When will Nigeria be safe?

Nigeria is lethargically fighting an untelevised war, with human casualties far more than the televised war in Russia/Ukraine. A war that compels every sane mind to question the value of human life in Nigeria. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights puts verified death figures in Ukraine at 16,000 civilians, while Ukraine’s military and independent international media estimates roughly 43,000 to 140,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed. On March 22, 2026, Vanguard News referenced the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law’s report that no fewer than 190,150 Nigerians were killed by bandits, Boko Haram insurgents, suspected armed herdsmen, and unknown gunmen between July 2009 and March 19, 2026. Surpassing the total figure of casualties recorded in Ukraine.

Since 2009, Nigeria has battled insecurity with increasing failure to secure the state. We have faced the war with a reactionary model, with attacks occurring first, troops mobilised later, and a matching order from a top hierarchy for an investigation and resolute results. In most cases, there is neither a concluded and transparent outcome of investigation nor all the victims rescued, like the cases of the Chibok girls, the Oyo abducted children and thousands of individuals taken in smaller, localised kidnappings or mass raids that are unaccounted for. Presidents have fired service chiefs, allocated approximately N34.5 trillion from 2009 through 2026 to defence and security architecture, and left thousands of Nigerians kidnapped, killed and dehumanised. All manner of solutions have been proffered and promised, and assurances made on securing Nigeria. Notwithstanding and without undermining their efforts, Nigeria’s security system has failed to achieve the single most important reason for the existence of Nigeria – ensuring the security and welfare of Nigerian citizens.

As always, Nigerian policymakers have elected to go the easy route on the crisis: the establishment of state police without clear institutional insights on how the system will work efficiently within the Nigerian socio-political realities and context. While decentralising policing to the subnational governments is a fundamental constitutional and legal framework for long-term security in Nigeria, it cannot be an immediate response to the unrelenting and emboldened insurgency economy and criminal affront to safety in our country. This was the same route taken in the power sector. Notwithstanding the revolutionary provisions of the Electricity Act 2023, in decentralising the power sector, only two to three states are seriously taking advantage of the new legal frame that has shifted control from a rigid central monopoly to localised state electricity markets designed to improve power access and reliability. While we all welcome state police, the federating units cannot abandon their responsibility under Section 153 and the Third Schedule of the 1999 Constitution in providing general supervision over the Nigeria Police Force – which is a police force for the federation and not the federal government’s police force. The state police legal framework must explicitly enshrine accountability clauses to ensure that governors do not take advantage of state police institutions as units or extensions of their political parties or pet projects that can easily be deployed to dissenting voices.

While experts push and call for an endless declaration of a state of emergency on insecurity, the real solution starts with a security sector internal audit. From the grand strategic to the strategic levels of leadership in the security sector, the sector must enforce accountability in procurement, ensure resources reach the frontlines with purchased military hardware, and weed out corruption. This will ensure that defence and security funding translate directly into operational capability, reinforce readiness and equip officers in theatre operations with modern and functional tools rather than obsolete gear. More importantly, the security sector must purge itself of internal saboteurs through a counterintelligence approach and swift legal consequences for officers found guilty of compromising operational efforts against insurgency. There must be painful consequences for both compromised officers and convicted terrorists: we have to reintroduce public execution of convicted criminals like bandits, insurgents and kidnappers by firing squad as was the case with military regimes in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

If we must win this war in a sustainable way, Nigeria cannot afford to fight insecurity with obsolete equipment or technological tools or without institutional collaboration with the telecommunication sector. When the federal government in 2020 mandated the SIM-NIN linkage, it was meant to address insecurity by tracking down criminal elements involved in terrorism, kidnapping, banditry, illegal arms movement, cybercrime and financial fraud and other organised criminal networks. While the government was connecting and validating citizens’ NINs to match SIM information, some criminal elements were busy building their telecommunication logistical lifeline with almost more advanced communication devices like Starlink and other sophisticated technologies, equipment and tools. It took the operational efficiency of the troops of Sector 2, Operation HADIN KAI, to intercept and seize some such devices, amounting to 400 Starlink communication devices in the hands of one syndicate alone. Bandits across different states continue to show their combat readiness and their RPGs and anti-graft weapons, hosting live TikTok sessions and displaying cash on different social media handles without any trace. In a high-tech-enabled world, Nigeria’s security sector must have an effective approach to leverage tech to track, dislodge and neutralise these criminal elements in their different hideouts with precision and swiftly scale the progress being made by security institutions; advance on it; and ensure that every community in Nigeria has a presence of advanced tech surveillance, a modernised security presence and readiness of the state to protect the people, no matter how remote their location.

While no country is entirely free from insecurity, Nigeria needs a deadline for ending the current scale of insecurity. We cannot continue to lose innocent children, helpless mothers and fathers, and military generals and soldiers in theatres of operation. The police force, the military, and other security institutions must get angry at the scale of loss of life in the hands of non-state actors and act decisively with a furious urgency. As we push for an intensified and aggressive assault on all criminal elements, we must also commend officers of our security institutions, who bravely fight to secure our country against all odds.

God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Ekpa, Stanley Ekpa, a lawyer and leadership consultant, wrote via [email protected]