Nigerian air assets have conducted precision strikes against terrorist hideouts and logistics installations in the Lake Chad Basin region, destroying assembly points and supply networks in Bukar Meram in the Southern Tumbuns and Chikide in the Mandara Mountains as part of the ongoing Operation Hadin Kai counter-insurgency campaign.
The operations followed credible intelligence assessments and confirmatory surveillance missions. Several insurgents were neutralised and planned attacks were disrupted. The Chief of the Air Staff reaffirmed the service’s commitment to sustaining coordinated joint operations with sister services and allied partners, stressing that intelligence-driven strikes would continue to target and destroy terrorist infrastructure wherever it was located.
Nigeria’s military leadership simultaneously advanced the country’s role in continental security cooperation at the 2026 African Air Chiefs’ Symposium held in Tunis under the auspices of the Association of African Air Forces. The event brought together air chiefs and senior military officials from across Africa to deepen collaboration in airpower development, interoperability, and coordinated security operations.
The Chief of the Air Staff, who chaired the symposium, said terrorism, insurgency, transnational organised crime, and humanitarian crises had continued to erode peace and prosperity across the continent, making intelligence sharing and enhanced operational coordination among African air forces increasingly essential. He argued that no single nation could effectively confront today’s complex security threats alone, and that the collective strength of African states lay in their ability to build a united front against shared threats.
He cited the successful conduct of a table-top exercise at the 2025 African Air Chiefs’ Symposium in Zambia as a milestone toward a planned field training exercise scheduled for Kenya in February 2027. At the closing ceremony, he was unanimously re-elected as chairman of the Association of African Air Forces for another two-year term.
On the domestic security front, the presidential spokesperson declared that Nigerian citizens possess a constitutional right to defend themselves against attackers, stating that when individual rights to self-defence are combined, they become collective rights. He clarified that the possession of firearms remained regulated under law, but that communities could apply to government to coordinate their own security arrangements.
The Governor of Oyo State signed an executive order regulating the registration, coordination, and operations of vigilante groups across the state, following violent attacks and the abduction of students and teachers in Oriire Local Government Area. The order was designed to prevent abuse by unregulated groups, avoid ethnic confrontation, and strengthen security coordination within a legal framework.
The Nigeria Labour Congress demanded that federal and state governments fundamentally reassess their approach to countering terrorism and banditry, calling for a shift from treating the conflict as a business to treating it as a matter of national survival.
