Nigeria’s Minister of Defence, Mohammed Badaru Abubakar, has resigned from his role for health reasons, the presidency confirmed on Tuesday.
The departure of the 63-year-old clashes with a time of intensified security challenges across the West African nation, with the government under pressure to deal with a series of mass kidnappings.
About a week ago, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that a minimum of 402 people, mostly schoolchildren, had been kidnapped since the first week of November.
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Christopher Musa, a retired general, has been nominated by President Bola Tinubu as the new Minister of Defence to replace Abubakar in Nigeria.
The 58-year-old served as Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff between June 2023 and October 2025 and is widely regarded as one of the country’s most experienced military strategists.
Musa is also particularly known for commanding major counter-insurgency operations against jihadist groups in the north-east of the West African nation.
In the latest sign of insecurity, gunmen kidnapped a minimum of 20 people, including a Christian pastor, a Muslim bride and her bridesmaids, in two different raids on Sunday in the north.
About 250 schoolchildren and 12 teachers from a Catholic school in central Niger state are still believed to be missing after the biggest mass abduction attack in weeks.
Multiple analysts believe these attacks are carried out by criminal gangs seeking ransom payments, but a presidential spokesman said to the BBC that the government believes they are the work of jihadist groups.
In August 2023, Abubakar was appointed to his post. It remains unclear up until now what health issues led him to resign.
He wrote a letter to President Bola Tinubu to inform him of his decision, thanking him for his “services to the nation”.
Tinubu has declared a national security emergency, and the aim is to bolster the police force to about 50,000 by recruiting 20,000 more officers.
Nigeria faces countless security challenges, which include kidnappings for ransom by criminal gangs, an Islamist insurgency in the north-east, separatist violence in the south-east, and a battle between herders and farmers in the centre over access to land and water.
According to the BBC, corruption, poor intelligence sharing and underfunded local policing have delayed efforts to handle these crises.
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Abubakar served as a two-term governor of the northern state of Jigawa between 2015 and 2023.
