*Photo: President Bola Tinubu*
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Statehouse Statement, declaring a security emergency and ordering immediate implementation of personnel recruitment, is a classic example of policy paralysis masked by presidential fiat. While the acknowledgment of a “national emergency” is a necessary step towards honesty about the nation’s existential threat, the proposed strategy, deploying more boots and shuffling existing ones, is tragically symptomatic, ignoring the structural, constitutional, and economic collapse that fuel asymmetric warfare across the nation.
The statement, dated November 26, 2025, offers reactive, temporary fixes to a systemic rot. The real solution, a strategic and the permanent, indigenous one that the current threat matrix demands, requires a paradigm shift away from the failed 20th-century model of centralised security toward the democratisation of force. We are at a crossroads, and this statement unfortunately suggests the government prefers to stay on the road to nowhere but insanity. Albert Einstein was reputed to have defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. So, I say that we cannot keep doing the same thing over the years and expect different results, there must be a pivot to a new and different pathway to win this war in our nation, unless someone is benefiting from this chaos.
The Illusion of Centralised Monopoly
The foundation of any modern state is its exclusive monopoly on violence. The blunt, uncomfortable truth is that in vast swathes of Borno, Niger, Zamfara, Kaduna, and even the “soft targets” mentioned, Kebbi and Kwara, the Nigerian state’s monopoly, exercised through the Nigerian Police Force (NPF) and the Military, has collapsed under the weight of asymmetric warfare. What we now have is a security market, dominated by bandits, terrorists, and ethnic militias, forcing citizens to pay protection money or ransom to survive.
The President’s order to recruit an additional 20,000 police officers, bringing the total recruitment to 50,000, is statistically insignificant and frankly, insulting to the scale of the crisis. Let’s look at the data:
Population: Nigeria’s population is pushing towards 237 million people in 2025 (according to United Nations and Worldometer projections).
Police Strength: The NPF’s official strength is typically cited around 370,000 personnel.
The Math of Inadequacy: Even adding the proposed 50,000 new recruits, the total strength stands at approximately 420,000. This yields a police-to-citizen ratio of approximately 1 officer for every 564 Nigerians. The United Nations recommends a minimum ratio of 1:450. Furthermore, the statement itself acknowledges the problem of VIP guard duties, which, according to various reports, can siphon off an estimated 100,000 or more officers, leaving the actual, boots-on-the-ground, public safety ratio far worse, closer to 1:700 or 1:800.
To imagine that shuffling VIP guards and graduating a few more recruits from crash courses in NYSC camps, which are neither structurally sound nor legally designed for intensive police training, will defeat well-armed, highly motivated bandit groups operating with sophisticated intelligence across thousands of square kilometers of ungoverned forest is sheer delusion. It’s a solution designed for headlines, not for securing lives and property.
Accountability and the Cost of Silent Release
The President’s statement commended security agencies for securing the release of the 24 schoolgirls in Kebbi and the 38 worshippers in Kwara State. This commendation, while meant to be encouraging, is fundamentally incomplete and serves to maintain the dangerous culture of security opacity that sustains the kidnapping-for-ransom economy.
The critical question the Nigerian people, and indeed the families of those rescued, are asking, and which the President failed to answer, is: What exactly did the government do? Who negotiated? And at what cost?
The search results confirm that the Christ Apostolic Church worshippers in Kwara had a ransom demand of a chilling ₦100 million per victim placed on them by the bandits. The release of both the Kwara and Kebbi victims occurred without any official disclosure of ransom payments or negotiation details. When the government celebrates releases without detailing the process, it creates a deadly, dual reality:
For Terrorists: It confirms that kidnapping is a profitable, low-risk business model, incentivizing immediate and copycat attacks.
For the Public: It breeds deep cynicism, reinforcing the belief that the state is either complicit in the transactions or is funding terror through back-channel deals, all while maintaining a false public posture of refusing to pay ransom.
True leadership demands transparency, especially when dealing with asymmetric warfare. The government needs to come clean on whether ransom was paid, by whom (government agency or a private negotiator), and how it intends to track and starve the terrorists of the funds derived from these crimes. Without this, every congratulatory message is just a tacit admission that the state is funding the criminal enterprises it claims to fight.
The Political Retreat on State Police
The President’s handling of the long-overdue State and Local Government (LG) Police issue is an exercise in political evasion. He stated: “I call on the National Assembly to begin reviewing our laws to allow states that require state police to establish them.”
This is passing the buck to the legislative arm. The Nigerian Presidency, as the head of the executive branch and the driver of national policy, does not merely “call on” the National Assembly for reviews; it initiates comprehensive, well-researched executive bills that shape the national agenda.
The argument for State Police has been won in the court of public opinion and reality. The problem is no longer conceptual; it is constitutional and fiscal.
Constitutional Amendment: The constitutional provisions giving the NPF the “exclusive jurisdiction throughout the country” must be dismantled.
Executive Bill Mandate: The President should present a draft bill detailing the operational structure, recruitment standards, training curricula (to prevent abuse and regional bias), funding mechanisms (e.g., specific percentage allocation from the Federation Account), and a robust civilian oversight framework for State and LG Police.
A mere “call for review” ensures that the issue remains stuck in the usual political gridlock, allowing vested interests, particularly those benefiting from the centralised security architecture, to kill the initiative quietly. The nation needs bold leadership to dismantle the current structure, not rhetorical appeals to the legislature.
The Indigenous Solution:
Democratising Armed Security
If the centralised, federally controlled security apparatus has irrevocably collapsed, then the indigenous, permanent solution must be a democratisation of security. This is not a call for anarchy, but for the structured, legal transfer of capacity to the local, private, and community level, rigorously overseen by the state.
This is why the President’s statement missed the opportunity to champion the creation of a Third Pillar of Security, a regulated, armed private security industry.
Nigeria desperately needs the National Assembly to pass a “Private Security Industry Reform Act” that would establish a regulatory body modelled after South Africa’s Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (PSIRA).
The PSIRA Model for Nigeria:
South Africa’s private security industry is arguably the largest in the world, often exceeding the size of its public police force. PSIRA is the regulator that ensures this capacity is professional and accountable. A Nigerian equivalent would provide the following:
Professional Regulation: The Act would establish an agency with teeth, responsible for licensing, mandatory, standardized training (digitalized and verifiable, as PSIRA does), and enforcement of minimum occupational standards across the industry.
Accountability and Vetting: The regulator would continuously vet all private security service providers, ensuring they operate within the public and national interest.
Firearm Control: Critically, it would establish a transparent, dedicated Firearm Enforcement Unit to regulate the use, possession, and issuing of firearms to licensed private security companies, ensuring weapons are used responsibly and tracked effectively. This allows for the necessary firepower to protect against bandits without placing control solely in the hands of an overwhelmed federal structure.
Force Multiplier: A professional, armed private sector could immediately serve as a force multiplier, protecting vulnerable soft targets, schools, churches, mosques, farms, and corporate infrastructure, thereby freeing the scarce military and police resources for tactical offensive operations against entrenched terror groups.
This democratisation of security acknowledges the reality that communities are already seeking, and paying for, protection. The goal is to bring this existing market out of the shadows, arm it legally, train it professionally, and hold it accountable to the state, turning a source of insecurity into a structured defense line.
The Bureaucratic Band-Aid for Herder-Farmer Clashes
The President’s call to herder associations to embrace ranching and the mention of the Livestock Ministry, an institutional solution, is too slow, too weak, and too bureaucratic to address a conflict that is inherently economic, environmental, and now, armed.
The herder-farmer conflict is a civil war of ecology and economics, exacerbated by decades of governmental neglect of livestock infrastructure. Calling on associations to “take advantage” of a ministry and “end open grazing” is an administrative suggestion to a problem requiring massive, immediate capital investment and political will.
Ranching is indeed the path forward, but the policy needs teeth: a fixed national deadline, billions of naira in dedicated federal and state matching funds for infrastructure, and a robust framework for land acquisition that respects constitutional property rights. Without these components, the plea for ranches remains an empty political gesture while communal blood continues to flow.
The Uncomfortable Truth of Self-Rescue
Fellow Nigerians, the blunt truth must be faced: there is no saviour coming to save Nigeria. The President’s emergency declaration and orders for recruitment, while well-intentioned, rely on the same outdated, over-centralised system that failed us yesterday.
The external motivations of great powers must also be viewed through this lens. When the US President threatens military action over the “mass slaughter” of Nigerian Christians, one must strip away the altruistic rhetoric. The American motive, like all foreign policy, is primarily economic and strategic: stabilizing a key African market, securing energy routes, and preventing the kind of regional chaos that breeds global terror threats. It is not driven by love for Nigerian Christians or anyone else. Our sovereignty demands we understand this.
Our salvation lies within an indigenous, radical re-imagining of the security architecture. We must stop reinforcing a collapsed system and instead build a new one, a devolved, multi-layered system that empowers local governments and harnesses the professional capacity of a regulated, armed private sector, holding all forces, public and private, to fierce account. Until we embrace this kind of hard, structural change, every new security pronouncement will remain a drop in an ocean of national emergency.
*Prof. Sarumi, a leadership expert and digital transformation architect, writes from Lagos. Email: oyewolethecoach@gmail.com