After the Clearing
Why Nigeria Struggles to Convert Battlefield Gains into Durable Order
In May 2026, the African Union Peace and Security Council praised the Multinational Joint Task Force for operational gains against Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province. Operation Lake Sanity III had degraded logistics hubs, constrained terrorist movement, improved security conditions, expanded humanitarian access, and supported the return of displaced people. The Council then emphasized the need to consolidate and preserve those gains. In the same communiqué, it identified serious shortages in military capabilities and significant funding gaps affecting stabilization, coordination, monitoring, and cross-border initiatives.1
The juxtaposition captures a problem that has followed Nigeria’s counterinsurgency campaign for years: military force can recover territory, but Nigeria struggles to make those gains endure when campaigns outpace the civilian authority, local security capacity, and political arrangements needed to preserve them. Converting temporary advantage into durable order therefore has to begin before the fighting ends.
Nigeria’s armed forces have repeatedly imposed significant costs on insurgents and recovered contested territory, and those battlefield achievements remain indispensable. Their strategic value, however, depends on whether recovered territory can sustain the return of ordinary life: roads that safely reconnect residents with their farms; government buildings staffed by civil servants; police equipped, protected, and supported well enough to remain; and public services rooted in a functioning relationship between citizen and state rather than sustained indefinitely by humanitarian organizations.
Physical control, in other words, is only the first form of holding. Nigeria’s deeper security challenge is the conversion of battlefield success into institutional holding: civilian authority, policing, justice, services, livelihoods, administration, political participation, and predictable public finance capable of making state presence persistent.
The Space After the Operation
The Nigerian military and its regional partners substantially reduced Boko Haram’s territorial control during the offensives of 2015 and 2016. The insurgency adapted, moving into harder-to-govern rural spaces, returning to guerrilla tactics, and continuing to contest parts of northeastern Nigeria even after major population centers had been recovered.2 The recovery of those population centers changed the local balance of force without, by itself, establishing the structure of authority that would make the gains endure.
The demands of holding therefore extend well beyond the force required to secure a town. Restored civilian authority requires civilian policing, courts and traditional institutions, functioning local government, and schools, clinics, markets, and transport networks that people can use. Keeping those institutions and services functional depends on residents feeling secure enough to rebuild and on the state providing the personnel, authority, and recurrent financing needed after emergency resources recede.
The military may therefore accomplish its assigned mission while the state fails to preserve the resulting gain. That distinction matters if insurgents reappear: their return does not necessarily mean the clearing operation failed; the breakdown may have occurred later, when the security gain reached an institutional boundary and responsibility passed from one organization to another. The strategic question is who inherits the gain.
Nigeria Has Known Much of This for Years
In 2016, the Federal Government, the six northeastern states, the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Bank produced the North-East Nigeria Recovery and Peace Building Assessment. Its implementation chapter reads today less like a historical document than a description of the architecture that holding territory would require.
The assessment identified horizontal coordination among government institutions, vertical alignment among federal, state, and local authorities, weak frontline institutional capacity, financing, accountability, community participation, and clear allocation of responsibilities as central requirements for recovery.3 Its institutional analysis compared three arrangements: a dedicated recovery agency, implementation through existing ministries and agencies, and a hybrid model. A special agency could concentrate attention and resources but create jurisdictional conflict and sustainability problems; implementation through existing ministries would avoid creating a parallel structure but burden already weak capacity; and a hybrid could combine centralized coordination with existing implementation channels if roles were clearly distributed and the coordinating body could align the actors involved.4
The assessment went beyond diagnosing coordination failures. It mapped the work of recovery across Nigeria’s three tiers of government, locating responsibility for political leadership, program management, policy alignment, accountability, resource mobilization, basic services, conflict resolution, and security at federal, state, and local levels.5 That level of specificity matters: the requirements of post-conflict consolidation were not merely recognized in principle; they had been translated into a proposed division of institutional responsibility. Nigeria’s challenge therefore cannot be reduced to not knowing what should follow military success. The harder question is why that knowledge has proved so difficult to convert into durable capability.
Holding Means More Than Staying
Even in military terms, holding is not confined to geographical terrain. Security forces must prevent insurgents from returning while protecting the population whose safety and cooperation give territorial control its political meaning. Yet neither military presence nor population protection can substitute for the civilian authority through which a state governs.
Saskia Brechenmacher’s 2019 study of stabilization in northeastern Nigeria documented the consequences when these forms of holding diverged. In parts of Borno, local officials had returned only partially and some remained based in Maiduguri. Police ordered back into recovered towns sometimes resisted redeployment because they lacked equipment, training, or adequate resources. In several locations, rebuilt schools, markets, and health facilities existed without the personnel required to operate them.6
The problem became particularly visible in Borno’s garrison towns. Bama, recaptured in 2015 and later designated for stabilization and rehabilitation, received returning displaced residents while basic infrastructure and security remained incomplete. Across some garrison communities, civilians faced severe restrictions on movement and access to farmland. The military and Civilian Joint Task Force continued performing policing functions, while the government had yet to establish a coordinated and resourced transition from military to civilian policing beyond Maiduguri.7
Because Brechenmacher’s evidence was gathered several years ago, it should not be read as a description of conditions across Borno today. Its value lies in the recurring mechanism it exposes: military campaigns can recover territory faster than civilian institutions can reestablish the capacity to govern it. Competing threats then create pressure to reallocate scarce military capabilities from recovered areas. If civilian institutions and locally sustainable security arrangements cannot yet assume routine responsibilities, that reallocation can create opportunities for insurgents to rebuild influence and regain freedom of action. The holding problem lies in sequencing military capability, civilian authority, and local security capacity so that territorial recovery can endure.
The Handoff Is Part of the Strategy
Operation Safe Corridor reveals the same problem from another direction. The program addresses deradicalization, rehabilitation, and reintegration rather than territorial stabilization, yet the institutional seams are similar.
Idayat Hassan’s assessment, based principally on fieldwork conducted in 2019, found problems involving communication, staff capacity, interagency coordination, screening, accountability, community participation, and financing. Respondents described tensions among participating agencies and overlapping responsibilities that hindered implementation. Former combatants encountered delays and resistance as responsibility shifted from the program toward states and receiving communities.8 Community consultation often came late, when graduates were already preparing for release, and some governors felt insufficiently involved. Sustainable reintegration, Hassan concluded, required ownership at national, state, and local levels, alongside attention to justice, reconciliation, victim concerns, and funding.9
Safe Corridor shows that a program can reach its administrative endpoint before its strategic outcome is secure. Rehabilitation may end at release, but reintegration depends on what states and receiving communities are able and willing to do afterward. The same problem arises when military operations, stabilization projects, or reconstruction efforts transfer their gains to institutions that lack the authority, resources, personnel, political support, or local acceptance required to sustain them. The handoff must therefore be designed into the strategy, not treated as an automatic consequence of one organization completing its mandate. When those conditions are absent, successful activity decays into temporary performance, which is why Nigeria must plan less around institutional endpoints and more around chains of continuity.
Power Decides What Survives
Institutional design provides a formal architecture for action. On paper, it can specify responsibility through an organogram, establish lines of effort through strategy, and allocate funding through a budget. Its performance, however, depends on organizations with different interests and different capacities to enforce, resist, redirect, or delay decisions.
Political-settlements analysis offers a useful way to examine this layer without turning every security problem into a sweeping argument about national politics. Mushtaq Khan defines a political settlement in relation to the distribution of power among organizations relevant to a particular institutional or policy problem. Those organizations may support, resist, or distort institutions according to their interests and capabilities. Their holding power is the capacity to endure contests, mobilize resources, impose costs, and force compromise. Crucially, the relevant settlement can be examined at the level of a village or municipality as well as at the national level.10
Applied to recovered territory, Khan’s concept directs attention to the effective authority behind formal institutions. That authority is visible in whether police can operate despite intimidation and whether local government can translate a statutory mandate into action despite its dependence on state-level political and fiscal decisions. Traditional authorities, community organizations, vigilante groups, security agencies, humanitarian organizations, political networks, and insurgent structures also shape the local distribution of power. A sustainable arrangement must account for that distribution—or deliberately change it—because where civilian authority cannot function, military presence risks remaining the default guarantor of order.
This is where apparently technical stabilization questions become political. Who controls appointments and money? Who provides security and resolves disputes? Who benefits when displaced people return, and who loses influence when civilian government resumes? Who can block implementation while formally supporting policy? Which local organizations command enough trust or coercive capacity to make an arrangement work? The answers vary by place. Nigeria cannot hold Bama, Marte, Dikwa, or another conflict-affected locality through a generic template detached from local organizations and power relationships. The architecture must be locally informed while remaining nationally coherent.
Winning the Peace Begins Before the Shooting Stops
The architecture for holding cannot wait for a declaration that an area has become post-conflict, nor should it be improvised around individual clearing operations. A functioning strategy should establish that architecture in advance, aligning military, political, administrative, and fiscal lines of effort toward a common political outcome. Operational planning then gives the strategy local form: civilian and security leaders identify which institution assumes each responsibility, what conditions trigger the transfer, which resources move with it, and what happens if the receiving institution cannot yet perform.
A workable holding architecture begins with clear authority. Each recovered area needs a map of responsibility across federal, state, local, security, and community actors, together with a decision authority capable of resolving disputes rather than another committee that records them. The transfer of responsibility should follow defined conditions, so that changes in military posture, police deployment, civilian return, service restoration, and reconstruction are not driven by political calendars or assumptions that security will continue improving.
A handoff becomes viable only when responsibility travels with resources and local consent. Institutions expected to hold outcomes need predictable recurrent funding; otherwise their mandates remain largely on paper. The 2016 recovery assessment linked implementation directly to resource mobilization, public financial management, accountability, and the distribution of functions across tiers of government.11 Communities likewise need enough influence to shape the return of displaced residents, the reintegration of former combatants, new policing arrangements, and reconstructed political authority. Consultation after essential decisions have been made produces compliance at best and resistance at worst.
Measurement should reflect the same objective: whether ordinary institutions can sustain the gain. Reduced attacks matter, but so do police presence, freedom of movement, market access, civil-service attendance, dispute resolution, school and clinic functionality, voluntary return, community confidence, and the ability of ordinary institutions to continue without emergency intervention.
These requirements do not diminish the military effort. The African Union Peace and Security Council’s May 2026 communiqué identified major capability gaps facing the Multinational Joint Task Force, including air mobility, counter-IED and counter-drone capabilities, communications, amphibious platforms, and other force enablers. It also identified funding and coordination gaps in stabilization and called for balance between military and nonmilitary approaches.12 Nigeria needs both military capability and institutional capacity. Military force creates the security space in which civilian institutions can return and function. If those institutions cannot sustain the gain, Nigeria risks a recurring cycle in which territory recovered at great cost is lost and must be retaken at further cost in lives, treasure, and political capital.
Holding the Gain
Nigeria’s security problem is often described through the language of insufficient force: more troops, better weapons, better intelligence, better surveillance, stronger borders, and greater mobility. Many of those requirements are real. Yet a country can improve every one of them and still leave unanswered the question that follows a successful campaign: What makes its gains endure?
The documents produced over the past decade suggest that Nigeria and its partners understand much of the answer. Recovery depends on coordinated authority capable of restoring civilian administration, transferring law-enforcement responsibilities from the military to police, and giving local governments the resources and capacity to function. Public services require institutions and personnel, not buildings alone, while communities must help shape arrangements governing return, policing, and reintegration. Rehabilitation cannot by itself secure acceptance for former combatants in receiving communities. Financing and accountability must outlast the emergency attention that initially sustains recovery.
The missing capability may therefore be less conceptual than institutional: a standing system that aligns military effort with civilian authority, recurrent financing, and local legitimacy while security forces are still creating the conditions for recovery. Such a system would give practical meaning to the African Union’s call to consolidate and preserve operational gains.13
The opportunity created by battlefield success can mature into durable political order when institutions are able to govern, adapt, retain public confidence, and carry the burden of authority without continued emergency support. Winning the peace begins with designing that capacity into a campaign before the fighting ends and sustaining it as military capabilities are reallocated.
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Endnotes
- African Union Peace and Security Council, “Communiqué of the 1347th Meeting of the PSC Held on 18 May 2026 on an Update on the Stabilization Activities of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) against Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin,” PSC/PR/COMM.1347.1 (2026), paras. 3, 8–10. ←
- Saskia Brechenmacher, Stabilizing Northeast Nigeria After Boko Haram (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2019), 1, 4–5. ←
- 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), 59–62. Prepared with support from the European Union, United Nations, and World Bank. ←
- Federal Government of the Republic of Nigeria et al., North-East Nigeria Recovery and Peace Building Assessment, 63, table 13. ←
- Federal Government of the Republic of Nigeria et al., North-East Nigeria Recovery and Peace Building Assessment, 64, table 14. ←
- Brechenmacher, Stabilizing Northeast Nigeria After Boko Haram, 22. ←
- Brechenmacher, Stabilizing Northeast Nigeria After Boko Haram, 22–23. The cited evidence concerns conditions documented during the study period and is used here to illustrate an institutional mechanism, not to characterize every present-day community. ←
- Idayat Hassan, “Reintegrating Ex-Combatants: An Assessment of Operation Safe Corridor,” Journal for Deradicalization, no. 33 (Winter 2022/23): 165–70. The assessment draws principally on fieldwork conducted in 2019. ←
- Hassan, “Reintegrating Ex-Combatants,” 171–73. ←
- Mushtaq H. Khan, “Political Settlements and the Analysis of Institutions,” African Affairs 117, no. 469 (2018): 639–42. ←
- Federal Government of the Republic of Nigeria et al., North-East Nigeria Recovery and Peace Building Assessment, 64, 66–68. ←
- African Union Peace and Security Council, “Communiqué of the 1347th Meeting,” paras. 8–10. ←
- African Union Peace and Security Council, “Communiqué of the 1347th Meeting,” para. 3. ←
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