Northern youth groups push community security pact with defence ministry

Grace Odum

Northern youth groups push community security pact with defence ministry

Abuja — A coalition of northern Nigerian civil society and youth organizations visited the Ministry of Defence this week, presenting a formal security collaboration proposal to Defence Minister General Christopher Musa (Retired) and calling for closer ties between community groups and the military establishment.

By Musa Maye

The delegation was led by Comrade Abdul Danbature, chairman of the Forum for Youth Development, Unity and Peace Initiative (FYDUPI), and included representatives from the Arewa Youth Assembly for Good Leadership (AYAGL), Ethnic Nationality Groups of Northern Nigeria, the Christian Youth Alliance, and a number of other affiliated civil society organizations.

The visit, described by organizers as a courtesy call, gave the groups an opportunity to formally table a proposal on strengthening national security through coordinated youth and community engagement across northern Nigeria — a region that has grappled for years with insurgency, banditry, intercommunal violence, and mass displacement.

What the groups proposed

Danbature walked the minister through several areas of proposed collaboration between FYDUPI and the Ministry, spanning grassroots intelligence-sharing with security agencies, interfaith peacebuilding between religious and ethnic communities, anti-drug campaigns targeting young people, and the mobilization of women and youth across the north under a unified advocacy platform.

The forum also proposed supporting public communication efforts around government and military achievements — an element of the proposal that positions the coalition partly as a civic messaging vehicle alongside its stated peacebuilding mandate.

Organizers said the breadth of the coalition — drawing in both Christian and Muslim youth organizations, as well as ethnic nationality groups — was deliberate, intended to signal cross-sectional buy-in for the initiative in a region often divided along religious and ethnic lines.

Minister’s response

Musa received the delegation warmly, according to a statement issued by FYDUPI, and expressed readiness to work with the forum and its partners. He emphasized the importance of peace and unity, and encouraged the groups to sustain advocacy for social cohesion at the grassroots level.

The minister flagged misinformation as a key threat to stability, and urged the organizations to deploy social media platforms — naming TikTok specifically — as tools for promoting positive values and countering what he called ignorance and social anomalies. The suggestion underlines a growing recognition within Nigeria’s security establishment that the information environment, particularly on platforms popular with young Nigerians, is an active front in the country’s security challenges.

Before the delegation departed, Musa presented them with an award in recognition of the initiative, a gesture the groups said signaled the minister’s commitment to long-term collaboration.

Broader context

The visit comes as Nigeria’s security situation in the north remains deeply volatile. Bandit militias continue to conduct mass abductions and attacks across the northwest, while insurgent violence from Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) persists in the northeast. In the Middle Belt, intercommunal clashes between farming communities and armed herders have displaced hundreds of thousands and claimed thousands of lives over the past decade.

Community-based security initiatives have grown in prominence as the Nigerian military stretches to cover multiple simultaneous theatres, with policymakers increasingly looking to civil society groups to fill gaps in early warning, local intelligence, and peacebuilding.

FYDUPI said the engagement was “highly fruitful” and reaffirmed its commitment to working with the Ministry of Defence and other relevant stakeholders. Danbature said the forum would pursue what he described as community-driven solutions in support of peace, unity, and national development.

The ministry had not issued an independent statement on the meeting as of press time.