Every one of these roles of the president can be delegated except the last. As Commander-In-Chief, the president sets security strategy.
For over 50 years, Nigeria’s national security strategy docked onto the neighbourhood of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). There was good reason for that. The country’s northern boundaries feed into the southern rim of the Sahel. With Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger to its north as founding members of ECOWAS, the country could count solidly on friendly neighbours as buffers against the historical brutalities of Sahelian violence.
This understanding was at the heart of the transformation of the ECOWAS from an economic integration arrangement envisioned at its foundation in 1975 into a collective security arrangement in 1981. For much of the period since then, this arrangement held together.
However, following the military coup in Niger Republic in July 2023, the country lost its marbles and decided to bite its nose in order to spite its sovereign face. On behalf of ECOWAS, President Tinubu committed the blunder of threatening to invade another member of the ECOWAS collective security arrangement. He alone knows what he was thinking.
The hubris of President Tinubu’s handling of the coup crisisin Nigeria is inexplicable. With a landmass of over 1.267 million km2, Niger Republic constituted about 22% of the 5.8 million km2 of the landmass of ECOWAS. The idea of an invasion of the country in order to militarily restore the ousted administration of President Mohamed Bazoum was always worse than bluster; it was plainly unviable.
In invoking war against Niger on behalf of ECOWAS, President Tinubu managed in one stroke to violate the prohibition against the use of force in international law; create the impression that Nigeria’s Sahelian neighbours did not matter; and suggest that France was a more important factor to Nigeria’s neighbourhood strategy than its immediate neighbours.
That much should have been evident to the people who thought up the idea. But the damage was beyond a resort to fantastic bluster where hard-nosed rationality was needed. The costs have been prohibitive and rising; and the result has been devastating.
In September 2023, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger created their own collective security arrangement and orbited off into the realm of Russia’s mercenary diplomacy. Since then, the consequences for Nigeria have been stark. In the period since September 2023 and despite the fantasies of NSA Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s internal security situation has disintegrated into mayhem.
In the north-west states of Sokoto and Kebbi, a new terror group, Lakurawa, has taken root. South of Kebbi, in Kwara State, another new terror group, Mahmuda, runs murderously rampant. To the east of Kwara in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, vast swathes of territory and communities in Benue, Nasarawa, and Plateau states are being emptied in intense attacks credited to so-called “foreign herdsmen.”
The politicians are reluctant to acknowledge what is obvious and the soldiers have been trained not to say that their Commander-In-Chief has left them in an insecurity pickle. But that is exactly what President Tinubu has done with the way he has brought about the transformation of ECOWAS from an integrated security arrangement for the region into a rump of anassociation of Atlantic West African States (AAWAS).
The evidence is everywhere in the rising casualty count which NSA Nuhu Ribadu will not acknowledge. According to monitoring coalition, Nigeria Mourns, 4,416 people were killed in atrocities in Nigeria in 2023. In 2024, President Tinubu’s first full year in office, the number rose 21.2% to 5,353, including 308 security personnel. 88.5% of these killings occurred in Northern Nigeria. Another 5,171 were abducted.
Behind these numbers are people, families, communities, traumas that both Nuhu Ribadu and the ruling APC will not allow Nigerians to see, hear, acknowledge or mourn. They are the experiences of loss and indignity that the dissolute wannabes in the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP) cannot bring themselves to ask the APC to account for or acknowledge.
On 28 May, the civic Coalition Nigeria Mourns invites all Nigerians wherever they may be to spare a thought for all these victims and their loved ones in a National Day of Mourning (NDoM) “to rage, resist, and demand action from the government” in memory of all who have been killed or violated. A more responsible government would not have waited for a group of un–armed, un-elected citizens to remind them.
A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
