A former director of the Department of State Security Services has laid out a scathing account of how insecurity took root during Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency, arguing in a newly released book that government indifference, not ethnic conflict, was the true driver of Nigeria’s descent into insurgency, banditry, and kidnapping.
In his book, “DSS@ 40: My Journey Behind the Shield,” Dennis Amachree describes the Buhari years as a period when security threats multiplied largely unchecked, despite the president’s own military background. Rather than decisive action, Amachree writes, the administration’s response amounted to something close to indifference, an approach that hardened public perception of a leadership disconnected from the realities facing ordinary citizens.
That perception, according to Amachree, was compounded by rhetoric as much as inaction. He points to Buhari’s characterization of Nigerian youths as “lazy” during international engagements as a moment that deepened public resentment, landing especially hard amid already widespread unemployment and reinforcing the sense that a large segment of the population had been written off by its own government.
But Amachree’s sharpest criticism is reserved for what he describes as the quiet financing of the very threats the state claimed to be fighting. He alleges that senior government functionaries secretly authorized ransom payments amounting to billions of naira to bandits, a practice that effectively subsidized the criminal networks terrorizing the country. When bandit leaders such as Bello Turji later contradicted official denials of these payments, Amachree writes, it shattered whatever public trust remained and confirmed that elements of the state were bankrolling the instability it publicly condemned.
That contradiction feeds into the book’s broader argument: that Nigeria’s security crisis is best understood not as a struggle between competing ethnic groups, but as a conflict between a self-interested ruling class and the ordinary citizens left to bear the consequences. Amachree describes the political establishment of the period as operating with what he calls “reckless abandon,” prioritizing personal gain even as economic warning signs mounted and security conditions worsened.
For Amachree, that pattern of self-interest over national responsibility is what ultimately positions the political class, rather than any external or communal threat, as the greatest danger to Nigeria’s social cohesion and long-term stability.
