Viewpoint: Washington’s terror list indicts Nigeria’s inaction

Last week, the United States government released a list of individuals and entities designated as terrorism sponsors. Among them were Nigerian names.

Within days, the Nigerian government, which had for years loudly proclaimed it knew who was financing terror in the country, suddenly sprang into action and froze accounts.

The question that every thinking Nigerian must ask is uncomfortable but necessary: if the government truly knew, why did it take Washington’s list to make Abuja move?

For years, successive Nigerian administrations have declared with confidence that they knew the sponsors of Boko Haram, ISWAP, and bandits terrorizing the North. Former President Muhammadu Buhari made similar declarations. State governors echoed the same and security chiefs repeated it. Yet names were never released, and arrests were never made. The sponsors continued sponsoring, while terrorists continued their devastating attacks on communities and Nigerians.

When a government claims to know who is financing mass murder but fails to act, it leaves only two plausible explanations: either it is displaying extraordinary incompetence, or its declarations were never true to begin with. Both possibilities are damning.

According to the Global Terrorism Index, Nigeria has consistently ranked among the world’s most terror-affected countries. Between 2011 and 2023, Boko Haram and affiliated groups killed an estimated 35,000 people and displaced over two million. The economic cost runs into hundreds of billions of naira: destroyed farmlands, abandoned investments, and a traumatized productive population in the Northeast and Northwest.

These numbers include children who did not return from school in Chibok, school children abducted and held for weeks in Oyo National park, farmers killed on their own land in Zamfara and many more. Every year that a known sponsor went unnamed and unpunished is a year complicit in that bloodshed.

The contrast with functioning democracies is instructive. After the 2001 attacks, the United States passed the Patriot Act within weeks, restructured its entire intelligence architecture, created the Department of Homeland Security, and built a global financial surveillance network — SWIFT monitoring, OFAC sanctions, and FinCEN reporting, specifically to strangle terror financing at its roots.

The United Kingdom enacted the Terrorism Act 2000 and Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, giving authorities sweeping powers to freeze assets and prosecute financiers without waiting for a foreign government to hand them a list. Rwanda, having suffered the worst of what ethnic violence produces, rebuilt its entire security and intelligence apparatus around early detection and pre-emption.

The common thread is institutional ownership. These governments did not outsource their survival to external actors. Nigeria has repeatedly done exactly that – from relying on mercenaries to fight Boko Haram in 2015 to now needing an American designation list before freezing accounts that were apparently already known.

There is a more cynical reading that cannot be dismissed. Many Nigerians believe terrorism in Nigeria has, at various points, served political purposes. It has been weaponised in intra-elite conflicts. When terror is politically useful, it is managed rather than eliminated. When an external actor removes the political cover by publishing names publicly, sudden action becomes unavoidable.

This is not unique to Nigeria. Across weak institutional democracies, security threats are often managed as political instruments. The difference is the cost borne by ordinary citizens while elites play these games.

The nation requires structural change. The State Security Services, or DSS, the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit, and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission must be genuinely operationally independent, insulated from political interference and mandated to act on intelligence without waiting for executive permission.

Terror financing leaves financial trails. Banks, mobile money platforms, and crypto-currency exchanges must be compelled under strengthened legislation to report suspicious patterns in real time. The NFIU has the framework; it lacks commitment or the political backing to enforce it fearlessly.

Community intelligence networks in affected regions must be funded, protected, and taken seriously. Most terror attacks are preceded by signals that local communities detect but have no safe channel to report.

Finally, Nigeria must stop treating external designations as a substitute for domestic accountability. Washington’s list should have been Abuja’s list first. That it was not is the indictment.

The Nigerian government’s sudden activation after the US release is not a sign of strength. It is a confession that the political will was always available, but was rationed according to convenience rather than deployed in service of the citizens paying the ultimate price.