From Threat Assessment to Territorial Security: Navigating Nigeria's Evolving Defence Planning Framework

Abstract
For much of the Fourth Republic, Nigeria's defence establishment has planned reactively: budgets, force postures, and procurement decisions have tended to follow crises rather than a shared, standing assessment of threats. In August 2026, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu directed the immediate preparation of a National Threat Assessment and a rolling five-year Strategic Defence Operations Plan, instructing an eleven-member committee of service chiefs and intelligence heads to produce, within ninety days, a unified framework linking threat identification to force generation, capability gaps, and procurement. This article situates that directive within the longer arc of Nigeria's security architecture and asks what the new framework can plausibly achieve, and where it is likely to strain. It uses Russia's State Armament Programme as a comparative case, not as a model of geopolitical alignment but as an illustration of a mature, threat-informed, cyclical planning process anchored in law and budget. It then examines Nigeria's most persistent territorial security problem, its porous and largely undemarcated land borders, as the test case against which any new planning framework must prove itself. The article argues that Nigeria's central deficit is not doctrinal ignorance but institutional follow-through: chronic underfunding, procurement corruption, inter-agency rivalry, and fragile multinational coordination arrangements have repeatedly hollowed out well-designed strategies. It further cautions against reading Nigeria's simultaneous defence partnerships with Russia, the United States, China, the United Kingdom, France, and others as a coherent hedging strategy, arguing instead that this diversification carries its own institutional risks. The article closes with a set of implementation-focused recommendations for the 2026 Strategic Defence Operations Plan.
Keywords: Nigeria; National Security; Defence Planning; Border Security; Multinational Joint Task Force; Russia; threat assessment; civil-military relations

Nigeria; national security; defence planning; border security; Multinational Joint Task Force; Russia; threat assessment; civil–military relations; legislative oversight

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