Over 1,000 Terror Groups in Africa: Gambari’s Grim Warning

Prof. Gambari warns over 1,000 insurgent groups now operate across Africa — a call for urgent joint defence, intelligence sharing and domestic security industry investment.

Atlantic Post

August 25, 2025

3–4 minutes

Africa security, African Standby Force, African Union, displacement, ECOMOG, Ibrahim Gambari, Insurgency, Regional Defence, Sahel crisis, Savannah Centre

Africa on the Brink: Gambari Says 1,000-Plus Insurgent Groups Turn Continent into a Chain of Fire

Africa’s security architecture is confronting an existential crisis. Prof. Ibrahim Agboola Gambari, a seasoned diplomat, warned at the Africa Chiefs of Defence Staff Summit in Abuja that there are over 1,000 insurgent and terrorist groups operating on the continent, with the number increasing.

That figure, based on research conducted by the African Research Network at the Savannah Centre for Diplomacy, Democracy, and Development, is not rhetoric; it is a sobering sign of a multifaceted security issue.

Gambari, a former Nigerian foreign minister and UN envoy with decades of conflict diplomacy expertise, cautioned defence chiefs that regional institutions created for trade and integration have been consumed by banditry, violent extremism, and armed militias.

He cited the expanding geography of conflict: the Sahel, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and South Sudan, the Horn, and even pockets of Southern Africa are all areas where new armed groups emerge, splinter, and traverse borders with devastating rapidity.

This proliferation did not occur in a vacuum. The AU’s centrepiece vow to “Silence the Guns by 2020” has been delayed into the next decade, while violence has only increased in many places; the African Standby Force, designed to offer rapid continental reaction, was supposed to be fully operational by 2015 but is still largely aspirational.

Gambari’s diagnosis is that political commitment has outrun capacity: paper plans have not translated into interoperable forces, credible intelligence sharing, or strategic airlift to send soldiers to crisis zones.

History offers bitter lessons. West Africa’s ECOMOG interventions in the 1990s, when regional countries such as Nigeria and Ghana fielded combined forces to stabilise Liberia and Sierra Leone, showed African states could act collectively when political will and logistics aligned.

Yet those ad hoc successes were costly, uneven and are not easily scalable to a continent now facing a thousand different, often small, mobile and locally rooted armed groups. The problems today are more fragmented, networked and transnational than the large rebellions of the past.

The human toll is staggering. By mid-2024, nearly 123 million people were forcibly displaced globally because of conflict and violence; many of those crises are centred in Africa, producing millions of internally displaced people and refugees who feed cycles of grievance and recruitment.

In short, Africa is bleeding people and trust — the two commodities most needed to build resilient states.

Gambari’s prescription is realistic and urgent: collaborative military training, real-time intelligence sharing, platform interoperability, and investments in domestic defence businesses so that African countries are not forever reliant on global suppliers.

He revived Kwame Nkrumah’s mid-century concept of a continental high command, not out of nostalgia, but as a reminder that without institutional innovation, member nations will continue to struggle with how to respond to challenges that know no boundaries.

However, vigilance is required. Building a truly communal security architecture necessitates political trust, consistent finance, and democratic monitoring to prevent militarisation from crowding out governance.

The alternative Gambari proposed—a continent that becomes a permanent war zone—is not exaggeration, but a plausible future unless AU members and Regional Economic Communities move beyond statements to shared capabilities, transparent funding mechanisms and localised conflict prevention that addresses root causes: poverty, exclusion and governance failure.

For advocacy groups, donors and policy-makers, Gambari’s message is both alarm and blueprint. The number, 1,000 insurgent groups, should be treated as a statistical red flag since it tells us the battlefield has multiplied, making piecemeal responses ineffective.

Africa’s security debate must now shift from whether to act to how to create pooled, professional, accountable and rapid-reaction capacity that can quiet guns, and prevent new ones from being raised.