Nigeria in a state of war, report says
With no fewer than 964 Nigerian security operatives killed in the last one year alone, a security report released by a research firm, SB Morgen Intelligence (SBMI) has turned in a damming verdict that Nigeria is currently in a state of war.
The SBM Intelligence report, which was released to journalists at a press conference in Abuja, said that based on the figures of casualties, it came to the conclusion that Nigeria was in a state of war.
The leading geopolitical research consultancy outfit, said that it relied on available data and also examined attacks in the period covering Q4 2020 and Q3 2021.
The report states in part, “The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme defines war as a state-based conflict that reaches at least 1000 battle-related deaths in a specific calendar year.
“The most known and influential definition was developed by David Singer and Melvin Small in the framework of the ‘Correlates of War, COW’ project at Michigan University which has assembled statistical data on wars around the world since 1816.
“It also defines war as any violent conflict with at least 1,000 killed combatants in a year. Both definitions exclude genocides and sporadic massacres and make efforts to include only casualties that belong to organised parties to the violence.
“This filtering has given us a total of 964 soldiers and policemen killed in the period, while 3071 people belonging to either Boko Haram, IPOB, or various militant and bandit groups have been killed in that period. The offshoot of this is that we can only say that Nigeria is at war.”
It further revealed that 642 personnel of the military and 322 police officers were killed during the period under review, in addition to operatives of other security agencies who were also killed in attacks in different parts of the country.
The SBMI report added that 11 personnel of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCD, and five personnel of the Nigeria Customs Service.
It also disclosed that operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) lost two personnel, the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) also lost two officers, while the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) lost one personnel.
“129 vigilantes, 100 members of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB)and nine militants were also killed by non-state actors in the year under review,” the SBMI report said.
