Why Africa needs to redraw its security sovereignty map and build coherence

What we are witnessing is not merely the persistence of terrorism, but the collapse of strategic coherence in African security policy.

In 2024, the Sahel shouldered the world’s deadliest wave of terrorism, with the region alone responsible for more than half of all terrorism-related deaths across the globe.

Among the hardest hit were five countries—Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon—where violence has become alarmingly routine and state authority is increasingly contested. Yet Africa’s premier continental institution, the African Union, remains several steps behind.

The scale of the crisis has outpaced the frameworks built to contain it. The reality is that Africa isn’t just being outgunned by insurgents—it’s being outmanoeuvred by its own outdated security architecture.
Over the Horn of Africa, the story is equally grim.

Al Shabaab, the Somali militant group, continues to hold territory, extort the public, and deepen its grip on southern and central Somalia. The AU’s latest mission—known as the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission (Aussom)—was meant to be a reset, a bold new chapter after African Union Transition Mission in Somalia.

Now, barely off the ground, it’s already faltering: underfunded, politically unclear, and strategically adrift. Instead of marking a shift in momentum, it risks becoming another hollow intervention. Without a clear doctrine, Aussom risks becoming another placeholder mission, rather than a turning point.

What links the Sahel and the Horn is not just rising jihadist activity—it is the absence of African strategic agency. The continent continues to outsource its security doctrine to external actors: France, the EU, the US, Russia, China, Turkey, each projecting influence through partnerships that fracture rather than unify African responses.

In the Sahel, this has led to the rise of the Alliance of Sahel States (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso), a new regional bloc that has rejected Ecowas and turned eastward to Russia and China for arms, training, and diplomatic cover.

But this pivot does not constitute strategy. Replacing one set of foreign dependencies with another is not sovereignty, it is substitution.

Africa’s failure is not due to a lack of capacity, but a lack of political will to build long-term institutions, coordinate intelligence, and assert continental ownership over peace enforcement. The African Union Peace and Security Council remains stuck in workshop mode, issuing communiqués while jihadist groups are redrawing national borders in blood.

While the AU debates mandates, terrorist groups have entered a new phase. AI-powered propaganda, encrypted networks, and cross-border economic lifelines through gold smuggling and extortion have transformed these groups into agile, resilient actors.

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Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISK) now produces multilingual recruitment videos—from Arabic and Urdu to Russian and English. They no longer need physical territory to recruit; they operate through broadband and belief.

And yet, across African capitals, there is no coordinated response to this threat environment. Ministries of Information remain outdated, national security strategies are locked in Cold War paradigms, and digital counter-narratives are relegated to donor-funded side projects.

If Sahel and Horn are to be reclaimed, Africa must redraw its security map, both figuratively and institutionally.

First, continental institutions must move from mission mandates to strategic doctrines. Aussom cannot succeed unless it is backed by an African vision of security, grounded in local legitimacy, political reconciliation, and state-building.

The same applies to the Sahel, where the African Union should mediate the fractured relationship between the Economic Community of West Africa (Ecowas) and the three Sahel states (Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso).

Second, Africa must reclaim control over its information domain. Terrorism thrives on narrative dominance. We need continent-wide strategic communications units, embedded in AU and RECs, to craft localised, culturally resonant counter-messaging.

Third, we must treat resource governance as a core security pillar. In the Sahel, gold and uranium are not just commodities—they are the currencies of insurgency. National resource maps should be part of national security strategies, and artisanal mining must be brought under state oversight through community-driven agreements, not elite contracts.

Fourth, we need pan-African security coordination.

The silence between Somalia’s intelligence agency Nisa and Nigeria’s DSS, or between Mali’s intelligence services and Kenya’s NIS, is the sound of failure. A continental intelligence fusion centre, with rotating leadership and secure platforms, must be built now—not in another summit report.

We are running out of time. As the index shows, terrorism in Africa is not just persistent—it is evolving, adaptive, and politically embedded. If we do not meet this evolution with African clarity, we will be forced to respond to its consequences with perpetual crisis management.

The strategic question is simple: Will Africa lead or be led? If we choose the former, we must shed the illusion that peace is imported. The AU and its regional blocs must wake up—not to new donor templates, but to a continental security consensus rooted in African reality.

Because if we fail to redraw the map, others will do it for us—with drones, mercenaries, and missions that outlast their mandate but not their usefulness.

Abdisaid M. Ali is chairperson of the Lomé Security Forum