By Gloria Ikibah
The Insecurity Triad, an analytical model created by scholar and journalist Dr Max Amuchie, has received strong backing from respected African public relations academic Dr Omoniyi Ibietan, further cementing the framework’s growing relevance within scholarly debate.
Dr Amuchie, who leads Sundiata Post and writes the syndicated “Sunday Stew column”, recently explored the concept in the latest edition of the weekly publication carried by Premium Times. In a subsequent review, Dr Ibietan described the framework as a significant contribution to contemporary African political and security discourse. 
Ibietan, who serves as Secretary-General of the African Public Relations Association and lectures on the Rome Business School DBA Programme, situated ‘The Insecurity Triad’ alongside the works of leading thinkers in African political economy and post-colonial studies, signalling its emerging place within serious academic engagement.
“The first part of this took me back to Achille Mbembe, one of Africa’s leading representations of activistic scholarship,” Dr. Ibietan stated.
“Amuchie offered me a refreshing, lovely insight of the works of Mazrui, Ake, Bayart, (William) Reno — especially his treatise on the ‘Relocation of Authority’ — and of course Mbembe. It was a meta-analytical enterprise. So compelling was it that it shaped my theoretical framing for a new paper I just submitted on Crisis Communication in the Agatu Crisis. Needless to say, this is also beautiful.”
Ibietan, a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations, made his views known in a message sent to Ololade Bamidele, editorial page editor of Premium Times in response to the May 24 edition of Amuchie’s The Sunday Stew Column titled ‘The Insecurity Triad: Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Chinweizu — Nigeria’s Elite Class of Framework Builders’.
“Thank you Ololade Bamidele. Please tell Dr. Amuchie to keep it coming. The first part of this took me back to Mbembe (one of Africa’s leading representation of activistic scholarship). Amuchie offered me a refreshing, lovely insight of the works of Mazrui, Ake, Bayart, Reno (not Omokri, please but William Reno, especially his treatise on the ‘Relocation of Authority’) and of course Mbembe. It was a meta-analytical enterprise. So, compelling was it that it shaped my theoretical framing for a new paper I just submitted on Crisis Communication in the Agatu Crisis. Needless to say this is also beautiful,” Ibietan wrote in the message to Bamidele.
A Paradigm Shift in African Security Analysis
Amuchie’s The Insecurity Triad framework moves away from recycled, surface-level security paradigms, offering a structured, indigenous lens to examine African conflicts through three converging pillars: Money, Land, and Mind. By mapping the interplay between illicit capital flows (Money), territorial sovereignty disputes (Land), and weaponised radicalisation or identity manipulation (Mind), the framework makes highly chaotic ecosystems of violence legible to researchers and policy-makers alike in Nigeria and the Sahel region.
The Insecurity Triad is now disseminated across six global academic repositories — the US-based Social Science Research Network (SSRN); Harvard Dataverse, owned by Harvard University; Zenodo, operated by the European Council for Nuclear Science; SocArXiv, managed by the Open Science Framework, based the University of Maryland in the United States; ResearchGate, the global networking platform for scholars based in Germany and Academia.edu. On April 26 The Insecurity Triad formally received the endorsement of the Rotary Action Group for Peace, Nigeria chapter after Amuchie’s keynote speech as guest of honour at the Group’s bi-weekly fellowship.
Amuchie has also developed a companion model, the Trinity of State Decay, which theorises the structural condition produced when the Insecurity Triad operates unchecked — a decoupling of authority into the Institutional Mirage and rival Shadow Orders.
