SOKOTO, JIHADIST LEGACIES, AND NIGERIA’S SECURITY BLIND SPOT.

SOKOTO, JIHADIST LEGACIES, AND NIGERIA’S SECURITY BLIND SPOT.

SOKOTO, JIHADIST LEGACIES, AND NIGERIA’S SECURITY BLIND SPOT.

To understand the current security crisis associated with Sokoto, Nigeria must resist the temptation to treat it as a sudden aberration. What is unfolding today is better understood as the convergence of history, ideology, geography, and prolonged state neglect.

Sokoto occupies a unique place in West African history. As the seat of the 19th-century Sokoto Caliphate, it was once the political and religious centre of a vast transnational system that stretched across present-day northern Nigeria, Niger, and parts of Cameroon. While that caliphate collapsed under colonial rule, its legacy did not vanish; it survived culturally, religiously, and intellectually. In itself, this history is not a crime. But when modern extremist movements deliberately invoke and weaponise historical symbols, narratives, and networks, history becomes a security variable rather than a neutral memory.

Across the Sahel, jihadist groups have demonstrated a consistent pattern: they anchor themselves in regions with historical religious authority, exploit grievances against the modern state, and operate across borders that are weakly policed and poorly governed. From northern Mali to western Niger and parts of Burkina Faso, extremist movements have thrived not because communities supported violence, but because states failed to impose consistent authority.

Sokoto’s geography places it squarely within this Sahelian security arc. Its proximity to Niger Republic, long-standing transhumance routes, and informal cross-border trade networks make it vulnerable to infiltration, logistics movement, and ideological exchange. Terrorist groups do not require mass support to operate, they only require silence, fear, and ungoverned spaces.

Nigeria’s greatest error was conceptual. For years, violence in the North-West was framed almost exclusively as “banditry”, a criminal problem driven by poverty and cattle rustling. This framing ignored a critical reality long recognised by security analysts: criminality and extremism often merge. Bandit groups evolve ideological cover; extremist cells adopt criminal funding methods. Treating one while ignoring the other allows both to mature.

Equally damaging was the state’s reluctance to interrogate ideological ecosystems. Extremism does not emerge fully formed with weapons in hand; it grows through preaching, informal schooling, grievance narratives, and parallel authority structures. When these warning signs are dismissed for fear of political or religious backlash, the cost is merely deferred and not avoided.

It is important to state clearly that this crisis is not an indictment of Islam, the Fulani people, or any northern community. Such generalisations are intellectually lazy and strategically dangerous. Extremist networks are minorities that survive by hiding within legitimate communities and exploiting the state’s fear of confrontation.

What Sokoto represents today is not collective guilt, but collective consequence. Consequence of decades of border neglect, intelligence underinvestment, euphemistic language, and selective enforcement of the law. Nigeria now faces a choice familiar to states that have confronted insurgency before it metastasises: confront the problem honestly, disrupt networks decisively, and reclaim ideological as well as territorial space or continue to outsource truth to denial and pay a higher price later.

History shows that terrorism is rarely defeated by force alone. It is defeated when states combine security action with clarity, courage, and consistency. Sokoto should serve as a warning but also as a final opportunity to correct a long-standing blind spot before it hardens into permanence.