From Ballots to Battlefields: Nigeria can repurpose election tool to fight terrorism

Nigeria’s war on terror continues to be framed through the lenses of firepower, troop strength and defence budgets. Far less attention is paid to a quieter but consequential failure of information pathways that repeatedly fail to convert early warning signs into timely response, often resulting in mass tragedies.

Across the country’s terrorised zones, communities often see danger coming. What they lack are safe, trusted and reliable channels to transmit the information to those who can act on it.

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) offers a way to rethink this gap. DPI refers to open, interoperable and publicly governed digital systems designed to serve society at scale, not as one-off applications, but as foundational infrastructure. In fragile and conflict-affected settings, such as many parts of northern Nigeria, such infrastructure can mean the difference between foresight and catastrophe.

In this report, PREMIUM TIMES’ Yakubu Mohammed examines how Ushahidi, a crowdsourced reporting and real-time crisis mapping platform previously deployed for elections and oil-theft monitoring, can be adapted into a civilian early-warning counterterrorism tool—if designed with security, governance and public interest safeguards at its core.

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When communities see violence coming

On a quiet night in Papiri, a rural community in Niger State, barely 150 kilometres from two major military formations, Boko Haram fighters under the command of Mallam Sadiku advanced towards St Mary’s school. Villagers in nearby settlements saw them coming. Some tried to send a signal to Papiri, but none could get through.

By morning, more than 300 people, including students and staff members, were declared missing. While some later returned home, 230 others were confirmed abducted after conflicting figure narratives were reconciled. All the kidnapped victims were eventually released after spending several days in captivity.

Ahmed Adamu, a community leader known locally as the Dan Madami, believes the failure was not only military. It was infrastructural.

“People in other villages saw them coming,” he said. “But there was a poor network. They could not get us on the phone.”

This Papiri episode reflects a recurring pattern in Nigeria’s security crisis. Attacks on vulnerable communities in the northern region are often preceded by warning signs—suspicious movements of armed men, rumours of impending raids and visible mobilisation. But these signals rarely travel far, fast or safely enough to elicit a coordinated response.

Ushahidi as a digital solution

Founded in 2008 in response to post-election violence in Kenya, Ushahidi is an open-source platform that allows citizens to submit incident reports via Short Message Service (SMS), phone calls, web, and social media. These reports are then verified and mapped in near real time.

Its architecture aligns closely with the DPI principles. As an open-source, modular system, Ushahidi is designed for reuse across contexts rather than single-purpose deployment. It supports multiple low-tech input channels, making it accessible in low-connectivity zones, an essential requirement in fragile and conflict settings.

In Nigeria, the platform had been used by civil society organisations during elections to collect reports of violence, intimidation and irregularities. During the 2011, 2015 and 2023 polls, citizen reports were transformed into live crisis maps to support verification and rapid response by observers and security agencies.

The 2023 real-time map

The 2023 Ushahidi deployment, which garnered 1,158 responses, was championed by Connected Development (CODE). The organisation deployed what it described as UZABE, an Open Situation Awareness Room (OSAR) initiative that provided real-time intelligence, mapping tools and witness reports from “our 20,000 trained observers spread across various polling units in Nigeria.”

Beyond elections, Ushahidi had also been adapted by the Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN) to monitor oil spills and environmental crises in the oil-rich Niger Delta. In the early 2010s, SDN deployed Ushahidi through the Niger Delta Watch project to crowdsource reports of oil spills and environmental abuses. The platform mapped incidents in near real-time, building situational awareness around pollution, sabotage and illegal refining.

SDN later partnered with the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) to develop the Nigerian Oil Spill Monitor, a web-based mapping tool that allows regulators to visualise spill incidents and access records through an interactive map and table.

However, while the platform displays individual spill entries and locations, it does not publicly provide an aggregated figure showing the total volume of oil spilt, leaving key questions about the scale of environmental damage unresolved.

This limitation highlights a recurring DPI tension: technology can enable transparency, but governance choices determine how much accountability it ultimately delivers.

SDN’s project manager, Joseph Ekong, told PREMIUM TIMES that his team has partnered with agencies like NOSDRA, which he described as “responders.”

“We train some local volunteers to feed information into the platform to elicit responses,” he said. “We also link responders to the platforms.”

Despite the “huge achievements” recorded, Mr Ekong expressed frustration over issues around security and privacy.

“While responders have been able to use information on the platform positively, infiltration remains a major challenge,” he said. “It may be difficult to identify perpetrators of this crime, as there is a likelihood that a few of them we have as volunteers may be actively involved or be sympathisers. This could affect the quality of reports.”

Mr Ekong explained that citizens’ reports are submitted anonymously to protect volunteers from retaliation by perpetrators.

Ushahidi’s counterterrorism potential and limits

When adopted in counterterrorism, Ushahidi, Mr Ekong said, could function as an “early warning and early response” security architecture that complements—not replaces—military intelligence.

Experts, however, warn that poorly designed or governed deployments could expose civilians to harm.

Without military-grade encryption, a centralised database could become a “honeypot” for hackers, potentially exposing informants and turning sensitive records into a “kill list”, warned Olugbenga Odeyemi, a digital security expert.

He explained that Ushahidi’s deployment for counterterrorism, especially in remote areas, must be a low-tech and high-security framework. He cautioned that in such areas, app-based solutions would fail.

“An app-based solution will fail in rural Zamfara or Borno, for instance,” Mr Odeyemi stated.

In vulnerable villages where internet connectivity could be a problem, the expert advised designing an offline-first system that relies on “GSM (2G) networks using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes or encrypted SMS gateways.”

Like the SDN project manager, Mr Odeyemi raised concerns about weak safeguards that could result in what he described as “signal noise.”

“Armed groups could deliberately flood the platform with false alerts to divert security forces, underscoring the need for rigorous verification and validation protocols,” he cautioned.

To mitigate this, Mr Odeyemi argued that open crowdsourcing alone is insufficient in conflict settings. Instead, he pointed out that any civilian early-warning system must rely on what he described as a “web of trust”—a layered verification model that assigns greater credibility to reports from “trusted nodes” such as recognised community leaders, local vigilante groups, or verified civil society organisations.

“You cannot treat all reports as equal in a war environment,” he explained. “You need trusted human anchors in the system.”

Equally critical, he added, is “anonymity by design,” warning that if platforms retain identifiable metadata, such as phone numbers or location histories, citizens will be less likely to report.

“If people believe their number could end up with a compromised official or intercepted by insurgents, they will stay silent,” he said. “The interface must automatically strip metadata from the sender before it reaches the central database.”

Another risk he envisioned is data weaponisation, where tools built to track terrorists are repurposed to monitor political dissidents or journalists. To prevent this, he argued, independent oversight is essential.

“Strict data governance and independent (perhaps by a consortium of CSOs rather than solely the government) oversight is non-negotiable,” he stated.

Rethinking security as public infrastructure

The Papiri’s incident was not only about guns and insurgents. It was also about broken information pathways.

As Nigeria confronts increasingly decentralised and mobile armed groups, Mr Ekong, the SDN project manager, said the question is no longer whether technology can help, but whether the country is willing to treat early-warning and early-response systems as public infrastructure rather than ad-hoc, donor-driven projects.

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If used responsibly, he believes that tools like Ushahidi could help bridge the gap between communities and responders. Used carelessly, Mr Odeyemi, the digital security expert, warned it could expose civilians to new risks.

PREMIUM TIMES shared its findings with the National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC), asking if it would adopt a digital tool like Ushahidi as part of its tech-based counterterrorism strategies, with key DPI principles—inclusivity, interoperability, privacy, security and reusability, among others—considered. The centre acknowledged our enquiry but has yet to respond to it.

Should such a system be adopted, Mr Odeyemi warned against vendor lock-in, another DPI principle that requires that proprietary software not be exclusively private.

“For a national security project, ‘Software Sovereignty’ is non-negotiable,” he emphasised. “We must avoid proprietary ‘black box’ solutions where the government is locked into a single foreign vendor for maintenance and updates.”

He argued that systems must be built on open standards and open-source frameworks to ensure that the Nigerian government, not private contractors, owns the code and the data.

“It also allows local Nigerian developers to rapidly adapt the tool as security challenges evolve, rather than waiting for a vendor in Europe or Asia to push an update,” Mr Odeyemi stated.