At this point, Nigeria might as well appoint the Minister of Climate Change as National Security Adviser.
It would save time.
Because if the current argument is to be believed, terrorism in Nigeria is no longer the offspring of failed governance, compromised security systems, and political indifference. No—it is the direct handiwork of sunshine, heatwaves, and a Lake Chad that had the audacity to shrink without consulting Abuja.
One can almost admire the elegance of it all.
For years, Nigerians have asked inconvenient questions:
Why are vast territories ungoverned?
Why is intelligence so consistently unintelligent?
Why do armed groups operate with the confidence of elected officials?
At last, we have an answer: the weather is misbehaving.
This is policy gold. You cannot interrogate the weather. You cannot summon it before a parliamentary committee. You certainly cannot vote it out.
And best of all, it requires absolutely no reform.
Of course, we are told this is all very serious and “evidence-based.” Rising temperatures, desertification, shrinking water sources—important facts, no doubt. But somewhere between “less rainfall” and “terrorist recruitment pipeline,” the argument performs an acrobatic leap that would impress even the most flexible political manifesto.
Because, inconveniently, drought does not issue rifles. Heatwaves do not coordinate attacks. And desertification, for all its sins, has yet to be caught negotiating ransom.
What actually connects these dots is far less atmospheric and far more terrestrial: a state that has steadily retreated from its most basic responsibilities.
Communities do not descend into chaos simply because resources are scarce. They do so when there is no credible authority to manage scarcity. Farmer-herder tensions are not new; what is new is the near-total absence of systems to regulate them. Grazing routes didn’t evaporate into the sky—they were politically abandoned on the ground.
But governance failure is a stubbornly local problem. It refuses to attend international conferences. It does not attract climate finance. It lacks the glamour of global urgency.
“Climate change,” on the other hand, is the perfect diplomatic passport. It allows domestic dysfunction to be repackaged as planetary misfortune. It transforms policy failure into an environmental inevitability. It says, in effect: “It’s not that we cannot govern; it’s that the sun is too ambitious.”
And just like that, accountability melts faster than Arctic ice.
Meanwhile, terrorist groups continue to behave in a most uncooperative manner. Instead of acting like victims of climate patterns, they act like rational opportunists—expanding where the state is weak, recruiting where trust in government is nonexistent, and entrenching themselves where security responses are inconsistent at best and performative at worst.
Curiously, they seem less interested in rainfall levels and more interested in power vacuums.
Perhaps someone should inform them that they are actually climate activists.
None of this is to deny environmental stress. It exists. It bites. It complicates already fragile livelihoods. But to elevate it into the primary engine of Nigeria’s insecurity is not just analytically lazy—it is politically convenient.
It replaces hard questions with soft explanations.
And Nigeria has had quite enough of those.
Because at the end of the day, no insurgency was ever defeated by lowering the temperature. No bandit ever surrendered because the humidity improved. And no nation ever secured itself by holding the weather responsible for human decisions.
Until Nigeria confronts the far less fashionable truth—that insecurity thrives where governance fails—it will continue this curious exercise in meteorological blame-shifting.
Chasing clouds, while the storm remains firmly man-made.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 