The 10 governors, who met at USIP on April 23-25, form a major policymaking community in Nigeria. All elected in 2023, they will for four years collectively help govern over 34% of Nigeria’s population. State governments are crucial in Nigeria’s decentralized political structure, allowing more tailored responses to the varied governance challenges across a diverse nation. Despite Nigeria’s upheavals, it remains an anchor in the arc of West African democracies, a hub of vibrant civil society, and a leader in the regional bloc, ECOWAS. U.S. and international partners need to bolster Nigeria’s stabilization efforts as a central part of any strategy to build peace and security across West Africa. Partnership with Nigeria’s influential 36 states will be vital.

Eight of the 10 governors in Washington came from northwestern Nigeria, a region at the southern edge of the geographic Sahel and bordering Niger, the most recent Sahel nation to suffer a military coup d’etat. The governors must confront many of the same ills that have fomented more than a decade of communal violence and extremist insurgencies across the Sahel: ineffective governance, corruption and people’s unmet economic and social needs.

Nigeria confronts serious conflicts in its north. The extremist violence in northeastern states that killed more than 350,000 people as of 2020 is reduced from its peak, but still displaces hundreds of thousands, notably in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states. In the northwest, Nigeria’s most populous region, organized criminal, or “bandit,” groups commit mass murders, abductions, burning of villages and other violence at a scale resembling warfare in Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kebbi and Kaduna. A 2019 review found banditry the cause of almost half of all killings in Nigeria; the International Committee of the Red Cross and other analysts now characterize it as Nigeria’s gravest security challenge. While the banditry is driven by criminal profit-seeking rather than ideology, varied analyses warn of “tactical cooperation” and coexistence between bandit organizations and splinter groups of the extremist Boko Haram and Islamic State of West Africa Province movements.

In central Nigeria, insecurity is driven by intercommunal or farmer-herder violence, and some banditry, in states such as Plateau, Benue and Nasarawa. In the south, a separatist movement, the Indigenous People of Biafra, is linked to violent crime and remains the primary security threat. Nationwide, food insecurity and Nigeria’s worst economic crisis in decades — including annual inflation reaching 30% — compound the challenges for governments at all levels.

Nigerian Governors in Washington

Nigeria’s northwestern governors, plus their counterparts from Benue, Niger and Plateau states, joined international and U.S. experts and officials for three days at USIP to exchange ideas, data and lessons on non-military strategies, including peacebuilding and economic development, to shrink the root causes of Nigeria’s violent upheavals. As have many African and international policymakers over many years, “I came thinking of … a kinetic approach” leading with armed force, to addressing violent turmoil, said Sokoto state Deputy Governor Idris Muhammad Gobir, but “I’m going back home … with a changed mind.”

The symposium discussed ways to apply peacebuilding — through mediation, dialogues and the central principle of fully including all parts of communities facing violence. While public policy discussion often points to poverty as a driver of violence, the symposium underscored what peacebuilding specialists emphasize are the particular risks raised by social and economic inequalities and by governance that is unresponsive to citizens’ needs. Niger state Governor Mohammed Umar Bago said the symposium helped clarify the links between these disparities and insecurity: “the neglect of government, lack of transparency” has “held back development and has created gaps between the governed and the government.” That focus highlighted “how pivotal community engagement is going to be in helping to solve multiple issues of both insecurity and poverty,” he said.

Business representatives and U.S. economic affairs diplomats, including Under Secretary of State Jose Fernandez, provided insights on how states can attract investment, and on U.S. programs they can leverage to spur inclusive economic growth. For Nigeria’s states, as across Africa, an expansion of investment — tied to rule-of-law reforms and aimed at boosting prosperity for the broad population, rather than a few investment owners — is critical to transforming long-inadequate international development efforts.

Nigerians for decades have been building a demonstrated capacity and institutions for peacebuilding work, both by civil society and by state governments. Since the 1990s, two Kaduna-based religious leaders, Imam Muhammad Ashafa and Pastor James Wuye, have advanced peacebuilding — including in partnership with USIP — through their Interfaith Mediation Center. Civic and community activists form a Network of Nigerian Facilitators who support local mediations and dialogues. USIP’s own work in Nigeria is guided by eminent civil society leaders of the Nigeria Working Group on Peacebuilding and Governance.

Plateau and Kaduna states operate dedicated peacebuilding agencies that mediate to halt violent conflicts such as battles between farming and herding communities in the states’ border districts of Riyom and Kaura, Kaduna’s Governor Uba Sani noted. Other states have offices that perform similar elements of peacebuilding.

The symposium let governors “cross-fertilize ideas,” said Katsina Governor Dikko Radda. “I believe we will channel what we’ve learned here back home,” Kaduna’s Sani said before returning to host his counterparts in the Northern Nigeria Governors’ Forum. In that meeting, on ways that Nigeria’s states can improve their peoples’ security, the forum’s chairman, Gombe Governor Muhammadu Yahaya, emphasized a need to stabilize the region through economic development, better and universal schooling, and skills development for youth and stronger regional coordination.

U.S. officials who met the governors in Washington then flew to a meeting of the high-level bilateral commission that guides the countries’ cooperation. Those talks extended the themes of increasing investment and bolstering Nigerian conflict resolution, “especially by supporting state peacebuilding agencies.”

Supporting Security Advances by Nigeria’s States

U.S. and international partners can strengthen state-level peacebuilding capacities, support interstate collaboration on security and encourage links between subnational and federal initiatives. Support for state-level peacebuilding initiatives should prioritize their integration with local community efforts. They should encourage the full inclusion of government, security and community participants. U.S. government-funded programs through organizations like USIP, Mercy Corps, and Search for Common Ground offer models for such approaches.

Nigeria’s partners can support the efforts of Nigeria’s states as innovators, promoting successful policies or programs as models to build on. Kaduna and Katsina states have launched “early warning and early response” systems for local conflicts that within months, helped community leaders to quickly mitigate dozens of violent incidents. Katsina’s system helps reduce grievances associated with injustice through its coordination with the “Multidoor Courthouse” — a mediation center designed to offer free and speedy access to justice, resolving local disputes without lengthy, costly court cases. Kano state’s community policing and youth empowerment programs demonstrate proactive, inclusive approaches to improving public safety and social cohesion at local levels.

International partners should support greater interstate coordination on Nigeria’s violent crises, which easily spread across state borders. (State borders themselves can drive conflicts, for example where land ownership and demarcations are unclear.) Supportive international policies can engage Nigeria’s regional governors’ forums.

Research and experience show amply that stabilization efforts in the Sahel and West Africa must reverse years of failure through a narrow over-reliance on armed security responses that failed to address the roots of problems and only escalated violence. Nigeria’s new crop of northern governors represent a powerful layer of policymaking through which to encourage the only viable strategy — one that prioritizes good governance, an assault on corruption, well-shaped economic investments, and a major expansion of opportunities for Nigeria’s massive youth population. Effective international partnership to advance these imperatives can come only with full engagements of the nation as a whole: not only Nigeria’s national government but also its states, marginalized communities and pro-democracy citizenry at large.

Chris Kwaja is USIP’s acting country director in Nigeria and associate professor of international relations and strategic studies at Modibbo Adama University in Yola.