In 2018, twelve Thai schoolboys and their coach found themselves trapped in a flooded cave. What followed was one of the most stunning rescue operations the modern world has ever seen.
That success didn't happen by accident. It came from preparation, coordination, intelligence, technology, and a government machine that could mobilise everything toward one goal: bring those boys home.
Nigeria's story with missing persons looks nothing like this. Over the last ten years, mass abductions have become a haunting part of our security landscape.
Chibok. Kankara.
Kaduna. Niger State.
In each place, schoolchildren, travellers, farmers, and villagers have disappeared into the bush.
The pattern repeats itself endlessly. First comes panic, then public anger, then official promises, then negotiations with no end in sight.
Some captives come back home. Many never do.
Families don't believe the state can find their relatives quickly. That distrust cuts deeper than any headline.
Nigeria's security system has a serious problem at its core. We've hired thousands of soldiers and created multiple agencies and bought expensive equipment.
Yet we remain stuck in reactive mode.
We measure success by how many troops we deploy, not by how good our intelligence is. We don't ask whether information becomes action fast enough.
A real state doesn't just answer threats. It sees them coming first.
Before rescue can happen, location must happen. Before criminals fall, they must be tracked down.
Security starts with knowing what's happening on your territory. Nigeria understood this once.
In 1999, the National Space Research and Development Agency was created. Nigerian satellites went into orbit for Earth observation, mapping, and disaster response.
Those weren't vanity projects. They represented something bigger: a modern nation that could see its own land and respond when trouble arrived.
That dream never took shape. Today's real problem isn't missing technology.
It's fragmentation. Information sits scattered across different agencies like pieces of a puzzle nobody assembles.
Security services collect intelligence in one place. Satellite data lives somewhere else.
Aerial images go to another office. Phone records sit with a fourth group.
Field reports gather dust in a fifth.
These pieces never come together into one working system. So kidnappers move faster than the institutions chasing them.
Criminals know how to slip through ungoverned spaces. They communicate across state lines.
They adapt while government agencies remain stuck.
This isn't about having fewer soldiers. It's about failing to coordinate, failing to fuse intelligence, failing to build real capability.
Every failure chips away at trust in government. Communities stop believing in the state.
Families turn to self-help instead. Criminal groups grow bolder because they believe the government's reach is short.
Eventually insecurity stops being a crisis. It becomes normal life.
Deploying more troops won't fix this. Nigeria needs to build what it already has the pieces to create: a unified intelligence system that works.
