Nigeria has the military to defeat terrorism. Its government will not use it.

Bishop Stephen Dami Mamza of the Catholic Diocese of Yola, whose territory sits at the edge of the Boko Haram conflict zone in northeast Nigeria, told ACI Africa on July 7, 2026 that his country's failure to defeat terrorism comes down to one thing. "The Nigerian Army has resolved issues in different African countries," he said. "We have air power, we have land power, and we have all the necessary advantages that we need in order to get rid of the insurgency. But there is no will, there is no seriousness, there is no commitment, and there is too much politics in it."[^1] The statement is a diagnosis of a specific gap: a government that can see what must be done and will not do it. Mamza went further: "Even the sitting government is politicizing the whole security issue. Even those who are in the opposition are also politicizing the security issues."[^1] Both ruling party and opposition are extracting political advantage from a crisis they have the power to resolve.

The psychology of not acting

What explains a government that holds capacity without exercising it? The naive answer is incompetence, and Mamza's statement rules that out directly: the Nigerian military has a documented record of peacekeeping success across the continent. The question his diagnosis opens is psychological rather than strategic: what kind of moral failure produces deliberate non-use of available means?

Aquinas identifies fortitude as the virtue that sustains movement toward a difficult good when fear of cost makes retreat tempting.[^2] Its opposite is dramatic cowardice only in the rare case; more often it is what Royo Marín calls disordered fear, a natural slackness rooted in love of one's own comfort, which prevents persons from undertaking great things and drives them toward whatever avoids hardship and exposure.[^3] A political class that repeatedly chooses positioning over counterinsurgency is exhibiting that preference exactly: electoral survival valued above the cost of confronting violence.

Rodríguez observes that sustained resistance to pressure is what causes virtues to take root rather than erode, the resistance itself building capacity for further resistance.[^4] The inverse holds equally: repeated yielding to the easier path makes yielding more automatic. A political culture that has cycled through this pattern for years, capacity present and will absent and violence continuing, has trained itself into the pattern. The original failure may have been weakness; the current one is closer to habit.

The CCMMP's account of moral agency clarifies where accountability sits in that pattern. Free volitional action involves intending a particular goal, choosing the means to obtain it, and completing the action.[^5] A structural unwillingness to execute any of those steps is a failure of agency, and when a political class patterns toward non-action despite demonstrated capacity, moral weight concentrates in the persons who hold authority and choose otherwise rather than dissolving into the system. What Titus, Nordling, and Vitz describe as prudence's role, directing the cognitive faculties of perception, memory, imagination, and judgment toward concrete action, only functions when the will follows through.[^6] By Mamza's account, the Nigerian government understands exactly who the enemy is and what its military can do; the failure occurs at the step from accurate perception to committed action, and both governing and opposition parties have settled into it together.

What exploitation looks like at scale

Mamza's specific charge, that both sides are politicizing the security crisis rather than resolving it, describes something more calculated than weakness alone. At the individual level, exploitative indifference involves maintaining awareness of others' vulnerability while treating that vulnerability as a resource rather than a claim. What he describes in Nigerian political culture has the same structure: the displacement and death of citizens in the northeast processed as material for electoral competition rather than as a problem demanding resolution. People who could be protected are not, because protection serves those in power less than the ongoing condition of threat does.

The Church's function here

Maritain's political philosophy treats the common good as something the state is bound to defend, an order it betrays when it abandons citizens to lethal violence.[^7] Mamza is doing what bishops in conflict zones have done for centuries, naming a moral failure clearly enough that it cannot be laundered into a technical or strategic question, not asking the Church to govern in the state's place.

Evangelii Gaudium calls the Church to move toward every sociocultural setting where human dignity is under threat.[^8] For a bishop whose diocese borders the Boko Haram conflict zone, that call has a specific address: the communities displaced, killed, and left without the protection civil authority was constituted to provide.

Fortitude, in Aquinas's account, is the sustained commitment to a difficult good in the face of whatever makes that commitment costly.[^2] A bishop who names his government's refusal to exercise it, in public, from a diocese that lives with the consequences of that refusal, is speaking from lived experience, not abstraction. The sword of justice used as a tool of political advantage is governance turned against its own purpose. Naming that precisely is itself an act of the virtue the government is declining to practice.

References

[^1]: Abah Anthony John, "Catholic Bishop: There's No Political Will in Fight Against Terrorism in Nigeria," National Catholic Register / ACI Africa, July 10, 2026. https://www.ncregister.com/cna/catholic-bishop-there-s-no-political-will-in-fight-against-terrorism-in-nigeria

[^2]: Victorino Rodríguez Rodríguez, O.P. (Ed.), Introducción a las cuestiones 123-140: Tratado de la fortaleza, in Thomas Aquinas, Suma de Teología II-II (q.123, a.1; q.123, a.12), Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1981.

[^3]: Antonio Royo Marín, Teología de la perfección cristiana (4th ed.), Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1962, §446: "al don de fortaleza se oponen el temor desordenado o timidez, acompañado muchas veces de cierta flojedad natural, que proviene del amor a la propia comodidad, y nos impide emprender grandes cosas por la gloria de Dios."

[^4]: Alonso Rodríguez, Ejercicios de perfección y virtudes cristianas, Tratado cuarto, cap. VI, 1861: "así las tentaciones hacen que se arraiguen más en el alma las virtudes contrarias."

[^5]: Craig Steven Titus, William J. Nordling, and Paul C. Vitz, "Volitional and Free" (Chapter 16), in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice, Divine Mercy University Press, 2020.

[^6]: Craig Steven Titus, Paul C. Vitz, William J. Nordling, Matthew McWhorter, and C. Gross, "Fulfilled in Virtue," in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice, pp. 249–305, Divine Mercy University Press, 2020.

[^7]: Jacques Maritain, Una educación integral para un humanismo integral [Integral Education for an Integral Humanism], unpublished manuscript excerpt, Jacques Maritain library collection.

[^8]: Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium [Apostolic Exhortation], Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013, para. 30.