Once again, a familiar demand dominates Nigeria’s public conversation: “We need more boots on the ground.” For communities living under the shadow of banditry, kidnapping, and terrorism, the promise of more uniforms in the field can feel like an answer in itself.
In that spirit, the President has declared a state of emergency on insecurity and announced plans to recruit 20,000 additional police officers and 20,000–25,000 new soldiers. These steps recognise what Nigerians already know: our security forces are overstretched, and people are tired of living with violence as a daily possibility.
“Yet a more complicated truth remains: Nigeria has not exactly lacked boots on the ground. Soldiers have long been stationed in villages, patrols on highways, and checkpoints in cities, yet insecurity has continued to spread and mutate.”
Yet a more complicated truth remains: Nigeria has not exactly lacked boots on the ground. Soldiers have long been stationed in villages, patrols on highways, and checkpoints in cities, yet insecurity has continued to spread and mutate. If we are serious about change, we must look beyond numbers and confront the deeper governance, economic, and social failures that allow violence to thrive.
For many citizens, especially in rural areas, the state is not a clinic, a functional school, or a responsive police station. On paper, we operate a three-tier system, but many local governments have been hollowed out by political capture and financial strangulation. In the resulting vacuum, non-state actors move in—bandit leaders, militias, criminal gangs, extremist preachers—providing crude order by settling disputes, collecting “taxes” and enforcing violent, predatory rules.
Alongside weak governance is a distorted local economy. Farming, once the backbone of rural life, has become dangerous and unprofitable; farmers are attacked on their fields, displaced from their homes, or cut off from markets. In this collapse, an underground economy has flourished. So-called artisanal mining often masks illegal operations that loot resources, destroy the environment and fund arms and criminal networks, turning insecurity into a business model in which guns are investments and chaos is profitable.
Social cohesion is fraying at the same time. Long-standing disputes over land, political representation, and historical grievances in different parts of the country have hardened into ethnic and religious fault lines. Political entrepreneurs amplify fear and suspicion, turning neighbours into enemies. The drug crisis then pours petrol on this fire. With millions of idle young people and easy access to narcotics and small arms, recruitment into violent groups becomes disturbingly easy.
All of this unfolds in an atmosphere of impunity and failing services. Large-scale corruption, diversion of security funds and the absence of consequences for powerful offenders have hollowed out public trust. A child who grows up without any visible sign that the state cares receives a clear message about their worth, and by the time security agents appear—often in an intimidating posture—the social contract is already broken.
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It is against this background that we must weigh the President’s emergency measures and recruitment drive. Strengthening the police is, in principle, the right direction. For too long, Nigeria has relied on the military as a catch-all tool, from election security to basic law-and-order tasks. A more capable police force should allow the army to refocus on its core defence mandate and help roll back the militarisation of civic life.
But the key question is not how many officers we hire, but which institutions they join. Without reform, we expand a system already struggling with weak training, oversight, corruption and low morale. Recruitment must prize character and competence, supported by training in intelligence, community engagement and human rights. Decent welfare and equipment are essential, and modern, networked threats demand integrated intelligence, cooperation and, above all, trust between security forces and communities.
Nigeria does not lack ideas for tackling these issues. Policy frameworks already exist that link security operations with livelihoods, justice, and social cohesion. Our real challenge is political will—the courage to confront interests that profit from illegal mining, smuggling, diversion of public funds, and the manipulation of communal tensions. It also requires transparency in security spending, firm accountability for abuses, and clear consequences for officials who collude with criminal networks.
Ultimately, we must choose between managing insecurity and transforming the conditions that produce it. Managing insecurity focuses on deployments, emergency declarations, and show-of-force operations. Transformation is slower but more enduring. It means strengthening local governments so they serve citizens, reclaiming the rural economy from violent actors, treating drugs as both a security and public-health crisis, and deliberately repairing fractured intercommunal relations through justice and fair access to resources.
More boots on the ground may quieten violence for a while, but the peace Nigerians long for will only come when the ground itself changes—when villages are as familiar with teachers, nurses and honest local officials as they are with armed patrols; when young people see more opportunity in farms, schools and legitimate enterprises than in gangs. Only then will security uniforms symbolise a state that values and protects its citizens.
Dakuku Peterside is the author of 2 bestselling books, Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface.
