Nigeria

Nigeria's economy still rests heavily on crude that moves through a pipeline and creek network too vast and too remote to guard by patrol. Illegal tapping, bunkering and barge movements through the Niger Delta drain national revenue on a scale few other producers face, and the same waterways that carry the oil hide the theft.

The Gulf of Guinea off Nigeria has been among the most dangerous waters in the world for seafarers, where armed boarding and kidnap-for-ransom raise insurance costs and deter the shipping the economy depends on. A busy oil-export coast and a maze of creek exits give attackers both targets and places to disappear.

Nigeria faces entrenched insurgency across its north-east and spreading banditry through the north-west, where armed groups exploit vast distances, porous borders with the Lake Chad basin, and communications the state cannot always protect. The scale of the terrain gives these networks room the security forces struggle to close.

Nigeria's stretch of the Gulf of Guinea supports coastal communities and a fishing sector under sustained pressure from foreign industrial trawlers operating illegally in its exclusive economic zone. The same weak maritime picture that shelters piracy also lets unlicensed vessels strip the fishery beyond the horizon.

Nigeria's long land borders run through savanna, forest and semi-arid terrain shared with Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Benin. They are frontiers that armed groups, smugglers and traffickers cross where patrols are thinnest. The sheer length makes continuous watch by manpower alone impossible.

Nigeria's mineral belts across the north and centre draw unlicensed extraction that strips national resources, funds armed groups and scars the environment far from any road. The remoteness of the sites is exactly what lets the theft continue unseen.

Nigeria's coast concentrates the country's oil exports, its busiest ports and the entry points for much of its trade in a stretch of water plagued by piracy, bunkering and smuggling. Fixed coastal radar reaches only so far, and the gaps are exploited daily.

Lagos and Nigeria's other ports concentrate the nation's trade in a small, exposed footprint that faces threats from the water, the air and the network at once. As the busiest gateway in West Africa, a disruption there ripples across the whole economy.

Nigeria's power grid, pipelines and water systems underpin the largest economy in Africa while remaining exposed to both physical sabotage and cyber intrusion. Grid instability and infrastructure attacks already impose heavy costs, and the control systems behind them were built for reliability rather than adversarial resilience.

Nigeria loses substantial customs revenue to contraband, fuel and untaxed goods that cross its land borders and move through its coastal waters wherever surveillance is thinnest. Subsidised fuel in particular flows outward across porous frontiers on a large scale.

Nigeria has suffered high-profile jailbreaks in which armed groups freed large numbers of inmates, exposing how custodial security is now challenged from the air and through compromised communications as much as at the wall. The correctional estate spans facilities in regions where insurgents and criminal networks are active.

Sustaining Nigeria's security forces across the semi-arid north-east, the northern borderlands and the creeks of the Delta exposes convoys and strains budgets, in regions where roads are poor and armed groups target resupply. Keeping deployed units supplied and connected is itself a security problem.

A single picture of a nation's waters, orbit to harbour, for EEZ enforcement, illegal-fishing detection and port security, held on national tasking rather than a coalition's.

Persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance across land, sea and air, tasked on national priorities and accountable to the flag that owns it.

Power, water, transport and port systems assessed, hardened and watched continuously, by a team with no foreign government to report the findings to.