By S.N.C Nwagu
For years, Africa has fought terrorism with soldiers, budgets and foreign partnerships, and for years terrorism has survived them. Armies are deployed, emergency security budgets approved, foreign assistance received, counter-terrorism operations launched in succession. Yet from Nigeria’s northeast to the Sahel, from Somalia to parts of Central and East Africa, terrorist organisations keep demonstrating the same disturbing skill: they absorb military pressure, recruit new fighters and reinvent themselves.
This is the question Africa has not sufficiently confronted: why does terrorism persist, and who benefits from its persistence?
THE RELIGIOUS EXPLANATION—AND ITS LIMITS
The conventional answer is religion. Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda affiliates and Islamic State-linked organisations invoke Islam and dress their violence in religious language. That is real, and no honest analysis pretends otherwise.
But it is also incomplete. Millions of African Muslims reject terrorism outright. They live, trade and worship peacefully alongside Christians and adherents of African traditional religions across the continent. If religion alone produced terrorism, every country with a large Muslim population would experience it at comparable scale. None do.
Religion supplies the ideological vocabulary of terrorism. Poverty, exclusion, weak governance, political grievance, criminal economies and the absence of state authority supply the soil it grows in. Collapsing that distinction is where Africa’s terrorism debate keeps going wrong.
WHEN TERRORISM BECOMES AN ECONOMY
A young person without work, education, security or hope is vulnerable to any organisation offering money, protection, identity and belonging. Poverty does not manufacture terrorists on its own, but it lowers the cost of recruiting them.
And once an extremist organisation takes root, something more dangerous follows: terrorism becomes an economy in its own right. Fighters need financing, and they get it through kidnapping for ransom, extortion, illegal taxation, smuggling, illicit mining, trafficking and control of commercial routes. Where government authority is weak, armed groups do not merely disrupt the state — they become an alternative one, taxing communities and traders directly.
A group may preach religion while running the books of a criminal enterprise. That is the part of the story Africa’s terrorism debate keeps skipping.
THE BENEFICIARIES OF INSECURITY
The question worth asking is not only what religion the terrorists profess. It is what political and economic conditions let them survive, what criminal networks sustain their operations — and, more uncomfortably, who gains when insecurity continues.
Terrorist organisations gain obviously: money, recruits, territory, publicity, bargaining power. Criminal networks gain alongside them, since weapons trafficking, illegal mining and smuggling flourish precisely where government control is thin.
There is a third beneficiary Africa is reluctant to name: corruption. Every prolonged security crisis demands enormous expenditure — weapons, equipment, surveillance systems, security contracts, emergency budgets, special interventions. Spending money to protect citizens is not the problem. The problem begins when weak accountability turns insecurity itself into an opportunity for private enrichment, and a war quietly becomes an industry. Once that happens, peace threatens the interests of everyone who has learned to profit from war.
THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION
Africa’s insecurity does not unfold in isolation. Foreign governments have legitimate security interests on the continent — and economic and geopolitical ones alongside them. Terrorism can justify military cooperation, intelligence partnerships, foreign bases and strategic engagement that might otherwise be harder to secure.
None of this proves that foreign powers created African terrorist organisations; that claim would be simplistic and unearned. The more defensible argument is narrower: existing conflicts can be, and are, exploited by external actors for strategic advantage. External actors exploit local grievances. Local elites exploit foreign interests. Criminal organisations exploit instability. Terrorist organisations exploit poverty and weak governance. Everyone enters the same conflict carrying a different objective.
NIGERIA’S BOKO HARAM: A CASE STUDY IN COMPLEXITY
Nigeria’s experience with Boko Haram makes the point concrete. Its religious ideology is real, and its violence against civilians, schools, religious institutions and government targets cannot be waved away as mere economic grievance dressed up in scripture.
But neither can the environment that let Boko Haram grow be ignored. Poverty, unemployment, poor governance, corruption and weak state presence built the vulnerabilities that extremism exploited. Military victory over its fighters was never going to be sufficient on its own — and it has not been.
Africa can eliminate fighters and still leave behind the conditions that produce their replacements. It can destroy camps without destroying the criminal economy that finances them. It can raise military spending without strengthening the institutions that earn citizens’ trust. And it can keep describing every terrorist as a religious fanatic without asking why certain communities remain fertile ground for recruitment.
BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD
The central African question is not whether terrorism is religious or economic. It is both, and neither explanation stands on its own. Religion supplies the ideology; political grievance, the motivation; economic deprivation, the vulnerability; weak governance, the opportunity; illicit markets, the financing; geopolitics, the amplification.
This is why the fight against terrorism has to move beyond the battlefield. Africa needs security forces capable of defeating armed groups — and, just as urgently, governments capable of defeating the conditions that let those groups regenerate: employment, education, accountable government, effective justice, secure borders, transparent management of natural resources, and the disruption of terrorist financing.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Above all, Africa must start following the money. When a terrorist organisation survives for years, somebody is financing it. When illegal mining continues under armed groups’ control, somebody is buying the minerals. When weapons cross borders repeatedly, somebody is supplying them. When ransom payments keep kidnapping networks in business, somebody is receiving the money. And when insecurity persists despite enormous security expenditure, somebody should be asking where that money has actually gone.
The real question is bigger than terrorism itself: who benefits from Africa’s insecurity? Until the continent asks that question honestly — and insists on an answer — it may keep winning battles against terrorists while losing the larger war against the political and economic conditions that let terrorism survive.
Terrorism speaks the language of religion. Its survival is sustained by economics, politics and power. That is where Africa’s next counter-terrorism conversation should begin.
