Nigeria’s Ambassador-Designate to Mexico Reno Omokri has explained why Nigerian security agencies struggle to locate and neutralise bandits operating in the country’s forest regions, arguing that the real issue borders on geography and infrastructure gaps rather than incompetence.
Through a Facebook post on Friday, Omokri focused on the limitations of “triangulation” —the primary digital tracking technique used by law enforcement agencies worldwide.
The method, Omokri maintained, relies on cell phone towers, internet routers, and IP address data to pinpoint a person’s location.
Where necessary, security agencies can obtain a court warrant compelling mobile and internet providers to share a suspect’s location data.
“Triangulation and other means of narrowing down your location work almost like science in urban and even rural areas,” Omokri noted.
He explained that the technique becomes largely ineffective in environments such as deserts, thick forests, and open oceans, where little or no telecommunications infrastructure exists.
While highlighting Opara Forest in Oyo State as a case study, Omokri said that the forest, where cross-border bandits are suspected to operate, is roughly the size of Lagos State and nearly half the size of Anambra State.
He claimed that there are no cell towers or routers within it, making digital tracking nearly impossible. In his argument, Oyo State itself is approximately as large as Nigeria’s five South-eastern states combined and contains several such dense forests.
Omokri also addressed the recent abduction of schoolchildren in villages near Ogbomosho where, he maintained, telecommunications coverage is either severely limited or entirely absent. He revealed that this connectivity void was the very reason school authorities were delayed in alerting the Oyo State Government after the abduction occurred.
He further highlighted two complications. First, moving targets in vast, signal-dead terrain are exponentially harder to locate than stationary ones.
Secondly, he said, drones, often proposed as an alternative surveillance tool, face serious limitations in dense forest environments, where tree canopies obstruct ground-level visibility from the air.
Omokri flagged the tactical danger posed when bandits use hostages as “human shields”, meaning that even locating them does not straightforwardly translate into a safe rescue operation.
He went further to draw a comparison to his point, as he noted that hundreds of small towns across the United States also lack mobile network coverage, and that millions of Americans remain without internet access.
Omokri urged Nigerians to resist making unfair comparisons and instead support the security forces operating under considerable environmental constraints.
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