Nigeria: Africa's War Within A War
There is a continent-wide Jihadist offensive in Africa. From the Sahel region of West Africa down to Ituri and North Kivu Provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the coast of East Africa, stretching from Somalia to Cabo Delgado in Mozambique, a variety of Islamist insurgencies, of varying lethality and size, are active and growing.[1] The continent is global jihad's new epicenter.[2] While some countries are particularly threatened – insurgencies are well advanced in Burkina Faso, Mali and Somalia – no country combines the full range of destabilizing factors as much as Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, with a population exceeding 230 million souls.
Practically every trend or nuance seen in the Islamist insurgencies elsewhere on the continent are at play inside Nigeria, but there is one major difference (aside from the country's sheer size).
There are Jihadist insurgencies in Muslim majority African countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso, and Somalia where terrorists battle governments and militaries mostly made up of Muslim co-religionists. While Christians or animists are targeted in those countries, the fight is between Salafi-Jihadists and pro-government Muslims.
There are also Jihadist insurgencies in Christian majority African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) or Mozambique, where terrorists may be based in a Muslim majority region (such as Mozambique's Cabo Delgado) but will face difficulties in advancing because the religious demographics do not work in their favor – the DRC is about 80 percent Christian and two percent Muslim. Mozambique is about 70 percent Christian and 19 percent Muslim. And, of course, in both cases, a minority of the Muslims are likely active violent Jihadist insurgents. These can still be, and are brutal and bloody conflicts, but the sheer weight of the non-Muslim population is an important factor in the government's favor.[3]
Nigeria is different. Unlike the insurgencies in Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique (and lesser conflicts elsewhere in the Sahel and the East Coast of Africa), Nigeria is more or less evenly split between Muslim in the North and Christians in the South, with a mixed population in between. While both religious blocs have experienced rapid growth, it seems that the Muslim half of the population has been growing a little faster.[4]
This means that Nigeria's Jihadist insurgency occurs within an already fraught religious context of competition and conflict. The Jihadist phenomenon encompasses not only two rival groups – one (Ansaru) associated with Al-Qaeda and the other (Boko Haram or ISWAP – Islamic State West Africa Province) with the Islamic State[5] – but flourishes side by side with other forms of extreme violence and banditry. Nigerian security forces recently scored a major success in capturing Ansaru's leadership.[6] The fear is that Al-Qaeda-linked Jihadists (JNIM) pushing down from Burkina Faso into Northern Benin would have been able to link up with their Ansaru allies in Northwest Nigeria.
But Jihadism in Nigeria also overlaps with generalized insecurity and banditry, a phenomenon which has been growing in recent years, especially in the North of the country and among the populous, regionally important, Fulani people. One recent study claimed that there are at least 30,000 bandits in Northwest Nigeria, spread among numerous rival groups.[7]
Some of these bandit groups are tiny. Others are like small armies with their leaders functioning as local or regional warlords with an exaggerated public persona. Figures like Bello Turji, Dogo Gidge or Gwaska Dankarami are not actual members of Jihadist groups but in their actions and impact on vulnerable communities, they are little different than the Jihadists.[8] The sole difference may be that the state sometimes negotiates with them.[9]
Both banditry and Jihadism overlap to some extent with existing tension between Fulani pastoralists and non-Fulani farmers (who are either Christian or Muslim). Thousands of Christians have been killed, their farms and villages in Nigeria's Middle Belt burnt out by roving Fulani. All too often these bloody acts are minimized by both the international community and the Nigerian government as mere clashes over land, ignoring the political, ethnic, and sectarian dimension. The sheer scope of the carnage is shocking.[10]
Both Jihadism and the attacks by Fulani militia have raised concerns among Christians (who are mostly unarmed) that the government – particularly certainly Muslim state officials and Fulani army officers – is not just incompetent in fighting insecurity but actually complicit in the violence.[11] Fulani Ethnic Militia (FEM) kill five times more Christians than Boko Haram in Nigeria.[12]
In 2025 alone, more than 7,000 Nigerian Christians have been slaughtered, while almost 8,000 more have been abducted. That is an average of 32 Christian deaths a day, every day this year. Christian civil society groups claim that the goal is to extirpate Christianity altogether in the country by 2075.[13]
With national elections scheduled for early 2027 and incumbent President Bola Tinubu – a Muslim – running for re-election, the questions of rising insecurity, dysfunctional governance, and the religious dynamic will loom large. Nigeria's Jihadists and Fulani death squads do not seem to be really strong enough by themselves to overthrow the state, as dysfunctional as it sometimes seems, but they are lethal and active enough to turbocharge existing ethnic and religious fissures.[14] With or without government connivance, they function almost as an armed wing in an ongoing ethnic and religious competition that has fateful political, social and economic dimensions whose consequences we do not yet fully understand.[15]
But even if Nigeria is able to persevere as a nation state and does not actually break apart into regionalized civil war, the country is too large and influential for rising internal instability to remain limited to inside the country's borders and not impact the region and even the West. The world is filled with raging conflicts dominating front page coverage. Nigeria is the conflict that is coming tomorrow that approaches while we are distracted elsewhere.
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