Adebayo Adeleke is a seasoned security and defence professional with unique expertise in geopolitics, supply chain risk management, national security frameworks, indigenous supply chain, and trade. His hands-on security experience has helped him provide data and insights on security challenges in Africa. His policy briefs on security and other resources have been featured in London Business School, the African Report, and others.

Adeleke, who is also a seasoned combat veteran of the United States Army with 20 years of service, highlighted the need for Nigerian security managers to reconstruct their combat tactic and overlay it with technology to achieve impact.

What is the importance of security to national development?
The question should be – what is the importance of national security to national development? National security is the baseline that holds everything together. It is a pivotal part of a country’s development. Security has about 30 elements, and one of them is human security, which I specialise in. When you think of national security, you must consider human security and all its expressions – community security, economic security, food security, health security, political security, environmental security, and physical security.

All these encapsulate human security and are vital in building the national security framework. You can’t have national security without having the human security element.

In the military, we say you cannot do anything on an objective without having the objective secured. (I know you’d ask what an objective is. Military objectives are objects that, by their nature, location, purpose, or use, make an effective contribution to military action, and whose total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralisation offers a definite military advantage. Either to attack, defend, or secure.). The first task when you get to an objective is to secure that objective. You can’t sleep, you can’t eat, you can’t do anything unless security is established. Security takes precedence, and every other thing follows. Without national security, it’s going to be unfathomable to develop any other aspect of the nation.

Drawing inference of global trends security-wise, what lesson can the country learn?
There are a lot of things that are happening globally. Climate change, the Houthis attacks on the Red Sea, the high tension in the Indo-Pacific, the Ukraine war still ongoing, and the coup d’etat going on in the sub-Sahara. At this point, Nigeria should know that security is a priority. We must also realise that global trends are affecting what is going on in Nigeria. They are all linked.

Nigeria must realise that all these elements are connected. We must look at precedence and learn how to use the tactics to secure our nation. We are beginning to see the use of technology in kidnapping. I recently read how social media is used to gather information about their kidnapping targets.
Those tactics are not synonymous to Nigeria but they are filtering in slowly.

Wisdom tells us that we will soon start seeing a variation of what is going on in the Red Sea in the Gulf of Guinea. If something is happening on the Western side of the world, a variation is bound to happen in Nigeria, and we need to prepare ahead for it.

As a US military veteran, what role can some of you play in the country now?

As a US military veteran, a role I can play is to help in reshaping Nigerian national security and Defense landscape. Sub-Saharan Africa is facing many security and defence challenges, and Nigeria‘s stability as the centre of gravity in the region is crucial and essential.

We have seen that technology is critical in warfare and strategy. How can Nigeria use this modern equipment and technology to solve its internal issues?

There is a place for new technology in combating issues, but the tactics need to evolve. In Gaza, Hamas used ancient tactics to inflict a significant blow on Israel’s national security. Technology has its place in gathering intel, and you cannot have a solid security architecture without having an intelligence arm to analyse, gather, implement, and feed into the security architecture.

That aside, the tactics we use to fight these wars should be revisited. Any time you face a new enemy or challenge, you need to revisit what you are using.
The old tactics are not going away, but the new way of fighting has to be reconstructed and overlaid with technology.

If we keep using the old tactics with new technology, there’d be little impact.

As a security expert and a retired army officer, is the strategy adopted by Nigerian security architects yielding results considering recent killings in the country?

It’s more important to look at our national security architecture and find avenues for improvement. Currently, the country’s security architecture is focused on terrorism.

I understand the basis for this decision, but we’ve failed to address other national security concerns. Human security needs to be the core of Nigerian national security. You cannot talk about economic security without talking about energy security, or critical infrastructure security. You can’t talk about community security without talking about fiscal security. You can’t talk about community security without talking about homeland security. All these things are interwoven to form a baseline for national security.

Our national security architecture is flawed. We need to start looking at security from a holistic view, not only in the area of threat. For instance, have we sat to think about how food insecurity affects other forms of security? Food fuels life, and without food, there is no life. If we don’t address this, it will be challenging to move forward in the national security scheme. Another challenge is that Nigeria’s threat matrix is still unclear. There’s a lot to do, but if we start from here, we are on the right path.

Can you provide any measure that can help the country in ensuring the safety of our lives?

Over the last couple of years, we’ve been working on RouteWatche, a safety and security platform helping to digitise security data in Nigeria. There are several solutions to security challenges, and this is one of them. We collect data digitally, report digitally, and turn it into actionable intelligence for security agencies. Nigerians cannot travel on many major logistical corridors because they believe it’s not safe and underpoliced. It is vital to change the narrative and to do that, we need to put the decision-making process of security and safety in the hands of Nigerians. That’s why we developed Routewatche.

Recently, we have seen more countries developing their military capabilities and adware rather than depending on foreign countries. What do you have to say about this?

It’s a national security issue. Just like you can’t depend on other nations to feed your people, you should not depend on other countries for security equipment. The moment you do that, you have outsourced your national security, and that’s what we’ve been doing.
The ability to develop our technology is crucial. It is central to our ability to take back our national security. The moment we make our national security dependent on other nations, we are screwed. I understand that we don’t have all the capabilities yet, but we don’t need to have it all.

However, certain things are critical to national survival and should not be outsourced. Producing our equipment to a large extent, producing our technology, and developing our defence industrial base. I know the government is making a lot of effort in this matter, but it is crucial to expand our thinking. It’s beyond producing ammunition and guns. Our existence partly depends on it.

It also creates jobs and provides a sense of patriotism, knowing that we are producing what we use in our country to fight our threats.