Since assumption of office in May this year, President Muhammadu Buhari for all intents and purposes has placed the Boko Haram terrorism insurgency top of the agenda of his government.

It has not been surprising because his promise to end the insurgency against his background as a retired general and former Head of State who successfully dealt with the Maitatsine religious riots in 1984 played a major role in him winning the March 28 General Elections.

He has changed his service chiefs, begun the reorganization of the military and made trips to foreign countries, liaising with other countries around the Lake Chad which have also suffered the effects of the terrorists, and sought military cooperation with as many countries as possible towards the elimination of the group.

Second to the Boko Haram insurgency on the security agenda has been the restiveness in the Niger Delta, especially with the Presidential Amnesty Program for militants which begun in 2009 coming to an end this December, coupled with anger in the region since the end of the Goodluck Jonathan administration. There are fears that these factors might cause militancy to resume and affect the nation economically by crippling the oil industry.

However, the Buhari administration, like administrations before it, seems to be ignoring the incessant, low-intensity crises that has been going on in the Middle Belt of the country, covering Nassarawa, Plateau, Benue, and parts of Taraba and the Southern part of Kaduna State. It is a crisis that is essentially a competition over resources – nomadic herdsmen and farmers clashing over land for grazing. But like with many things Nigerian, it has been complicated by religion, ethnicity and politics.

But the biggest culprit in making this crisis bad is the inability of government to have the monopoly of violence and using that to enforce law and order. This has anarchy to reign over the region, with wanton raids on hapless villages and settlements, leaving in their wake death and destruction. Thousands of people have been displaced, some farmlands have been left abandoned for as far back as 2006.

To put this in perspective, the number of people killed in the Middle Belt in 2014 was just about 500 less than those that lost their lives to the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East. This means that the crisis is currently as bad as the Boko Haram insurgency, but it is not only ignored by the government, but under-reported in both local and international media.

As though this is not scary enough, it is likely to get worse with increasing clashes between nomadic herdsmen and local communities in Delta, Ondo and Enugu, indicating that the spate of violence is moving southwards. This puts the entire country on a powderkeg that could blow up and push completely over the brink when the factors of religion, ethnicity & politics are factored in and how single narratives could form around it and the crisis.

So why has government not acted on it so far? From history, the Nigerian government does not act on security issues by nipping them in the bud but only when it has gotten out of control. Whether it is the Igbo pogroms in 1966, the Niger Delta militancy or the Boko Haram insurgency, the governments of the day ignored all the tell-tale signs until they became monsters too wild to tame.

It will be disastrous if the Buhari administration refuses to learn from this bit of history until the Middle Belt crisis consumes the whole country. While it is right to focus on the Boko Haram insurgency, we are inclined to agree with this columnist that it is the Middle Belt crisis, not Boko Haram that will be the defining security issue of the next four years.

However, if the Middle Belt crisis should further escalate, at the risk of sounding like the prophets of doom, we do not think that Nigeria will be able to pull itself from the brink as it always has. We might end up as the Somalia of West Africa.

It is about time that President Buhari and his security team work together with stakeholders at all levels to start looking into the remote and immediate causes of this crisis. There are tons of reports by panels of inquiries of governments at the federal and state levels into previous crises; hardly anyone has been implemented. This will be an excellent time to dust up those reports and begin the implementation of the recommendations that are contained within them.

We can only postpone doomsday thus far without doing anything to avert it; we should not have to wait until it comes upon us before we start running from pillar to post in trying to reverse it.

Kolapo Olapoju