A presidential aide has revealed that the president has been losing sleep over the situation as attacks by bandits, terrorists and kidnappers continue to multiply across the country.
The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Community Engagement for the North-West, Abdulillahi Yakassai, made the disclosure during an interview on Channels Television’s Morning Brief programme on Tuesday March 24, 2026. “Even the president is having sleepless nights because every week you see him having a security council meeting in the Presidential Villa to see how to address this insecurity,” Yakassai said.
Yakassai specifically pointed to the North-West as one of the most pressing theatres of concern, noting that banditry and kidnapping in the region have escalated to levels that demand constant presidential attention.
He defended the administration’s approach, saying the government was not sitting idle but actively deploying resources and intelligence to address the crisis.
The disclosure comes at a particularly fraught moment for Nigeria’s security landscape. In the past two weeks alone the country has recorded coordinated suicide bombings in Maiduguri that killed 23 people and injured 108, an ambush that killed 20 security operatives and vigilantes in Plateau State, and a Global Terrorism Index report that ranked Nigeria fourth among the most terrorism-affected countries in the world with 750 people killed in terror related incidents in 2025 alone, the highest death toll since 2020.
The United States military has deployed 200 troops and multiple MQ-9 Reaper drones to Nigeria to provide intelligence support and training to the Nigerian military a development that underscores Washington’s own assessment of the severity of the threat facing the country.
Yakassai’s comments also arrive in the wake of a damning assessment by the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, which declared that the country’s counterterrorism architecture has collapsed and accused the military of spreading misinformation about the true scale of casualties on the frontlines.
Whether the president’s sleepless nights translate into a strategic shift that actually reduces the death toll or whether they remain a measure of presidential anguish without corresponding results on the ground is the question yet unanswered.
