"Weaponized AI and Illegal Mining Driving Our Crises": Security Analyst Kabir Adamu Echoes Abdulsalami's Warning on Politicized Security
Prominent security analyst and CEO of Beacon Security & Intelligence Limited, Dr. Kabir Adamu, has validated warnings by former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, naming the deliberate politicization of national security as Nigeria’s single highest risk factor.
Appearing live on Arise News, Adamu outlined how a toxic combination of local political agendas, sophisticated foreign cyber-interference, and a multi-billion Naira illegal mining economy are actively sustaining the nation's security challenges. He warned that the state's reliance on superficial technology deployments and heavily centralized policing has failed to match the evolving, highly coordinated operations of armed actors on the ground.
The Illusions of Surveillance Without Physical Dominance
Reacting to recent violent breaches in Bokkos Local Government Area of Plateau State—which occurred despite high-profile presidential visits and defensive pledges earlier this year—Dr. Adamu directly questioned the federal government’s tactical execution. He argued that technology cannot replace raw territorial control.
"From a security point of view, it would be futile to install cameras in a location that you cannot dominate," Adamu explained. "It's important that you are able to dominate an environment before you install physical security assets, because otherwise, the bad guys will just come and destroy it.
When you look at the attacks in Plateau State, these actors usually come in their numbers—in tens, sometimes in hundreds, and on motorbikes. It beats me that we are not able to use local intelligence or technology to determine their movement. Imagine ten or fifty bikes moving across locations; the noise, the fueling indicators—so many intelligence indicators can be picked."
The Sand Export Loophole: Follow the Minerals, Solve the Conflict
Providing a structural diagnosis of the violence plaguing resource-dense areas across the North-Central and North-West geopolitical zones, Adamu stated that his firm's proprietary risk mapping reveals an undeniable link between high-value extraction fields and mass casualty attacks. He alleged that sophisticated illegal operations are bypassing state regulations by exploiting the nature of unrefined mining outputs.
"If you look at all the resource-rich African countries, there seems to be one threat that runs through them: the extraction of minerals," Adamu noted. "We've been able to see clearly that almost all the locations that have these minerals, that’s where you see the concentration of these types of attacks. Anyone who knows extractive mining knows that if you find one mineral, you are likely to find others. If you pack sand and you export that sand, paying perhaps for gold or lithium, what are the other contents within that sand? Follow the market, and you'll be able to solve the security issue."
Weaponized AI and Foreign Cyber-Interference
Beyond the physical battlefields, Dr. Adamu emphasized that the national security landscape is being actively destabilized via the cyber-domain. He disclosed that hostile foreign actors are collaborating with local political figures to deploy advanced digital manipulation, aiming to divide the country along ethnic and religious fault lines.
"In today's world, we're not just talking of the physical space, but we're also talking of the cyberspace. There are international players attempting to take advantage of some of our security challenges and drive them through misinformation. For example, when General [Abubakar] Rabe was killed, a video went viral showing his corpse being handed over by bandits. That was a fake AI—artificial intelligence. That's the kind of danger we are faced with: people using deepfakes and AI with the support of foreign players to put up these kinds of videos to disunite us."
Policing vs. Militarization: The Path to State Police
While throwing his weight behind current institutional considerations regarding state police and the deployment of state-level forest guards, the intelligence expert warned against turning domestic civil defense units into unchecked, heavy military branches.
"It is important to decentralize security. If you go to my village, I can count the number of security personnel on one hand, while the enemy comes fifty on motorbikes, each with an AK-47. Yes, let’s decentralize, but let’s do it according to a mechanism that makes it accountable. If we don’t, we risk creating a dangerous militarization of our ecosystem. Policing is policing; it is not militarization. People calling for arming local agencies with military-grade weapons are making a mistake. The military can go in, clear and take a forest, and then hand it over to forest guards who function as localized intelligence providers."
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