“We need more boots on the ground” is a well-worn expression that recently started to recur in Nigerian public discourse. It’s a decisive, almost reassuring remark. It implies motion, determination, and outward action. The idea of more uniforms in the field may seem like a solution in and of itself in a nation where far too many communities live in constant terror.
The President has given that feeling tangible form during the last two weeks by announcing intentions to recruit 20,000 more police officers and 20,000–25,000 new army members, as well as proclaiming a state of emergency due to insecurity. These actions are important. They recognize the obvious: Nigerians are fed up with having to deal with kidnapping, banditry, terrorism, and intercommunal conflicts on a daily basis, and our security system is overburdened.
Yet underneath the relief lies a more painful truth: Nigeria has deployed soldiers to villages, patrols to roads, and checkpoints to city streets, yet instability continues. To end this cycle, we must go beyond boots on the ground and promote holistic, institution-building reforms that address the core causes of instability.
In many regions of the country, particularly rural Nigeria, the state is a distant abstraction. On paper, we have a three-tiered structure of governance where local governments are closest to the people. In actuality, too many local councils are hollowed out—politically seized, fiscally crippled, or just missing. The governing structure exists in law but not in everyday reality. For numerous Nigerians, the state is not experienced as a working clinic, a responsive police station, or a magistrate’s court. It is experienced as a convoy speeding past, a politician’s billboard, a seasonal promise.
That gap in governance has been filled by alternative authorities. Extremist preachers, criminal groups, warlords, and bandit leaders enter areas that the state has abandoned. They resolve conflicts, collect taxes, administer harsh “justice,” and establish a kind of order that is both violent and exploitative. Insecurity ceases to be an anomaly and becomes the norm when residents come into contact with these non-state entities more frequently than they do with efficient government.
Many communities’ economic underpinnings have also been subtly destroyed. In far too many places, farming, which used to be the backbone of local life, has become risky and unfeasible. Farmers are attacked on their crops, driven from their homes, or priced out of markets they cannot safely reach. A darker economy has surfaced in the wreckage of this previous one. Artisanal mining, in name, sometimes hides sophisticated criminal enterprises that harm the environment while fueling arms purchases. In many areas, it is difficult to distinguish between political patronage and criminal activity. People believe that influential individuals are protecting the networks that profit from turmoil when they witness illicit mining sites functioning with impunity.
In such a setting, insecurity is a business strategy rather than merely the lack of order. Guns are investments. Leverage is violence. Abductions are revenue sources. This underground economy follows a straightforward logic: the weaker the state, the more formidable its shadow rivals.
These structural problems are accompanied by a decline in social cohesiveness that has made identity a weapon. Long-standing concerns over land, political representation, and historical injustice have solidified into interfaith and intercommunal animosities in Southern Kaduna, Benue, Plateau, and other flashpoints. Communities come to dread one another as existential threats rather than as neighbors with common interests. In order to create personal relevance, political entrepreneurs exacerbate these fears by framing conflicts along racial or religious lines. Once that logic takes root, a single incident might unleash years of accumulated bitterness.
This requirement is frequently failed by law enforcement, which ought to act as a buffer between grievances and violence. Community-rooted, accountable policing remains more rhetoric than reality. Too many people view the police as “checkpoint police,” or cops connected to extortion, humiliation, and arbitrary stops, rather than as defenders of their rights. This is a dramatic slide from a period when the Nigerian police garnered global reputation for their expertise in peacekeeping missions across the world.
These issues have been made worse by the drug crisis. When the NDLEA Chairman referred to drugs as the “number one problem fuelling conflict in Nigeria,” he did not engage in hyperbole. Narcotics numb conscience and enhance anger; they also fund crime. Violent networks can easily recruit young individuals who are unemployed, have no prospects, and have easy access to narcotics. The same porous borders that allow light weapons to flow into the country facilitate the passage of heavy drugs, counterfeit medications, and trafficked humans.
All of this occurs in a greater climate of impunity. Public trust has been undermined by widespread corruption and political players’ persistent lack of accountability. Restoring trust in institutions is vital, as communities need to believe in the state’s role as a protector, not an instrument of elite resource capture. Without faith, attempts to safeguard the nation will stay hollow.
This disappointment is exacerbated by the lack of essential social services including clean water, healthcare, education, and working roads. Growing up in a village without a school, a clinic, or any other obvious sign of government assistance sends a strong message about their worth. An armed patrol or a tax demand can be the child’s first serious interaction with the government. The social contract is destroyed long before the first gunshot is fired.
It is against this backdrop that the President’s recent actions must be judged. Declaring a state of emergency on insecurity and preparing the recruitment of tens of thousands of police officers and soldiers is, at one level, a necessary response. For too long, Nigeria has used its military as an all-purpose tool, pushing soldiers into responsibilities that properly belong to the police—from basic law-and-order administration to election security. In theory, bolstering the police may free up the army to concentrate on its primary defense duties and lessen the militarization of civilian areas.
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However, the question goes beyond just whether we require additional staff. It is the kind of institution we are asking these recruits to join. What principles will mold them? What incentives will govern them? What mechanisms will direct and limit their authority? To turn numbers into true security instead of merely increasing dysfunction, political will and bravery are crucial.
Therefore, hiring should focus on skill and character rather than just meeting quotas. Intelligence gathering, community participation, human rights, conflict de-escalation, and technology use must all be included in training, going beyond simple drills. The equipment needs to be up to date, dependable, and appropriate for the dangers and terrain. Welfare must be respectable enough to protect officers from the daily temptations of corruption. A police officer who cannot feed their family or a soldier who feels abandoned on the frontlines is not merely demoralised; they are a risk to themselves, to their colleagues, and to the citizens they are expected to protect.
For the military, the challenge goes beyond adding “boots on the ground.” Security risks in the twenty-first century are dynamic, networked, and adaptable. The sheer number of workers cannot overwhelm them. They necessitate strategic planning, interagency collaboration, real-time information, and creative use of technology, including data analysis, drones, surveillance systems, and secure communications. They also demand something less tangible but equally critical: trust.
Communities won’t exchange information if there is no trust. Even the most capable force is working in the dark without information. Ensuring that security operations are disciplined, proportionate, and accountable is essential to fostering that trust. It entails penalizing abuses instead of rationalizing them away. It entails realizing that every unfair murder, arbitrary detention, and dehumanizing interaction at a checkpoint is not a small occurrence but rather a calculated setback that drives communities farther away from the state.
To his credit, the President has emphasized that insecurity is now at the core of the national agenda. That political signal is important. However, substance must be equal to symbolism. Addressing the causes of insecurity—governance deficiencies, distorted political economics, social fragmentation, and the disregard for human development—is the true task.
Our lack of ideas is not the tragedy. We do not. I am aware, for example, that the UNDP, working with Nigerian consultants, built a comprehensive framework for peace and development in the Northwest at the request of regional governors. That approach recognises what communities have long understood: that you cannot bomb your way to enduring peace in areas where people are poor, marginalized, and furious. Programs that provide access to justice, restore livelihoods, fund healthcare and education, and consciously repair strained social ties must be integrated with security activities.
But frameworks, no matter how well-crafted, are powerless without bravery and political determination. Implementation demands leaders prepared to tackle established interests that profit from illegal mining, smuggling, diversion of security funding, and the manipulation of local tensions. It calls for strong control of law enforcement, openness in security spending, and a demand that individuals who conspire with criminal enterprises—whether in uniform or in positions of authority—face serious repercussions.
In the end, Nigeria faces a crucial question: do we seek to control insecurity or change the circumstances that lead to it? Managing insecurity can be done by announcements, deployments, and occasional shows of power. Transformation is much more difficult, slower, and less dramatic. It entails improving local administrations, so they become true hubs of service, not simple conduits for patronage. It entails taking back the rural economy from criminal activity and violence so that farming and lawful trade can once again be sustainable sources of income. It involves treating drugs not merely as a law-enforcement issue but as a public-health and social disaster needing prevention, rehabilitation, and youth engagement. It entails mending the damaged fabric of intercommunal relations by communication, justice, and equitable resource distribution.
More boots on the ground may quieten violence in the short run. However, the calm that Nigerians yearn for won’t materialize until the town, which previously only experienced terror, starts to see teachers, nurses, judges, and trustworthy local officials as frequently as it considers armed patrols. When a young man who may have joined a gang discovers that a school, farm, workshop, or legal mine offers a brighter future. when people feel that their lives are important to the state, not out of faith but rather from personal experience.
Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface are two of Dakuku Peterside’s best-selling novels.
