When do we fund the peace?
There is a certain ritual that has become almost ceremonial in Nigeria’s annual budget season. A president walks into a joint session of the National Assembly, presents a fiscal plan
- By Tajudeen Lanre Abdullahi
There is a certain ritual that has become almost ceremonial in Nigeria’s annual budget season. A president walks into a joint session of the National Assembly, presents a fiscal plan with a grand title, and somewhere in the document, buried beneath the rhetoric of renewal and consolidation, is a number so large it should stop us in our tracks.
In December 2025, President Bola Tinubu introduced the 2026 Appropriation Bill, which he termed the “Budget of Consolidation, Renewed Resilience, and Shared Prosperity.” What is the single largest sectoral allocation in the N58.18 trillion budget? Not education. Not healthcare. Not infrastructure. The defense and internal security budget totaled N5.41 trillion.
Nobody who’s been paying attention should be surprised. This is not an outlier; it is a pattern. Nigeria has spent approximately N32.8 trillion on defense over the past 15 years. Year after year, the allocation increases. Every year, the violence increases.
I want to be careful here because I am not arguing against funding security. I have seen, from the inside, just how dangerous and complex Nigeria’s security landscape is. I completed my NYSC service at the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution’s National Conflict Early Warning and Early Response Situation Room, where I observed analysts track conflict indicators across the country in real time; ethno-religious flashpoints, intercommunal tensions, and early signs of escalation that, if addressed quickly, could prevent bloodshed. The work is painstaking, largely invisible, and chronically under-resourced. I interned at the same institution before that. And just recently, I received an invitation to participate in an engagement with Conflict Early Warning Indicator Monitors (CEWIMs) and Community-Based Reconciliation Committees under the IPCR/SPRiNG Project, a programme that, notably, relies on external partnership support to carry out what should be core government-funded work.
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That last detail is the one I want you to sit with.
Nigeria’s primary institution for conflict prevention and peacebuilding is implementing its community reconciliation programmes through donor-funded projects. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defence alone is receiving over N3.1 trillion in the 2026 budget. The mathematics of our priorities is not subtle.
The question I keep returning to is not whether we should fund the military; rather, we must. The question is why we keep expecting a military solution to what is fundamentally a political, social, and psychological issue.
Consider the geography of our insecurity. In the Northeast, Boko Haram and ISWAP have terrorised communities for over a decade. In the Northwest, banditry has displaced millions and turned entire states into conflict zones. In the North-central, Plateau State, we have watched communities burn in cycles of violence that predates and outlasts every military operation deployed to contain it. The violence in these theatres is not simply the product of armed actors who need to be neutralised. It is the product of unaddressed grievances: land disputes, resource competition, historical marginalisation, identity-based fear, and the complete absence of institutional trust.
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These are not problems that can be solved with airstrikes. They respond to discourse. To reconciliation. To early warning systems that detect rumbling before an eruption. To community mediators who understand the local language of conflict. To the kind of patient, unglamorous peacebuilding work that IPCR and its network of CEWIMs conduct every day, despite the fact that they are not well-funded.
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There is a concept in criminology and conflict studies called negative peace, the mere absence of active violence, usually maintained by force. And then there is positive peace, which is the presence of the conditions that make violence unnecessary: justice, trust, equity, and functioning institutions. Nigeria’s security doctrine, as reflected in its budgets, is almost entirely invested in negative peace. We deploy troops to suppress; we rarely invest in the conditions that prevent. We fund the response; we starve the prevention.
The SPRiNG Project, the Strengthening Peace Resilience and Inclusive Governance in Nigeria project, is a collaboration between IPCR and international partners designed to do exactly what the government should be funding natively: community-level reconciliation, early warning systems, and grassroots conflict prevention. That this work requires external support to survive is not an indictment of the people doing it. It is an indictment of a national security doctrine that treats peacebuilding as an afterthought.
President Tinubu, in presenting the 2026 budget, said that “Nigerians must see tangible results from increased allocations to defence and security.” I agree entirely. And here is the tangible result that 15 years and N32.8 trillion in defence spending have delivered: more displacement, more deaths, and a country where the conflict map grows larger, not smaller, with each passing year.
Results will not come from more of what has not worked. They will come when we finally decide that peace is not the absence of something, but the presence of something worth protecting. They will come when the budget begins to reflect what our own security chiefs are telling us: that this problem is too complex, too human, too deeply rooted in grievance and distrust, to be solved by military force alone.
We know how to build peace in Nigeria. We have the institutions, the frameworks, the trained professionals, and even the early warning infrastructure to do it. What we have consistently failed to do is fund it.
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The army is not the problem. The problem is that we have decided, budget after budget, that peace is not worth investing in.
That is the conversation Nigeria needs to have. And it needs to happen before we spend another N5 trillion and ask, again, why nothing has changed.
- Abdullahi is a postgraduate student of criminology and forensic psychology at the Nigerian Defence Academy. He writes via tajudeen.abdullahi2024@nda.edu.ng
