APPRAISAL OF THE CAPACITY OF NATIONAL COUNTER TERRORISM STRATEGY TO PREVENT AND COMBAT TERRORISM IN NIGERIA

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The standing policy adopted by Nigerian states to fight against terrorism is known as the National Counter Terrorism Strategy (NACTEST). This tactic has five pillars, namely: to forestall, to secure, to identify, to prepare, and to implement. Most of the literature engages on reasons for the emergency of terrorism, the effect of terrorism, or the strategy adopted by the terrorist to perpetrate their heinous activities. However, little attempt has been made to evaluate the efficacy of Nigeria's strategy against terrorism, especially NACTEST. Based on this backdrop, this paper is an attempt to examine the performance of Nigeria in identifying terrorist plans and its preparations to thwart them. These are two major and critical pillars of the NACTEST document (to identify and prepare). The paper adopts secondary methods of data gathering and content analysis for analyzing both primary and secondary data as a source of information gathering and content analysis methods for analyzing the generated data. The paper also adopted protracted social conflict theory to analyze the reasons for terrorism and the methods adopted by the Nigerian government to address those motivating factors. It was discovered that the Nigerian government has been able to prevent attacks by terrorists by identifying some sources of terrorist funding in Nigeria. However, it was discovered that, as far as the capacity of the government is concerned, security agencies still lack the necessary capacity to efficiently explore and detect terrorist attacks before they occur. The paper recommends more engagement of civilians and community stakeholders in fighting against terrorism in Nigeria.