The recent coordinated suicide bombings in Maiduguri claiming 23 lives and leaving 108 others injured serves as a reminder that the scars of insurgency in Nigeria’s North-East remain raw and unhealed.
Despite years of counter-terrorism operations, the capital of Borno State continues to bear the brunt of assaults on markets, hospitals, and transit hubs. These are not just tactical targets, they are the heart of civilian life, and their repeated violation signals that the technical defeat of terrorism remains a distant reality.
The sophistication of these blasts, reportedly executed by suicide bombers using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) at the Monday Market and the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, exposes systemic vulnerabilities.
While the Borno State Police Command and military units responded rapidly to contain the scenes, the failure to intercept these attackers before they reached high-traffic public spaces points to a persistent gap in proactive intelligence and community policing.
Since the insurgency’s inception in 2009, Maiduguri has endured a relentless cycle of raids and suicide blasts. However, the recurrence of such high-casualty events in 2026 suggests that the security architecture has hit a plateau. For the people of Borno, condolences and condemnations from the capital have become a hollow ritual. What is required now is a decisive demonstration of political will from the Presidency.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration must move beyond rhetoric to prove it truly means business in the fight against insecurity. To win this war, the federal government must intensify the deployment of surveillance technology, strengthen the synergy between military intelligence and local hunters or civilian task forces, and hold security heads accountable for intelligence leakages.
Maiduguri deserves more than mere survival, it deserves the restoration of total normalcy. This latest tragedy must serve as a turning point for the Tinubu administration to overhaul the North-East security strategy. Anything less than a total crushing of these remnant terror cells will be viewed as a failure of the government’s primary responsibility, the protection of lives and property. The wounds of Maiduguri remain open, and they will only close when the state proves it has finally gained the upper hand.