President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's appointment of retired Major General Adeyinka A. Famadewa as Special Adviser on Homeland Security is, on its face, a welcome development. Nigeria needs every serious mind it can find in the fight to secure lives, communities, farms, highways, schools, markets, and borders.
First, congratulations are in order. Major General Adeyinka A. Famadewa (Rtd) comes into office with a serious security pedigree, a background in intelligence coordination, and a reputation for understanding the machinery of the Nigerian security state.
In a country under daily pressure from terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, communal violence, cyber threats, arms trafficking, and weak border management, no reasonable person should dismiss the importance of strengthening internal security coordination.
Nigeria needs capable hands. It needs steadier thinking. It needs less rivalry and more coherence. So the new appointee deserves a fair hearing, professional goodwill, and the nation's best wishes.
But goodwill is not the same thing as silence. This appointment raises hard but necessary questions: What exactly is 'Homeland Security' inside Nigeria's existing security architecture? Where does this office sit in relation to the Office of the National Security Adviser, the Ministry of Defence, the armed forces, the police, the DSS, NSCDC, immigration, customs, NEMA, and state-level security platforms?
Is this a genuinely new coordination node, or simply another advisory silo inside an already crowded and fragmented system? In security governance, titles matter less than remit, authority, and measurable outcomes. If the boundaries of the office are unclear, then the appointment may create more paperwork than protection.
Where Does Homeland Security Sit in Nigeria Today?
That is the first institutional question the presidency should answer plainly. Nigeria does not have a fully developed homeland security architecture in the way the term is often understood elsewhere. What Nigeria has instead is a dense patchwork of bodies with overlapping responsibilities: the Office of the National Security Adviser for strategic coordination; the military services for external defence and increasingly internal deployments; the Nigeria Police Force for core internal law enforcement; the DSS for domestic intelligence; the NIA and DIA for external and defence intelligence; NSCDC for critical national assets and civil defence; immigration and customs for border functions; NEMA and other emergency structures for disaster response; and a growing layer of governors, ad hoc task forces, vigilante arrangements, and informal community security actors.
That means the phrase 'Homeland Security' can become either useful or dangerous. Useful, if it forces Nigeria to think of security as the protection of people, communities, infrastructure, borders, cyberspace, supply chains, and public confidence across institutions. Dangerous, if it becomes a fashionable label without legal clarity, operational boundaries, budget discipline, or accountability.
Nigeria does not need another elegant office in Abuja whose main output is meetings, memos, and inter-agency competition. It needs a function that removes duplication, closes response gaps, and helps convert scattered intelligence into fast protection for citizens.
If this new role is to make sense, it should be defined as a coordinating and performance-driving office focused on domestic threat prevention, inter-agency fusion, crisis anticipation, protection of critical infrastructure, border risk reduction, and subnational early warning. It should not become a parallel NSA, a shadow interior ministry, or an extra command post without command responsibility. In other words, the question is not whether the title sounds important. The question is whether the office solves a problem that existing institutions have failed to solve.
What Can Famadewa Bring That He Did Not Already Bring Before?
This is the second hard question, and it is a fair one. Public reports on the appointment note that Famadewa previously served as Principal General Staff Officer to the National Security Adviser between 2015 and 2021 and played a key role in establishing the Intelligence Fusion Centre at the Office of the National Security Adviser. That matters because the presidency is effectively appointing someone who already knows the system's wiring diagram. He cannot plead ignorance about where coordination breaks down. He has seen the silos from the inside.
That background is either his greatest strength or his greatest test. It is a strength because he understands the rivalries, bottlenecks, incentives, reporting chains, and politics that often prevent agencies from sharing information in real time. It is a test because Nigerians are entitled to ask: if these coordination ideas were already visible years ago, why did they not produce a fundamentally different security outcome? What will now be different: structure, authority, political backing, operating doctrine, technology, or accountability?
The most persuasive answer he can give is not rhetorical. It is practical. He should not try to sell himself as the discoverer of a brand-new theory. He should instead present himself as the official who will finally move from concept to execution. If he helped design fusion, then his mission now should be to make fusion real beyond Abuja: from national intelligence centres to theatre commands, from theatre commands to police formations, from federal agencies to state actors, and from classified reporting to field-level prevention. The country does not need another diagram of coordination. It needs coordination that can be felt in markets, highways, farms, schools, rail lines, border communities, and digital networks.
What Should His KPIs Be?
No official KPIs had been publicly outlined at the time of writing, but if this office is to be meaningful, the presidency should publish clear deliverables. At a minimum, the Special Adviser on Homeland Security should be judged against the following performance indicators:
- Intelligence-to-action time: Has the gap between threat warning and operational response reduced?
- Inter-agency response quality: Are the police, DSS, NSCDC, armed forces, immigration, customs, and emergency services working from shared threat pictures in priority theatres?
- Protection of critical infrastructure: Are rail, power, telecom, oil and gas assets, ports, and digital systems better protected with measurable incident reduction?
- Kidnap and banditry disruption metrics: Are there fewer successful attacks on highways, farms, schools, and peri-urban communities in identified hotspots?
- Border risk management: Are arms smuggling, irregular crossings, and transnational criminal flows being disrupted more effectively?
- Subnational early warning: Do governors and local security structures receive actionable alerts early enough to prevent escalation?
- Civilian trust and safety outcomes: Do citizens feel safer, report threats more readily, and experience faster emergency response?
- Duplication reduction: Has the office helped eliminate overlapping mandates, repeated meetings, and bureaucratic turf wars?
- Accountability and review: Is there a quarterly public-facing scorecard, even if sensitive details remain classified?
These KPIs matter because security success cannot be measured only by how many meetings were held, how many briefings were presented, or how many stern statements were issued. Real security governance is measured in prevented attacks, saved lives, restored mobility, improved trust, and reduced fear.
Why Nigeria Must Throw Away the Old Playbook
This is the larger point. Nigeria cannot continue to approach twenty-first century insecurity with a twentieth-century security imagination. The old playbook is too state-centric, too force-heavy, too centralised, too reactive, and too invested in institutional ego. It treats insecurity mainly as a matter of deploying more men, issuing tougher directives, or creating one more office whenever the old ones disappoint.
But Nigeria's threat environment is far more complex than that. Many of today's threats live in the seams; between federal and state authority, between intelligence and policing, between land borders and digital networks, between criminality and ideology, between climate stress and communal violence, between unemployment and recruitment into armed groups.
A transformative security mindset would start from the citizen, not just the state. It would ask different questions: How safe is the farmer going to the field? How safe is the truck on the highway? How quickly can a distress signal move from a village to a response hub? How many communities have functional local early warning systems? How resilient are schools, hospitals, telecom networks, dams, pipelines, and data systems? Can the justice system convert arrests into credible prosecutions? Can technology support accountability instead of merely expanding surveillance?
That new mindset would also accept an uncomfortable truth: kinetic response is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Nigeria needs a homeland security doctrine built on prevention, intelligence, policing reform, emergency management, border modernisation, cyber resilience, community legitimacy, strategic communications, deradicalisation where appropriate, and disciplined use of force. Security is not only about who carries a gun. It is also about who can connect data, anticipate risk, manage crises, earn public trust, and sustain lawful order.
Is It Time to Consider Civilian Experts as NSA?
The debate over who should serve as National Security Adviser is legitimate. Nigeria borrowed much of its presidential national security coordination concept from the American model, but it has not fully adopted that model's flexibility. In the United States, the National Security Adviser need not be a retired general. The office has been held by academics, diplomats, lawyers, policy strategists, and military officers. The U.S. National Security Council was created under the National Security Act of 1947, while the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs emerged in the early 1950s.
The American model has produced figures such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton, Susan Rice, Jake Sullivan, and currently, in an acting capacity, Marco Rubio.
The lesson for Nigeria is not to copy personalities but to emulate the openness of recruitment. A modern NSA can be a retired military officer, but need not be. The best candidate should be the person with the strongest combination of strategic judgement, inter-agency management skills, presidential trust, geopolitical understanding, intelligence literacy, crisis discipline, democratic temperament, and the ability to challenge groupthink.
Indeed, appointing non-uniformed experts can sometimes help break the culture of securitisation that frames every problem through barracks logic.
Nigeria has diplomats who understand regional politics, scholars who understand conflict systems, economists who understand criminal markets, technology experts who understand cyber threats, lawyers who understand rights and justice, and former intelligence professionals who understand quiet statecraft. The country should widen the pool. The security of over 200 million people is too important to be constrained by habit.
A mature republic should be able to separate operational command from strategic coordination. Civilian-led national security leadership, properly designed, can strengthen democratic accountability, reduce institutional capture, and broaden the range of ideas at the top.
This is not an argument against military expertise. Nigeria absolutely needs military professionalism at the centre of security thinking. It is an argument against intellectual closure. A country facing hybrid threats should not limit itself to a single career pipeline when selecting its highest-level security policy coordinators.
What Should the New Special Adviser Do First?
- Publish a short public doctrine note defining the scope of Homeland Security in Nigeria.
- Map overlap across federal security agencies and identify where mandates collide.
- Establish a 100-day action plan with a limited number of measurable priorities.
- Create a joint threat dashboard for domestic risks, with escalation triggers and response ownership clearly assigned.
- Drive fusion downwards; not only across elite federal agencies, but into states, border corridors, transport nodes, and critical infrastructure networks.
- Build a citizen-facing emergency and intelligence feedback loop that rewards timely reporting and protects informants.
- Insist on quarterly performance reviews chaired at the highest political level, so coordination failure has consequences.
A Welcome... and a Challenge
So yes, Major General Famadewa should be welcomed. He is entering office at a difficult time, and nobody should envy the burden on his desk. Nigeria needs every ounce of seriousness it can get. But welcome must not become uncritical applause. The presidency owes the country a clear answer about remit, fit, boundaries, powers, and outcomes. Without that clarity, 'Homeland Security' risks becoming one more room in Abuja where urgent problems go to change names.
The best outcome would be this: that the new appointee uses his experience not to preserve the old architecture, but to challenge it; not to add another layer of ceremony, but to reduce fragmentation; not to defend inherited habits, but to replace them with mission-driven coordination; not to speak the language of security elites alone, but to restore the everyday security of ordinary Nigerians.
Nigeria does not merely need more security offices. It needs a new security mindset; one that is integrated, accountable, preventive, technologically intelligent, locally informed, and human in its priorities. That is the real test of this appointment. And that is the standard by which the new Special Adviser should be judged.
Dr Charles Omole is an LLB, LLM, PhD (Bucks)*, Polymath, Intl. Lawyer, Jurist, Author, Rtd UK Judge, Leadership Coach, DG@IPSPRorg, Governance, Policy & Security Sector Reform Expert.
