ASSESSING NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT’S EFFORTS IN SAFEGUARDING CITIZENS, UTILITIES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE FROM TERRORIST ATTACKS

Vulnerable places are usually the targets of terrorist attacks everywhere in the world. The scenario is quite the same in Nigeria. Boko Haram and other terrorist groups in Nigeria have attacked ordinary citizens and infrastructure like schools and hospitals. Especially crowded places are the main targets of the terrorists. To mitigate this security challenge, the Nigerian government factored in the protection of soft targets in its National Counter-Terrorism Strategy (NACTEST). The second pillar of NACTEST, known as “to secure,” is in charge of this assignment. The NACTEST document was launched in 2014 by President Jonathan as a standing policy to combat terrorism in Nigeria. It is expected that this strategy needs to be evaluated since it has been in operation for more than half a decade. The focus of this paper is to examine the extent to which the Nigerian government has successively protected soft targets from terrorism attacks. The paper makes use of both primary and secondary data as sources of data gathering and content analysis for data analysis. The research makes use of the NACTEST document and bases its evaluation on the specified objectives of the NACTEST second pillar, “to secure." It also adopts asymmetric theory as its theoretical framework. The paper discovered that the Nigerian government has, to a large extent, successively protected the vulnerable, like civilian citizens, utilities, and infrastructure. However, sporadic attacks by terrorists are equally a challenge that the government needs to handle seriously. The paper recommended, among others, that the government should provide needed resources, both human and material, for security and better performance.