Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu nominated General Christopher Gwabin Musa as the new Minister of Defense, the Presidency reported this Tuesday.
“In a letter addressed to the Senate, President Tinubu expressed his confidence in General Musa’s ability to lead the Ministry of Defence and further strengthen Nigeria’s security architecture,” a statement indicated.
General Musa, 58, served as Chief of the Defence Staff between 2023 and October 2025 and received the Colin Powell International Award for Military Service in 2012, which is usually awarded to military personnel who have demonstrated excellence in service, leadership, operational performance and commitment to discipline and military values.
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Between 2019 and 2021, he was Deputy Director of Training and Operations of the Infantry Center and the Multinational Joint Task Force in the Lake Chad region, and in 2021 he assumed command of the Hadin Kai Theater of Operations, the official name of the offensive against the Boko Haram jihadist groups.
Subsequently, he led the Infantry Corps of the Nigerian Army before his appointment as Chief of Defence Staff.
Tinubu proposed Musa as the successor to Badaru Abubakar, who submitted his resignation this Monday, following a series of mass kidnappings, the most notorious on November 21, when 303 students and twelve teachers were kidnapped by armed men at St. Mary’s Catholic Secondary School, in Niger State (west-central), although 50 students have managed to escape so far.
The Nigerian head of state declared a “national security emergency” on November 26th due to the wave of mass kidnappings that shook the country in recent weeks.
A situation that came to the fore at the end of October, when the US President, Donald Trump, designated Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” – a designation by the State Department for violations of religious freedom – after denouncing that Christians are “massacred” in Nigeria by “radical Islamists”.
Trump even threatened military intervention, despite the Nigerian government rejecting his allegations.
Some states in Nigeria, especially in the center and northwest of the country, suffer constant attacks by “bandits”, a term used to name the criminal gangs that commit assaults and mass kidnappings to demand ransoms and whose members the authorities sometimes call “terrorists”.
This insecurity is compounded by that caused since 2009 by the activity of Boko Haram in the northeast of the country and, from 2016, also by its splinter group, the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP).
In 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from a school in the village of Chibok, in northeastern Nigeria, and although many escaped their captors, according to the UN, at least 91 are still unable to return home.
