Who Inherits the Gain?

Why security victories can unravel at institutional handoffs

Wilson Ugah — Retired U.S. Army Strategist | Founder, NOVA Strategic Advisory Group

Security gains endure only when the institutions that inherit them can sustain routine order after military support recedes. In Nigeria, that requires more than formally transferring responsibility from the armed forces to police or civilian authorities. The institutions expected to remain must have the authority and capability to perform the functions that keep an area secure and governed.¹ A durable handoff therefore requires planners to settle ownership before the transition, transfer capability with responsibility, and measure performance as military support recedes.

Settle Ownership Before the Handoff

Ownership of what follows an operation must be settled before the operation ends. Military operations can create the conditions for government to return by disrupting armed groups, reopening access, protecting threatened populations, and recovering territory. Where violence has displaced the state or made ordinary administration impossible, those gains are necessary. They do not, however, determine what happens after the military phase.

The next phase depends on institutions with different functions and uneven capacities. Police are expected to resume routine public-security duties, but in some affected areas they may lack the reach or support to do so consistently. Civil authorities must restore basic administration and services before normal governance can resume. Courts, customary institutions, traditional authorities, and community organizations all have roles in dispute resolution, local warning, and access to the population. State and local authorities control different resources and may not act with the same priorities or capabilities.² The handoff is therefore rarely a transfer from military control to a single institution ready to assume everything that follows.

That makes ownership a planning problem. Each of these institutions can perform its assigned task while no one is responsible for whether the transition works as a whole. Before an operation concludes, planners should identify who will sustain routine security, administration, essential services, local warning, and dispute resolution, and who is responsible for recognizing a failing transition and correcting it. The 2016 North-East Nigeria Recovery and Peace Building Assessment distributed responsibility for political leadership, program management, policy alignment, accountability, resource mobilization, basic services, conflict resolution, and security across federal, state, and local tiers.³ The question is whether that mapping is incorporated into operational transitions before military support recedes.

Ownership must mean more than naming an agency. The institution assigned a function must know the limits of its authority, its relationship to other agencies, and the resources it can expect to control. Otherwise, responsibility moves before the arrangements needed to exercise it are settled.

Transfer Capability With Responsibility

Capability must transfer with responsibility, and assigning a function does not by itself supply it. A handoff may be formally complete while the receiving institution lacks the authority, personnel, information, logistics, resources, or local relationships needed to carry out the responsibility it has inherited.

In practice, capability is often spread across several organizations. One institution may hold formal authority, another may control funding, another may possess relevant intelligence, and another may have the local relationships needed to act. Nigeria’s national-security law reflects this division: the National Security Adviser’s statutory role centers on coordination, presidential advice, and integration of intelligence, while the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act gives the NSA wider counterterrorism coordination and capacity-building responsibilities without displacing the primary roles of the relevant operational agencies.⁴ If those dependencies are not resolved before the transition, responsibility can move faster than the system that must support it. The receiving institution becomes accountable for a function it can perform partially, intermittently, or only with continued military support.

Nigeria’s emerging forest-guard system illustrates the problem. In 2025, the President directed the Office of the National Security Adviser and the Federal Ministry of Environment to implement a national forest-guard initiative.⁵ As the program developed, ONSA assumed strategic coordination, the Department of State Services took operational leadership, and the National Park Service, police, armed forces, other security agencies, and participating state governments contributed different capabilities.⁶ The National Park Service sits within the federal environmental architecture and has statutory provision for specified officers to possess firearms under regulated conditions.⁷ At the same time, legislation considered by the National Assembly proposed a permanent Nigeria Hunters and Forest Security Service located within a different institutional structure: its governing arrangements were tied to the Interior services board, and the bill defined the responsible minister as the minister charged with matters relating to interior.⁸ The same security function can therefore sit across several chains of authority before its permanent institutional home is settled, without any single arrangement being wrong on its own.

Consider what that means after a military operation in a forested area. If forest guards are expected to help preserve the security gain, who commands them locally? Who pays and sustains them after an initial deployment? Who determines their legal powers and rules for the use of force? Who can direct police or military reinforcement when the guards encounter a threat beyond their capacity? Who is responsible if warning signs are reported but no agency acts?

Each question determines whether the institution receiving responsibility can perform the mission. A presidential directive can assign a task, and a coordinating body can organize several agencies around it, without automatically creating the integrated capability needed to sustain that task over time. Reporting during implementation attributed some delays to unresolved interagency procedures and uncertainty over the operational framework.⁹ Capability cannot transfer with responsibility if responsibility itself has no settled institutional home.

The same problem can appear at the local level even when the responsible agency is clear. Police may be present but unable to maintain regular access to outlying settlements. Local administration may reopen while depending on temporary funding or security arrangements. A reporting channel may exist without any confidence that a response will follow. In such conditions, armed groups can begin rebuilding influence before they are strong enough to confront security forces directly. Intimidation, extortion, recruitment, and involvement in unresolved local disputes can return gradually. A village leader under threat, farmers no longer using their land, a school closing again, or police patrols failing to reach a community may indicate that state access and authority are weakening long before conditions require another military operation.

Capability transfers only when the institution inheriting a function can act under its own authority, sustain the personnel and logistics that keep it present, receive and use relevant information, continue operating after extraordinary funding declines, and maintain relationships that allow it to detect changes in local conditions. Military support may still be necessary during transition, but planners should distinguish support that enables a handoff from support that substitutes indefinitely for a capability the receiving institution does not possess.

Measure Performance as Support Recedes

Measurement must begin before the handoff and continue as military support recedes. The end of an operation is too early to determine whether its gains will last, and continued military presence can mask weaknesses in the institutions expected to remain.

Planning should define what must be functioning at the point of transfer and what should still be functioning thirty or ninety days later. That includes the level of policing required, the officials and facilities needed for administration, the arrangements that keep schools and clinics operating, the mechanisms for managing disputes as displaced populations return, and the channels through which residents can report renewed armed activity. Recovery and stabilization assessments in northeast Nigeria have similarly emphasized restoring local-government capacity, public services, grievance and conflict-resolution mechanisms, citizen engagement, and coordination across institutions rather than treating physical return alone as evidence of recovery.¹⁰ These requirements make the transition testable rather than assumed.

The measures themselves should focus on performance: whether residents know which authority is responsible for routine order and can reach it; whether police and other security institutions can operate without constant military substitution; whether administrative functions and essential services continue; and whether local disputes and reports of renewed threats produce a response.

Institutional performance therefore belongs in the security picture. Those measures can reveal deterioration before armed groups again mass fighters or seize territory, and institutions that read them early may keep the problem manageable. Where they cannot, military forces may once again inherit the crisis that the previous operation was meant to resolve.

In conflict-affected parts of Nigeria, the institutions expected to inherit these functions often operate with serious capacity constraints. The 2016 recovery assessment found displaced local governments, inadequate fiscal and human resources, weak service-delivery capacity, and a need to rebuild their ability to provide protection and respond to emergencies; current IOM planning likewise identifies weak state presence and limited access to justice as continuing features of affected regions.¹¹ Requiring that capability accompany responsibility can therefore appear to demand capacity that does not exist. The objection is serious, and it marks the boundary of the argument rather than defeating it. Settling ownership and identifying a capability gap does not create police, courts, or local administration. It determines whether the gap is planned for and resourced during the operation or discovered after military support has already receded. Continued military support remains legitimate while that gap closes. What fails is support that substitutes indefinitely for capability no institution is building.

Nigeria will continue to require military force where armed groups threaten communities, territory, and critical infrastructure. The institutional handoff determines whether the effects of those operations survive after the immediate threat has been reduced. That requires knowing who owns each function, ensuring that authority and capability transfer with responsibility, and testing whether those functions continue after military support declines. Those decisions belong in strategic design and operational planning, not in response to the aftermath of an operation. If the institutions expected to remain cannot perform without continued military substitution, the handoff remains incomplete regardless of the tactical result.

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Endnotes

1. Federal Republic of Nigeria, Nigeria Police Act, 2020, Act No. 2, sec. 4; Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, as amended, sec. 214. ←
2. Federal Republic of Nigeria, Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, as amended, sec. 7 and Fourth Schedule; Federal Government of the Republic of Nigeria and the State Governments of Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Taraba, and Yobe, North-East Nigeria Recovery and Peace Building Assessment, Volume II: Component Report (2016), 17, 19. Prepared with support from the European Union, United Nations, and World Bank. ←
3. Federal Government of the Republic of Nigeria and the State Governments of Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Taraba, and Yobe, North-East Nigeria Recovery and Peace Building Assessment, Volume I: Synthesis Report (2016), 64, table 14. The table presents an indicative distribution of political leadership, program management, horizontal and vertical coordination, policy alignment, capacity development, accountability, resource mobilization, basic services, conflict resolution and grievance redress, and safety and security across federal, state, and local tiers. ←
4. Federal Republic of Nigeria, National Security Agencies Act, 1986, secs. 2, 4; Federal Republic of Nigeria, Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022, secs. 4, 6. ←
5. Ayodele Oluwafemi, “Tinubu Establishes Forest Guards to ‘Flush Out Terrorists,’” TheCable, May 15, 2025. ←
6. The State House, Abuja, “President Tinubu Declares a Security Emergency, Orders Army, Police to Recruit More Personnel,” November 26, 2025; Federal Ministry of Information and National Orientation, “FG Graduates Over 7,000 Forest Guards, Set for Immediate Deployment,” December 27, 2025; News Agency of Nigeria, “FG Expands Forest Guards Initiative to 10 States, Trains 9,000 Personnel,” July 31, 2026. ←
7. Federal Ministry of Environment, “How We Serve Our Fatherland,” homepage section, accessed August 27, 2026; Federal Republic of Nigeria, National Park Service Act, 1999 No. 46, sec. 42. Section 42 authorizes specified National Park Service officers to possess firearms and ammunition subject to regulation. ←
8. Federal Republic of Nigeria, House of Representatives, A Bill for an Act to Establish the Nigeria Hunters and Forest Security Service (NHFSS) to Prevent, Combat Forest Crimes and Enhance Security Within Nigerian Forests and for Related Matters, HB. 90 (2023), C971–C972, C980. The bill places the proposed service within the Interior-services governing architecture and defines the responsible “Minister” as the minister charged with matters relating to interior. ←
9. Olufemi Adediran, “Forest Guards: Inter-agency Rift Stalls Tinubu’s Recruitment Order,” Sunday PUNCH, December 21, 2025. The report attributed delays to bureaucratic hurdles, unsettled operational arrangements, and disputes over responsibilities including recruitment and remuneration. Significant portions relied on unnamed officials; it is therefore used as corroborating evidence of implementation friction rather than definitive proof of the underlying institutional dispute. ←
10. Federal Government of the Republic of Nigeria et al., North-East Nigeria Recovery and Peace Building Assessment, Volume II, 17–19; International Organization for Migration, Nigeria Crisis Response Plan 2026–2028, last updated December 9, 2025. ←
11. Federal Government of the Republic of Nigeria et al., North-East Nigeria Recovery and Peace Building Assessment, Volume II, 17–19, and table 1.5 at 41; International Organization for Migration, Nigeria Crisis Response Plan 2026–2028. The RPBA identifies displaced local governments, inadequate fiscal and human resources, low service-delivery capacity, and the need to rebuild local-government protection and emergency-response capability. IOM identifies weak state presence and limited access to justice as continuing contributors to grievances in conflict-affected regions. ←

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