Introduction

Border governance and migration securitisation, among other measures, have gained recognition as ways to prevent or counter the spread of terrorism, organised transnational crime, and pandemics. Since September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda’s terrorist assaults in the USA have sparked a significant shift in border governance frameworks all over the globe. Border security governance has continued to acquire renewed importance as a safeguard against growing transnational security challenges in different parts of the world despite growing commitment among states to the ideals of globalisation, regionalism, and supra-nationalism, with their differing degrees of emphasis on borderless communities.

Border governance, also known as border management, is the facilitation of the authorised movement of individuals for business, tourism, refugee resettlement, and so on, across the territorial frontiers of nation-states. According to Rubinskaya (2019), border governance involves the use of strategies such as the imposition of visa requirements, carrier sanctions against transportation companies bringing irregular migrants to the territory, interdiction at sea, and outright land border closure, to detect and prevent the irregular entry of non-nationals (and unregulated goods) into a given country. The imperatives of and the tension between balancing the international standards for facilitating the entry of legitimate travellers and preventing others from entering for inappropriate reasons or with invalid documentation are at the core of border governance.

The 2019 land border closure in Nigeria was putatively informed by the need to stem the rising inflow of arms smuggling, foreign fighters, drug peddling, and other prohibited items into Nigeria’s trade environment (The Guardian, 2020). Beyond the veil of President Muhammadu Buhari’s government’s justification based on economic and security reasons, however, the border closure was partly designed to profile the immigrant population and securitise migration in Nigeria. There is no doubt that the Nigerian state has demonstrated its inability to secure the country’s territorial integrity and guarantee the safety of its citizens’ lives and properties. Instead, various state actors have found solace in securitising border management and migration using Nigeria’s land border closure as a smokescreen for the state’s failure to provide internal security governance (Alumona et al., 2019). Even President Buhari had disclosed that the enormous security challenges—banditry, kidnapping, peasant farmer-herder conflict, and insurgency—the country is experiencing are consequences of the fallout of the Libyan conflict and the influx of foreign mercenaries trained and armed by the late Muammar Gadaffi of Libya (Nwangwu et al., 2020; Sahara Reporters, 2022a). The allusion to President Buhari’s assertion was made by the Department of State Services, Nigeria’s domestic intelligence agency, when it attributed Nigeria’s security challenges to the activities of Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) fighters who had infiltrated central parts of Nigeria (Wakili, 2018). To mitigate the influx of foreign mercenaries undermining Nigeria’s national security, the Buhari-led government directed the then Comptroller General of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), Muhammed Babandede, to protect the border against foreign invaders (Agbakwuru, 2021).

Diverse security challenges have crippled the Nigerian economy and created untold fear and hardship among Nigerians. Different credible reports suggest that the scale of offensives and onslaught by non-state armed groups in Nigeria has made the country one of the most vulnerable and terrorised places to live in the world. In 2015, for instance, militant herdsmen of mainly Fulani ethnic origin were rated the fourth most dangerous terror groups in the world because of the scale of their offensives in Nigeria (Global Terrorism Index, 2015). The 2020 Human Freedom Index shows that Nigeria ranks 131 out of 162 countries in terms of security and safety (Vásquez and McMahon, 2020). By the same token, the 2022 Global Terrorism Index ranks Nigeria as the sixth most terror-impacted country in the world (Global Terrorism Index, 2022).

Although this 2022 ranking is a marginal improvement relative to the country’s previous ratings, terror alerts from security and intelligence agencies around the world often suggest that Nigeria is one of the world’s most dangerous places to visit and/or live (Okoli, 2022; Vanguard, 2022). According to the Center for Democracy and Development (2022), over 61,865 people died in Nigeria over the last decade as a result of various forms of conflict. The state of insecurity in the country is compounded by misconceptions, a lack of information, disinformation, and propaganda among policymakers and the wider public, which contribute more to heating up the political climate.

The culture of profiling foreigners for national security challenges and the attendant use of discriminatory immigration policies have been adopted in other parts of the world, particularly in Europe and the USA (Ejdus and Rečević, 2021). Within Nigerian government circles, for instance, there is a widespread perception among Nigerians that gunmen who were trained and armed by Muammar Gaddafi but later escaped with their arms after the assassination of the latter are among those now terrorising Nigeria (Ogundipe, 2018). In corroboration, state actors suggest that the vast, unmanned, and porous borders of northern Nigeria have given unfettered access to foreign elements to come into the country and wreak havoc on Nigerians (Sahara Reporters, 2022b). This partly informed why the Nigerian government operated restricted borders with Benin, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger between August 2019 and December 2020 (Kwarkye and Matongbada, 2021). The over-a-year closure of the borders to tackle the influx of smuggled arms and foreign mercenaries in Nigeria failed to yield the expected outcome as the people continued to suffer devastation from various forms of insecurity in the country. However, the penchant of Nigerian government officials to externalise the causal factors for the growing security challenges confronting the country has not received adequate attention within the academic cycle.

Among academics, there is a large pool of knowledge on the causes, drivers, and consequences of the diverse conflicts plaguing the Nigerian state, including the proliferation of small arms and light weapons (Tar, 2021), the availability of large swaths of ungoverned spaces (Lenshie, 2018; Olaniyan and Akinyele, 2016), the militaristic responses of the Nigerian state (Mbah and Nwangwu, 2014), poor governance and state fragility (Lenshie et al., 2022; Okoli and Lenshie, 2018), and an elite conspiracy in Nigeria (Kifordu, 2010; Mbah et al., 2017). While these extant studies are very instructive, they have paid inadequate attention to how the securitisation of border governance and migration impinges on the growing spate of insecurity in Nigeria. Hence, this study interrogates the nexus between the securitisation of migration and national security in Nigeria. It demonstrates that the externalisation of the causal factors of the rising spate of insecurity in the country has allowed securitising actors to hide behind the veil of migration to shift attention away from how ineffective border governance has adversely impinged on Nigeria’s national security.

The study is discussed under six sub-thematic headings. Following this introduction is a review of the link between migration securitisation and national security. The third section focuses on securitisation theory within the analytic purview of border governance and national security challenges in Nigeria, while the fourth section dissects the study’s context and methodology. The penultimate section is the discussion, which centres on migration securitisation and the challenges of insecurity in Nigeria, while the last section draws a more general conclusion on the implication of border governance and migration securitisation for Nigeria’s national security.

Migration Securitisation and National Security

Recently, the connection between migration and national security has gained increased attention among scholars, politicians, media houses, and think tanks across the world, giving rise to a number of scholarly publications, opinion papers, and policy documents on a wide array of issues relating to the securitisation of migration. In this context, Bourbeau (2011) acknowledges the global anxiety caused by the transnational mobility of people. Nation-states, particularly in the West, are putting stricter restrictions on immigration due to national security concerns. International migration has not only emerged as a major security concern but has also become an existential security danger across the world. To be sure, the lumping together of two essentially contested concepts like security and migration into one has created more problems for scholars than it has solved. Perhaps this motivated Heisler (2006) to posit that there is a lack of a coherent and holistic framework for understanding the nexus between migration and security. More so, it was noted that even though the connection between migration and security is now well-known, a grounded understanding of the securitisation of migration is relatively limited (Bourbeau, 2011).

According to Abebe (2019), the securitisation of migration is the framing of “migration” as a security threat to a state or society, leading governments to limit regular migration pathways as they respond by instituting more restrictive policies against migrants, such as greater surveillance, detention, and deportation. It is the transformation of immigration into an urgent security concern as a consequence of speeches and actions. This implies that non-security issues are converted into security threats through the activities of the political elite (Messina, 2014). Huysmans (2000) notes that migration securitisation involves the regulation of migration by locating it within a framework that is concerned with national security. It also involves the formulation and implementation of policies and programmes on migration to protect the lives and properties of the citizens of a state. More specifically, Huysmans (2000) argues that it is an examination of how migration issues lead to security policy. It is, therefore, concerned with how states protect their citizens and territories from perceived threats from foreigners.

In the extant literature, there are four key perspectives on the securitisation of migration: socio-economic, securitarian, identitarian, and political (Estevens, 2018). The socio-economic aspect refers to job competition with nationals, the burden on the welfare system, and health threats relating to new and old viruses brought in by migrants. The securitarian perspective of migration covers threats related to sovereignty, borders, and both internal and external security concerns. This aspect is behind the idea of profiling migrants as importers of external threats through supporting terrorism from abroad and being involved in other forms of crime. From the identitarian point of view, migrants are considered a threat to the host society’s national identity and demographic symmetry. This leads to identifying borders between migrants and citizens. The political aspect refers to anti-immigrant and xenophobic discourses, which are built through the transaction of the other three dimensions: the socio-economic, identitarian, and securitarian (Ceyhan and Tsoukala, 2002). The political elite all over the world have always sacrificed migration on the altar of national security.

National security is always at the heart of the securitisation of migration. The concept of national security is quite dated and has occupied the front burner of public and intellectual discourse for years. According to Wolfers (1952), national security is conceptually fussy and malleable because it means different things to different people and can be applied to anything due to vested interests. National security refers to the set of policies, decisions, and actions geared towards protecting the domestic and core values of a country from external and internal threats (Leffler, 1990). Hence, national security is commonly appropriated by states across the world to protect their citizens, sovereignties, resources, assets, and well-being, as well as the rights and privileges of their nationals. Badmus (2005) posits that the highest level of concern for any government is to ensure that its citizens and territories are safe from both internal and external threats. Accordingly, this concern is non-negotiable and should not be compromised.

The literature on national security unearths three broad schools of thought. The first school is the state-centric perspective of national security, which focuses on the ability of a state to protect its values from external attacks (Bock and Berkowitz, 1966). According to Anyadike (2013), it is a condition whereby a state is not in danger of sacrificing its major values if it wants to avoid war and can be victorious when challenged in a war. Nonetheless, this perspective has been challenged for neglecting the presence and contributions of citizens and other non-state actors to national security. The second perspective argues that defence is different from security because security is all-encompassing and usually includes the well-being of the citizens of a country and not just the protection of national boundaries and authoritarian regimes from threats (Nnoli, 2006; Nweke, 1988). The third perspective argues that anything can be securitised and made to look like a threat to the existence and survival of a state (Buzan et al., 1998). Apart from immigration, issues that border on human rights—refugees, climate change, elections, counterinsurgency, and civil society organisations, among others—are also commonly securitised in certain contexts.

As argued by Eroukhmanoff (2018), calling “immigration” a national security threat shifts it from a low-priority political concern to a high-priority issue that requires extraordinary security measures such as improved (land) border security or outright border closures. With particular reference to West Africa (and indeed, several other jurisdictions), pandemic nationalism was used by many member-states of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as a justification for the COVID-19 pandemic border closure policy and other anti-migrant policies in contravention of the ECOWAS free movement protocols (Aniche et al., 2022). By the same token, the security implications of climate change, especially in Africa, became visible in 2007 following debates by the African Union, the United Nations Security Council, and the Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol. As argued by Nwangwu et al. (2020) and Lenshie et al. (2022), climate change in itself does not lead to direct violence, but a causal link between climate change–induced environmental scarcity and violence has been established, thereby securitising climate change discourses and actions. The foregoing suggests that no issue is essentially threatening in itself until it is referred to as a “security” issue by the securitising actors.

Freedman (1998) notes that anything that generates anxiety or threatens the well-being of the majority of the people in a country should be regarded as a national security issue, which should motivate the use of extraordinary measures to address it (Buzan et al., 2022). This explains why many states threatened by an influx of immigrants have responded by securitising migration (Banai and Kreide, 2017). The political elite now use the threat to national security as a decoy to put up repressive and discriminatory policies, especially against foreigners. For example, fear and anxiety on the part of the Hungarian elite forced them into declaring and implementing policies that securitised migration (Al Khomassy, 2021).

Similar circumstances exist in other European countries, including the Netherlands, France, the USA, and Germany, where far-right political parties often use migration securitisation as an election campaign strategy. Many of them were elected to political leadership positions by portraying immigrant populations and migration as threats to national security (Dimitrov, 2019). A clear case in point is the victory of Mr Donald Trump of the USA in November 2016, which was largely made possible by his ultra-racist protectionist ideology, adroitly captured in the catchphrases “Make America great again” and “America first” (Nwangwu et al., 2019). Similar fundamentals of migration securitisation also reverberated during the 2017 French presidential campaign of Marine Le Pen of the National Front. In particular, Le Pen advocated more stringent immigration policies and the promotion of protectionism as alternatives to neo-liberal economic policies, as well as opposition to the European Union’s (EU) supranationalism by calling on France to leave both the Eurozone and the EU.

Nigeria’s experience does not differ remarkably from the above cases, as the President Buhari–led administration and other key political actors have repeatedly profiled foreigners for most of the security challenges confronting the country’s territorial integrity. For example, Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State has on several occasions called out foreign herdsmen for several coordinated attacks against sedentary farmers and host communities in the state (Alike, 2022). Hence, it is not surprising that there are many studies that link irregular or undocumented migration to the rising threats to Nigeria’s national security (Adewale, 2021; Aniche et al., 2021; Idris, 2022; Muhammad, 2021). The consensus is that ungoverned and porous borders tend to facilitate the irregular movement of people, including arms smugglers and terrorists, from the Sahel into Nigeria. As argued by Nwangwu et al. (2020), the weak border governance capacity of the Nigerian state has been further aggravated by the relevant ECOWAS protocols on free movement. Coupled with the presence of compromised border security officials, these protocols, especially the ECOWAS Transhumance Protocol of 1998, the ECOWAS Protocol on Free Movement of Goods and Persons in West Africa, and the Regulations of Transhumance between ECOWAS Member-States of 2003, have liberalised the inflow of largely undocumented immigrants into Nigeria.

Securitisation Theory in the Context of National Security Threats in Nigeria

This study is founded on the fundamental assumptions of securitisation theory. The effort to widen the security agenda by creating a framework for analysing security came to the limelight in the 1990s following the seminal scholarly works of Barry Buzan, Jaap de Wilde, and Ole Wæver. The individual and collaborative works of these scholars (Buzan et al., 1998; Buzan and Wæver, 2009; Wæver, 1995), which are central to the entire gamut of the well-known Copenhagen School of International Relations, remain the basis for the contemporary theorisation of securitisation. Securitisation theory provides an insightful account of how security issues emerge, evolve, and are managed. The theory challenges traditional interpretations of security that view security as solely involving the use of objective military threats and force between states; instead, it incorporates other referent objects such as economic, environmental, societal, and political issues into security discourse (Balzacq et al., 2016; Farny, 2016).

The securitisation theory highlights the importance of labelling as a form of symbolic power exercised by securitising actors. The theory has been used to study a variety of issues, including migration and citizenship questions (Aslan, 2022; Ben-Porat and Ghanem, 2017; Bourbeau, 2016; Taureck, 2006), elections (Jenkins, 2020; Mbah et al., 2020), counterinsurgency operations (Okolie and Ugwueze, 2015; Okoli and Lenshie, 2022), civil society organisations (Njoku, 2020, 2022), (post)amnesty peace-building in the Niger Delta (Agwu et al., 2022), human rights (Appiagyei-Atua et al., 2017), and climate change (Oramah et al., 2022).

The theory has several fundamental components that illustrate how security is constructed, who is involved, the sites of security issues, and the undoing of security (de-securitisation) (Floyd, 2011). Security is the result of speech acts in which a security actor transforms a problem into an existential threat (Buzan et al., 1998; Wæver, 1995). The securitising actor takes into account the enabling conditions when determining the measures to be taken to control and manage the emergence of a growing existential or neo-existential threat. To deal with the perceived security threat, the securitising actors must justify extreme actions that are usually not in line with state policy. This can work if it can be shown that a referent object is facing an existential threat (Buzan et al., 1998; Wæver, 1995). These security measures must be supported by a large audience (Wilkinson, 2007). The support of the audience suffices when the securitising actor can persuade them that breaking the law to address the threat is acceptable. With the support of the audience, conventional policing can become panic policing directed at the perceived security threat. What this entails is that any issue or social group can be securitised when influential actors perceive them as an existential threat to one or more particular referent objects.

Securitisation occurs within the context of dynamic actors, existential threats, referent objects, extraordinary measures, and audiences. An existential threat generates a sense of urgency and therefore places an issue at the top of the priority list that needs to be handled immediately, often by unusual measures. Securitisation can only work if the object that is being put up for sale is in danger or is seen as something very important. Securitisation theory is useful in understanding the securitisation of migration because it provides the foundation to situate the phenomenon of migration as either security or non-security. When migration is identified as a security concern in the context of migration security studies, it shifts from being a less pressing political issue to one that demands extraordinary government action, such as establishing border security governance. Migrants, particularly the irregular migrant population, are securitised by numerous local and global players everywhere (Koser 2005; Peers 2011). The proclivity of the key securitising actors to attribute Nigeria’s national security threats to the undocumented immigrant population, using a speech act, has classified the migrant population as a veritable threat. After the speech act by the key securitising actors, it became acceptable to take drastic steps to stop the threat, even in flagrant disregard for relevant laws and conventions within the ECOWAS region.

In effect, the securitisation of border governance and migration through the 2019 land border closure in Nigeria was largely against some relevant ECOWAS protocols, particularly the ECOWAS Protocol on Free Movement of Goods and Persons in West Africa (Aniche et al., 2022; Nwangwu et al., 2020). While it is unclear if any foreigner was arrested and/or prosecuted during the implementation of the land border closure policy, a major securitising effect the policy has had centres on the progressive increase in Nigeria’s defence and security budget due to the Boko Haram insurgency and the rising spate of banditry in Nigeria (Nwangwu, 2022a; Onuoha et al., 2020).

Study Context and Methodology

The study adopted a triangulated qualitative design, comprising unstructured key informant interviews, focus group discussions (FGDs), and a review of secondary literature on border governance, migration securitisation, and insecurity. Data collection was carried out between July and November 2022 in 4 Nigerian states: Taraba (North-East), Benue (North-Central), Zamfara (North-West), Enugu (South-East), as well as Nigeria’s Federal Capital City (FCT), Abuja. These locations were chosen mainly because they are either situated along Nigeria’s national borders (which serve as entry points for arms smugglers and foreign fighters) or have experienced migration-related security threats in the past few years or both.

Using the purposive sampling technique, a total of 47 participants were selected and interviewed for this study, constituting an average of nine participants from each of the states and the FCT. The participants comprised 28 males (59.57%) and 19 females (40.43%) between the ages of 18 and 60, including critical stakeholders such as immigration officials, academics, soldiers, journalists, and members of civil society organisations. The interview was conducted either face-to-face or via telephone in order to get robust and nuanced responses from the critical stakeholders. Similarly, a total of four FGDs were conducted, one for each of the selected states. The professional composition of those in each FGD ranged from peasant farmers to border security personnel, artisans, transboundary traders, and border community leaders, among others.

Participants in each FGD ranged from 7 to 10 individuals who were selected based on the principles of availability, accessibility, and willingness to participate in the data collection process. Participants were guaranteed confidentiality and anonymity. Participants were asked questions on border security governance, migration securitisation, and the effects of land border closures on Nigeria’s national security, among others. The goal of the interviews and FGDs was to gather logically subjective views from the participants concerning the claim of the Nigerian government that the enormous insecurity in Nigeria is a consequence of the influx of immigrant populations, leading to land border closures as a national security governance strategy in the country. Structured interviews and FGD protocols were prepared and used for data collection. The data collection process was terminated when data saturation was reached (i.e. when no new issues emerged from the interviews).

The primary data (interviews and FGDs) were complemented by secondary data generated from the literature on border governance, migration security, and national security challenges. These data were generated from national dailies, official websites, blogs of relevant agencies, and related academic literature. They were used when appropriate to supplement the information that individuals were unable to capture. The data collected from secondary literature, focus group discussions, and interviews were routinely compared using the constant comparative method of qualitative analysis. Hence, our analysis of field data involved continuous comparison with previous data to logically order, confirm, or dispute information or claims, and to ensure the reliability of the data collected (Glaser 1965). Where necessary, relevant figures and tables were also used to strengthen the illustrative import of our argument.

Migration Securitisation and the Challenges of Insecurity in Nigeria (Table 1)

Table 1 Summary of FGDs on the impact of migration securitisation on Nigeria’s national security
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Although the dynamics and complexity of the growing spate of insecurity in Nigeria are not new, as they predate the transition to civil rule in 1999, their intensity and spread have grown exponentially thereafter. With a little over two decades of liberal democratic experience, Nigeria continues to be overwhelmed by insecurity arising from various groups with different ideological orientations and goals defined by their variegated framings of the Nigerian state. The security challenges in Nigeria are not only dynamic but multifaceted and are reinforcing each other such that the state is muzzled and struggling to breathe. To back up this claim, one of our respondents notes that:

The realities of security challenges are multiple and overlap today in Nigeria. The intensity of insecurity has also increased in terms of its spread across the six geopolitical zones of the country...... We are witnesses to security threats posed by the farmer-herder conflict in the North-Central zone, Biafra separatist agitation in the South-East, the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East, banditry in the North-West, and sea-marine tension in the coastal states within the South-South zone. These....... security threats cannot be compared with what was available in the 1990s and late 2000s. However, across the breadth and length of Nigeria, activities of cultists, kidnappers, bandits, ritual killers and pirates continue to grow in intensity and spread (interview with a security expert, Enugu State, November 2022).

The growing spate of insecurity in Nigeria today continues to exert a significant impact on the country’s national security governance. Generally perceived as conforming to the nature and character of the post-colonial state, Nigeria’s security governance architecture has remained in the doldrums. As observed by another respondent (a notable academic), “Nigeria as a country in post-colonial Africa has many challenges. The challenges are rooted in security, political, economic, nationality, and citizenship questions, which combine to aggravate the security challenges in the country” (interview with a political scientist, Enugu State, November 2022). The afore-listed issues have continued to serve as the key enablers of terrorism, militancy, separatist agitations, and farmer-herder conflicts in Nigeria. Figure 1 clearly shows that every part of the country recorded casualties from various security challenges in Nigeria in 2021 alone.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Source: Centre for Democracy and Development (2022)

Conflict-related casualties of the six geo-political zones in Nigeria for 2021.

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The causes of these security challenges are both internal and external. According to one of our respondents (a security expert based in Enugu), the internal factors include the nature and character of Nigerian politics, governance failures, how the Nigerian state responds to grievances, marginalisation and exclusion, and issues of basic social service provisioning. On the other hand, he identified the external factors, including the inflow of small arms and light weapons, the influx of fighters and terrorists who stream(ed) into Nigeria through the Sahel, and the increase in border porosity. According to him, even though there are both internal and external factors, Nigeria’s security challenges are primarily enabled by governance failure in Nigeria (interview with a security expert, Enugu State, November 2022). Figure 1 shows that insecurity is a major challenge in different parts of the country, although in different magnitudes and intensities. From the figure, the three geo-political zones in the northern parts of the country—North-Central, North-East, and North-West—experienced more severe security challenges than the other regions in 2021 alone.

Despite that poor governance fuels ethnic, religious, and regional animosity in Nigeria, the federal government has continued to associate security challenges with foreigners especially migrants who enter the country without proper documentation (Agbakwuru, 2021). According to one of our respondents, the linking of insecurity in Nigeria to foreigners is a flawed externalisation. Externalising security is an attack on Nigeria’s sovereignty; rather than providing internal security and defending the country against external security threats, the government has chosen to profile migrants for the calamities that have befallen Nigeria and its people (interview with a political scientist, Enugu State, November 2022). These views derive from the assertion made by President Buhari during an exclusive interview with Arise TV on January 8, 2019, where he reinvented his earlier interaction with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in April 2018. In the Arise TV interview, President Buhari stated as follows:

But the problem is even older than us. It has always been there but is now made worse by the influx of gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region. These gunmen were trained and armed by Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram (Arise News, 2019, online).

The spectre presented by President Buhari regarding the immigrant population motivates many academics, legislators, security professionals, policymakers, and think tanks to believe that foreigners should be blamed and profiled for many of the security issues plaguing the Nigerian state. Accordingly, our respondent in Benue State posits that “terrorists, killer herdsmen and bandits are non-Nigerians who have discovered a haven to operate in Nigeria due to state fragility and collapse in other African nations, permeable borders, ungoverned spaces, among other factors” (interview with a journalist, Benue State, July 2022). This postulation is in congruence with the viewpoint presented by Mahmud (1997) to the effect that the spectre of the migrant remains preoccupied with characterising the immigrant as an outsider and a threat, with immigration configured as a problem to be solved, a flaw to be corrected, a war to be fought, and a flow to be stopped.

Focus group participants in Benue State expressed concern about the “blame game” against immigrants in Nigeria, noting that President Buhari’s statement attributing the growing insecurity to immigrants effectively securitises migration and motivates the land border closure under the pretext of preventing or mitigating insecurity in the country. This is so because when the president attributed the growing security challenges in Nigeria to the immigrant population, a security threat was established and it led to the closure of selected land borders in 2019 to limit the operations and activities of bandits, terrorists, and killer herdsmen which had already crystallised into existential threats in the country (FGD, Benue State, July 2022).

Accordingly, the securitising speech act of the security actor is the president’s labelling of the insecurity as a result of the influx of foreigners into the country, thereby making them a security threat, as well as making land border closures a necessity (interview with military personnel, Zamfara State, September 2022). The option of land border closure was predicated on the management of national security in an era of worsening security situations in Nigeria. The enforced land border closure with Benin, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, which lasted between August 2019 and December 2020, was largely informed by the need to prevent immigrants from entering the country (Kwarkye and Matongbada, 2021). However, insecurity heightened in Nigeria throughout this period of the border closure. Hence, the French ambassador to Nigeria, Mr Denys Gauer, disagreed with the assertion that foreigners are security threats to Nigeria by stating that:

The reason for the killings is demography: some people are fighting for land, so there must be a direct policy to develop agriculture and animal husbandry. I think impunity is encouraging the killings, and those responsible must be punished. I do not believe foreigners are involved in the killings (Adepegba, 2018).

Responses from our FGDs across the country show that the Nigerian government under President Buhari failed to protect the lives and properties of its citizens. The right to life, which is a primary duty of the state, has been compromised. If it were true that the influx of foreigners exacerbates Nigeria’s security challenges, then it casts doubt on the integrity and capacity of the Nigerian state under President Buhari to assert its role as the sole entity with legitimate authority over the use of force to mitigate insecurity in Nigeria. This is because when in 1984 (during Buhari’s military regime) the government claimed there were intruders from Chad, the response was to push them back to their country, and not close the border.

Despite the use of land border closures to combat bandits and insurgents and prevent the smuggling or proliferation of weapons into Nigeria between 2019 and 2020, the level of security challenges reached unprecedented proportions during this period. Besides the complicity of some border security personnel, closing official border posts does not effectively checkmate irregular migration, arms smuggling, and other cross-border criminal activities. According to FGD participants in Zamfara State, banditry and herders’ aggression, kidnapping for ransom, and insurgency have ravaged lives and livelihood opportunities, not only in Zamfara State but also in Kaduna, Niger, Yobe, and Borno States. This has culminated in farming communities, particularly in Zamfara State, often brokering peace with the bandits by paying them an agreed-upon sum of money to allow them access to their farms during planting and harvest seasons. The bandits and killer herdsmen are mostly Nigerians of the Fulani ethnic group (FGD, Zamfara State, August 2022).

Unfortunately, the federal government has failed to punish these perpetrators of armed violence against peasant farmers and host communities across Nigeria. Apart from occasional words of disapproval, the Nigerian government has failed to formulate effective strategies to address the attendant dangers of herders’ aggression against different sedentary peasant farming communities in the country. Relative to other sectarian uprisings and movements such as the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, the Yoruba Nation Movement, and Biafra separatist movements, President Buhari’s administration’s responses to coordinated attacks by armed herdsmen and bandits have been lacklustre (Lenshie et al., 2021; Nwangwu, 2022b, 2023). It is not surprising, therefore, that President Buhari’s government’s failure to deal with these internal security challenges, especially across Northern Nigeria, is attributed to his pastoral Fulani background as well as his position as the life patron of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders’ Association of Nigeria (Igata, 2016).

The foregoing suggests that the securitisation of border governance and migration within the period under study is largely diversionary. This is because there has been a progressive deterioration of armed attacks in different vulnerable communities in northern Nigeria. Accordingly, one of our respondents at Taraba State University notes that:

The increasing spate of kidnapping and armed banditry in different parts of Nigeria has consequences for national security. In the recent past, security challenges have not worsened as much as they do today. People could easily travel by road in the past, but this is no longer the case due to insecurity. I have to take a flight from Enugu to Abuja and from Abuja to Jalingo because I cannot risk my safety by travelling by road, even though it is not cost-effective for me. It is heartbreaking that this once peaceful country has descended into a security crisis. People who perpetuate crimes that render the country insecure for Nigerians are Nigerians, and the majority of them are disenchanted with the government’s exclusionary disposition towards governance at the state and federal levels in Nigeria. As a result, I am sceptical of claims that foreigners are to blame for the security challenges we face in the country today (interview with a visiting scholar, Taraba State University, Jalingo, Taraba State, July 2022).

The proliferation of small arms and light weapons has negative consequences for Nigeria’s border security. Weapon smuggling and proliferation in Nigeria cannot be successfully carried out without border communities and border security personnel aiding and abetting the process. Hence, “the blame for compromised internal security operations in Nigeria should rest squarely with Nigerians, not foreigners” (FGD, Zamfara, August 2022). These participants further note that Nigerians, for whatever reasons, are providing the market for the smuggling of firearms into Nigeria to terrorise innocent citizens and communities in different parts of the country.

As part of its explanations for the land border closure, the federal government revealed that it was not only meant to mitigate insecurity but also to create the conditions for economic transformation, growth, and development, as well as a market for indigenous food production. This also failed because the closure of land borders did not reduce the importation of other items. On the contrary, there was an increase in the importation of rice and other ingredients into Nigeria after the land border closure was announced. The available report suggests that despite land border closures, the Nigerian government spent 1.85 trillion naira (approximately US$4.868 billionFootnote 1) on food imports between January and September 2020 (Izuaka, 2021).

The report indicates that this figure represents a 62% increase when compared to the same period in 2019. A similar report reveals how Nigeria’s immigration and customs officials are sabotaging the land border closure policy by taking bribes from motorcyclists carrying illicit goods through illegal routes (Adebayo, 2020). While it is convenient to blame Muammar Gaddafi’s assassination in 2011 (13 years later) for Nigeria’s prevailing security woes, such an inclination smacks of gross irresponsibility and a lack of commitment to Nigeria’s territorial integrity by President Buhari’s administration (interview with a political scientist, Enugu State, November 2022).

A military combatant on the frontlines against Boko Haram disagreed with the idea that foreign fighters were the cause of insecurity in Nigeria. He claimed that the majority of the Boko Haram terrorists caught in the battle were mainly Nigerian Kanuris; hence, foreign fighters cannot be enlisted into Boko Haram without the help of Nigerians (interview with a former military combatant, FCT, November 2022). Nonetheless, one of our participants, drawn from Kwakol, think tank based in Abuja (who also doubles as a visiting lecturer at the African University of Science and Technology, Abuja), argues that Nigeria’s borders are porous, which enables the Islamic fundamentalists to use such spaces to recruit foreign fighters and facilitate the inflow of weapons. Regardless, he affirms that Nigeria’s corrupt politicians and compromised border security personnel who facilitate arms smuggling and abet the recruitment of foreign terrorists in Nigeria are largely responsible for the growing insecurity in the country rather than random immigrants (interview with a civil society activist, FCT, November 2022).

Despite the securitisation of migration through land border closure, security challenges have continued to fester in Nigeria. As noted by one of our respondents, the arms smuggling “industry” has thrived in Northern Nigeria due to the availability of several routes in Jibia Local Government Area (LGA) of Katsina State, Shinkafi and Zurmi LGAs of Zamfara State, and Illela, Tangaza, Isa, Gudu, and Sabon LGAs of Sokoto State (interview with a retired immigration officer, FCT, November 2022). Needless to say, arms smuggling in these border communities is largely enabled by the complicity of border security agents, especially customs and immigration officials. Even before the 2019 land border closure, Oluwagbemi (2017) reported that Nigeria lost more than 130 billion naira (approximately US$ 390 millionFootnote 2) between May and July 2017 due to porous land borders and widespread corrupt practices along the border routes. This has been further exacerbated by longstanding historical and cultural ties between Nigerian border communities and their counterparts in adjoining countries, which have created opportunities for irregular migration and arms smuggling.

With particular reference to banditry and the confrontations between transhumant pastoralists and peasant farmers in Nigeria, a systematic documentation of weapons used and their supply routes shows that armed groups in Kaduna, Katsina, Niger, and Zamfara States possessed significant numbers of factory-produced small arms from Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and North America (Conflict Armament Research, 2020). The report also found that the three major international smuggling routes for weapons used in the conflicts went through Libya, Turkey, and Côte d’Ivoire. By the same token, Bish et al. (2022) show that smuggled weapons, such as AK-47 s, anti-aircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and ammunition, originate mainly from key conflict zones in the Central African Republic, Chad, Libya, Mali, and Niger. They also confirm that most of these firearms are smuggled into Nigeria through Geidam in Yobe State, or Abadam in Borno State. It is not surprising, therefore, that the heinous activities of bandits, kidnappers, terrorists, and other non-state armed groups have continued to fester in Nigeria because illicit and smuggled firearms not only serve as accelerants of crime and violence but also constitute a veritable threat to community resilience (del Mercado, 2022). All in all, securitising migration via land border closures is a subterfuge for concealing the inability of the government to respond to the enormous challenges of border governance, which have posed various security challenges never experienced in the country since independence.

Conclusion

Long years of governance deficit in Nigeria have largely contributed to the emergence and sustenance of various security challenges plaguing the country. Extant explanations of the prevailing security challenges in Nigeria are varied, ranging from arms proliferation, ungoverned spaces, state repression, governance failure and state fragility, elite conspiracy, contradictions of the Nigerian political economy, low-level inter-agency collaboration, and intelligence sharing to ineffective implementation of relevant regional protocols in West Africa, and climate change. Using the securitisation theory, however, this study demonstrated that the 2019 land border closures in Nigeria securitised the immigrant community without stemming the growing cases of banditry, insurgency, and other cross-border criminal activities in the country. This demonstrates that using migration securitisation to label foreigners as being responsible for the insecurity in Nigeria is a matter of politics which serves the interest of relevant state actors. Securitisation speech reinforces actions in response to fabricated or imagined security threats as defined by relevant state actors in Nigeria.

Migration securitisation which led to land border closure as a measure to mitigate widespread security challenges in Nigeria is a deeply politicised procedure. Even though foreigners may be considered part of the remote causes of insecurity in Nigeria, the government has securitised migration because of the understanding that in a liberal democracy, the people desiring the state’s protection from security challenges easily accept that foreigners are responsible for insecurity. The penchant of the relevant state actors to externalise the causes of insecurity in Nigeria does not exonerate them from their failures to guarantee the territorial integrity of the country and provide good governance. If anything, it betrays their complicity in the security conundrum in the country. Sovereignty is a veritable index for measuring state capacity and it cannot be safeguarded by securitising border governance and the immigrant community in Nigeria. Rather than land border closures, the Nigerian state and its contiguous neighbours should invest in better border security and surveillance, improve border security and intelligence sharing, tackle corruption among border officials, and ensure the development and empowerment of border communities that depend on smuggling as a source of livelihood. In all, the securitising actors, especially key officials of President Buhari’s administration, security officers at the strategic levels of leadership, and so on, should detour and frontally confront both the domestic and external sources of insecurity in the country.