By Emmanuel Ado

“This is a test from Almighty Allah, and we will certainly overcome it through prayer and sustained investment in military hardware to defeat the terrorists.” Governor Dauda Lawal

Dauda Lawal is not an accidental governor. He pursued his governorship ambition with a firm conviction that he can genuinely transform the lives of the long-suffering people of Zamfara State. When Lawal threw his hat into the governorship ring in 2023, the people responded decisively, electing him on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a party that had never previously won a governorship election in the highly conservative Zamfara State. His victory was, therefore, a profound statement—a powerful expression of the people’s faith in his capacity to frontally tackle the enormous challenges confronting a state that had endured years of underdevelopment and neglect.

That mandate has no doubt placed an enormous responsibility on Governor Lawal’s shoulders. Of all the challenges confronting Zamfara State, none is more urgent, more devastating or more existential than the lingering security challenges. For years, terrorists have turned once-peaceful communities into theatres of violence, disrupted agricultural production, displaced families, kept children away from school, destroyed livelihoods and eroded the people’s confidence in the ability of government to protect their lives and property.

It is against this backdrop, and the fact that the people are victims, that Governor Lawal’s hardline position on the security crisis should and must be understood.

At the North-West Security Summit, appropriately themed “Appraising the Security Challenges in the Northwest Region,” Governor Lawal delivered an unequivocal message to the criminal elements terrorising Zamfara State and the North-West that there will be no retreat and no surrender. He made it clear that the Nigerian state would not capitulate to those who have visited unwarranted violence on the people and turned their suffering into an unholy business.

Governor Lawal’s strong position is rooted in two fundamental facts. First, the terrorists are the aggressors who have chosen to wage relentless violence against innocent people and the Nigerian state. Second, experience has shown the limitations of negotiating with violent criminal networks whose commitments cannot be relied upon and who have repeatedly used negotiations they had no intention of honouring ab initio to buy time, regroup and return to visit more horrific violence on the people.

For Governor Dauda Lawal, therefore, negotiating with the terrorists would mean not only surrendering the authority of the state to them, but would also encourage other criminal groups to embrace the same violent path. In good conscience, negotiating with such criminal groups from their position of perceived advantage—after they have taken innocent people hostage and intimidated them with their capacity to unleash terrorists unacceptable to Governor Lawal.

Governor Lawal’s hardline position is not simply about refusing to negotiate with the terrorists. It is about refusing to accept a security strategy that allows the criminal groups to exploit state boundaries, weak intelligence coordination and gaps in military operations to continue to wreak havoc on the people.

This is the essence of Governor Lawal’s “No Retreat, No Surrender” position.

It is also why the choice of Zamfara State as the venue for the security summit was particularly significant. The state remains one of the principal theatre of a crisis that has engulfed the entire North-West. By hosting security chiefs, Governor Lawal was able to once again place the realities confronting his people directly before them. More importantly, he used the summit to insist that the region’s security crisis demands coordinated action and a strategy capable of producing results.

Governor Lawal, who is at the receiving end of the crisis, wants immediate answers. He wants workable strategies. He wants coordinated action among the North-West states. He wants the security establishment to look beyond the immediate location of attacks and confront the wider criminal ecosystem that makes the attacks possible in the first place.

Governor Lawal was also extremely careful not to portray the crisis as a Zamfara State problem alone. As he rightly observed, banditry, kidnapping and cattle rustling are not isolated criminal acts confined within the boundaries of the North-West states, but manifestations of an organised criminal groups whose operations transcend jurisdictional boundaries, with devastating consequences for livelihoods, food security and the social fabric of the region. Criminal networks do not respect state boundaries; therefore, the security response cannot remain trapped within specific states. To defeat them, security operations must be coordinated across the states, including Niger State in the North-Central, with intelligence shared and actions synchronised across these state lines.

This is where Governor Lawal’s argument about simultaneous military actions assumes significance beyond Zamfara State. A terrorist group operating in Zamfara State can easily move into Sokoto, Katsina or Kebbi States, establish new bases, recruit fresh members and cultivate local informants—an often-neglected factor in the security crisis. When military operations intensify in one state, these groups exploit gaps in coordination to move into another, making intelligence-sharing and synchronised operations across state lines essential to tracking their movements, disrupting their networks and preventing them from launching further attacks.

For Governor Dauda Lawal, the logical way forward is therefore a coordinated North-West security architecture in which the seven states work closely with the Federal Government and the security agencies, sharing intelligence in real time, coordinating operations and ensuring that criminal groups can no longer exploit state boundaries to escape. Such a unified approach, he believes, would be a game changer in the fight against terrorism by denying the criminals the safe havens and escape routes they have long exploited.

Going forward, there must be no safe havens, no escape routes and no gaps for them to exploit, which will make coordinated regional operations a far more effective weapon in the fight against terrorism and banditry.

But defeating terrorism requires more than putting more boots on the ground. It also requires dismantling the ecosystem that sustains them —the money, intelligence, logistics, weapons, food, transportation and local collaborators that enable these groups to operate. The state must pursue not only those waging violence against the people, but also the networks that finance, supply, shelter and facilitate them.

This means strengthening financial intelligence, stopping the payment of ransom and other illicit revenue flows, dismantling supply chains, monitoring vulnerable corridors, improving grassroots intelligence and ensuring that those who knowingly facilitate criminal activities are identified and prosecuted.

Governor Lawal’s emphasis on the role of local collaborators is particularly important in this regard. Over the years, these criminal groups have survived not only through their capacity for violence, but also through a network of local collaborators who are critical to their operations. But it must be stressed that the overwhelming majority of people living in Zamfara’s affected communities are victims of terrorism. They have lost relatives, homes, farms, businesses and years of their lives to unprecedented violence and should never be collectively portrayed as collaborators. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that these criminal groups could not have operated for so long without some form of local assistance, making it necessary to hold accountable those who knowingly support the activities of terrorists.

Without dismantling these internal support networks, military operations risk addressing only the visible symptoms of the crisis while leaving the underlying structure intact.

This is also why intelligence sharing must be part of the regional security strategy. The people living in the villages know their environment better than any security operative that is new to the area. They observe unusual movements and recognise strangers. Properly organised and responsibly integrated into the formal security architecture, intelligence gathered in the communities can provide the early warning that allows conventional forces to act before an attack occurs.

It is worth noting that the Inspector-General of Police, Tajudeen Disu, agrees with Governor Lawal on the need for a united regional front and that the security of the North-West is a collective responsibility. And that his emphasis on cross-state collaboration, intelligence-sharing and joint operations reinforces the central argument of the summit that no individual state can defeat a criminal network whose operational theatre extends across several states.

But what has Governor Lawal done since he assumed office in 2023?

Since June 2023, he has held repeated meetings with security chiefs, police commissioners and military commanders, followed by engagements with the National Security Adviser, the Chief of Defence Staff, the Chief of Army Staff and President Bola Tinubu. At each meeting, the message has remained consistent: Zamfara State needs a more coordinated response, more effective intelligence and a military strategy that looks at the entire North West.

On the institutional front, his administration established the Zamfara State Security Trust Fund, inaugurated its 21-member Board of Trustees in February 2024 and commissioned its integrated office complex the following month. The initiative was designed to create a structure for mobilising and directing resources towards the security challenge.

He also launched the Zamfara State Community Protection Guards in January 2024, providing a locally rooted mechanism intended to complement conventional security operations and strengthen intelligence-gathering at the grassroots.

Beyond conventional security deployments, the administration has also pursued measures designed to deprive criminal groups of the resources and opportunities that sustain their operations. Restrictions on tinted glass and measures against the illegal and unlabelled sale of petroleum products intended to reduce vulnerabilities that could be exploited by criminal networks were introduced. The decision to restrict traditional rulers from issuing mining licences was also aimed at curbing illegal mining activities that have been associated with the financing of armed groups.

Technology has also entered the equation, with the state hosting a course on Artificial Intelligence as a potential security instrument. Governor Lawal in his interaction with the UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed announced of his administration’s intention to deploy advanced technology in the fight against insecurity.Nothing for him is of the table.

For Governor Lawal, a man of faith, the crisis is a test that requires an abiding trust in the Almighty. Thankfully he equally believes that in addition to prayers that the state must make huge investments so that the terrorists can be defeated by military action.

Taken together, these measures reveal Governor Lawal’s approach to the security situation and the reasons for his informed hardline position.

The people of Zamfara State want an end to the attacks. They want to farm without fear. They want their children back in school. They want to travel without anxiety. They want their markets to reopen, and for life to return to normal in their communities.

Governor Lawal’s response to the security crisis—through sustained engagement with the security establishment, investment in new security institutions and support for stronger regional coordination to dismantle the criminal networks that sustain terrorism—shows a governor determined not to surrender to the terrorists. His “No Retreat, No Surrender” position is therefore more than a slogan; it is a commitment to restoring the authority of the state and giving the people of Zamfara State the peace they deserve.

And as Governor Lawal himself has often said,Zamfara State must—and will—overcome.