The Blueprint: A New Social Contract for Security

"We have tried everything else—more soldiers, more checkpoints, more weapons. Everything except the one thing that actually works: trusting the people we're meant to protect with their own protection."

Retired Deputy Inspector-General of Police Hakeem Odumosu said this to me in a Maiduguri tea shop in March 2024, stirring his cup with the steady hands of a man who had spent thirty-two years inside the very system he was now condemning. Outside, a military checkpoint blocked the Bama Road. A soldier no older than twenty waved vehicles through with the bored indifference of someone who had stopped believing his presence mattered. The DIG was not being poetic. He was being practical. "You cannot police a village from Abuja," he said. "You cannot know who belongs and who does not when you are transferred every eighteen months and you do not speak the language. The constable from Anambra posted to Zamfara is a foreign soldier. The people know it. The bandits know it. Only the government pretends otherwise."

Nigeria does not have a security problem. It has a protection problem. Every armed group—from Boko Haram to pipeline vandals to ethnic militias—is speaking the same sentence to the same deaf state, in the only language the state has taught them to use: force. The state has responded with more force. The result is a country where security spending consumes the largest single slice of the federal budget, yet citizens feel less safe than at any point since the Civil War.

The Tyranny of Distance

The 1999 Constitution, Section 214, establishes the Nigeria Police Force as a federal institution. It reads like a monopoly charter: "There shall be a police force for Nigeria, which shall be styled the Nigeria Police Force." State governors cannot establish police forces. Local governments cannot hire constables. Every uniformed officer in every village, from Bakassi to Bichi, serves at the pleasure of the Inspector-General in Abuja and, by extension, the President.

This was not an accident of drafting. It was a deliberate choice by military rulers transitioning to civilian rule, designed to keep coercive power concentrated at the centre. What made sense to generals in 1999 has become a death sentence for communities in 2025.

Consider the arithmetic. The Nigeria Police Force has approximately 371,000 officers, a figure last confirmed by the Inspector-General in 2018. No updated police strength data has been published since 2021—itself a measure of institutional opacity. Those officers, if every single one were deployed to street duty, would amount to roughly one officer per 600 citizens. In practice, a significant portion performs VIP protection for politicians, guard duty at government installations, and administrative tasks in Abuja. The officer who might respond to a distress call in Riyom LGA, Plateau State, is likely sitting in an air-conditioned office in the FCT, protecting a senator's convoy.

The training system compounds the distance. The Nigeria Police Academy in Wudil, Kano State, and the police colleges in Ikeja and Kaduna graduate recruits who receive less practical training than a private security guard in Lekki. There is no systematic community policing curriculum. No courses in local languages. No training in de-escalation, in trauma-informed response, in distinguishing between a herder with a stick and a bandit with a rifle. When these recruits arrive at their postings—often in states they have never visited—they are given a uniform, a rifle they barely know how to clean, and orders to man a checkpoint. The result is predictable: extortion at roadblocks, accidental discharges at markets, and a deepening alienation between the uniform and the population.

The consequences of this distance are measurable and brutal. The CLEEN Foundation's National Crime and Safety Survey, published in 2023, found that only 27% of Nigerians trust the police to protect them. A staggering 68% believe security forces are complicit in the violence they are meant to prevent. These are not abstract figures. They represent millions of Nigerians who have learned, through direct experience, that a police uniform is more likely to signal danger than safety.

I have seen this myself. In January 2023, I spent three days at the police division in Barkin Ladi, Plateau State. The station had three patrol vehicles. Two had no fuel. The third had a flat tyre that had been flat for eleven days because the divisional officer's request for maintenance funds was "still being processed" in Jos. When the Christmas Eve attacks came later that year—coordinated assaults across twenty communities that killed between 160 and 200 people, according to reports by Premium Times, HumAngle, and Reuters—the officers could not leave their station. They were not cowards. They were stranded.

In Borno State, the situation is different in degree but not in kind. In March 2025, ISWAP overran Marte town, the site of the state's largest military base. The insurgents had been gathering intelligence for weeks, moving through villages where they were known by name, while the soldiers in the super camp—consolidated into a single fortress—could not see past their own perimeter walls. Governor Babagana Zulum said publicly what civilians had whispered for months: the authorities were losing ground. The military had the weapons. The insurgents had the proximity. Proximity won.

This is the tyranny of distance. A police force designed in Abuja cannot protect a woman in Barkin Ladi. A constable transferred from Anambra to Zamfara cannot distinguish between a herder and a bandit. An institution built to control populations rather than serve communities will always fail at the community level. The more centralized the security architecture, the more fragile it becomes at the edges. And Nigeria is all edges.

The State Does What the Constitution Forbids

But here is the paradox. While the constitution prohibits state police, every region of Nigeria has already created one.

In the Southwest, Operation Amotekun launched in January 2020 after the governors of Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, and Ekiti signed a mutual security pact. The Yoruba word means "one who knows a leopard"—a creature that sees what others miss. Amotekun operatives wear distinctive khaki uniforms and operate checkpoints across the region. In Oyo State, they have arrested suspected kidnappers in Ibarapa. In Ondo, they have clashed with herder militias in the forests of the Akoko area. They are funded by state budgets—Oyo State allocated N1.2 billion to Amotekun in its 2024 budget—trained by retired military officers, and answer to state governors. They are, in every functional sense, a police force.

In the Southeast, Ebube Agu was launched in April 2021 by the governors of the five Igbo-speaking states. The name means "the tiger's roar." Unlike Amotekun, Ebube Agu has been more controversial from the start. Human Rights Watch and local civil society organizations have documented cases of extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, and harassment of civilians. In Anambra State, the vigilante group has been credited with reducing kidnapping in some LGAs, though independent verification of these claims remains contested. What is not contested is that Ebube Agu operates with state sanction, state funding, and state direction. It is state policing by another name, and like all policing without constitutional grounding, it operates in a legal grey zone where accountability is optional.

In Anambra, I spoke with a trader in Onitsha in January 2025 who described Ebube Agu operatives raiding her street at dawn, searching for "unknown gunmen" suspected of attacking a police station in a neighbouring LGA. They broke doors, seized phones, and detained three young men who were released three days later without charge. "They are better than the army, because they speak Igbo," she said. "But they are worse, because they know who has money and who does not. The army steals openly at checkpoints. Ebube Agu steals quietly from your house." This is the texture of de facto state policing: closer in language, closer in geography, but not necessarily closer in accountability.

The North has its own variants, less formalized but no less real. In Katsina, the state government established the Katsina Community Watch Corps in 2020. In Zamfara, the state-backed Yan Sakai vigilante groups—drawn largely from Hausa farming communities—patrol rural areas and have engaged in lethal clashes with Fulani herder militias. In Borno, the Civilian Joint Task Force has become the most famous and most scrutinized of them all.

These formations are not exceptions. They are the rule. Nigeria already has de facto state policing in every geopolitical zone. What it lacks is the constitutional framework to regulate it, professionalize it, fund it transparently, and hold it accountable. The gap between constitutional fiction and operational reality is where abuse thrives. When a state governor creates an armed force without legislative authorization, without independent oversight, and without judicial review, the result is not law enforcement. It is private armies with public money.

The Borno Warning

The CJTF was formed in 2013 in Maiduguri, Borno State, when young men in the city's neighbourhoods decided they had waited long enough for the military to protect them. They knew the terrain. They knew the families. They could spot a stranger in a community where everyone had lived together for generations. The military, initially suspicious, soon realized these volunteers provided intelligence that no satellite could capture. The CJTF became the eyes and ears of the counter-insurgency, guiding soldiers through dense neighbourhoods, identifying insurgent hideouts, and manning checkpoints that the police had abandoned.

For a time, it worked. Boko Haram was pushed back from Maiduguri's outskirts. Communities reclaimed their farmland. The CJTF grew from a few hundred volunteers to an estimated 26,000 members across the state. The Borno State government began paying stipends—initially N15,000 monthly, later increased. International donors provided training and equipment. The model was hailed in Abuja policy circles and international conferences as proof that community policing could succeed in even the most extreme conditions.

But power without accountability corrupts, and the CJTF had little accountability.

By 2024, the warnings could no longer be ignored. Human Rights Watch, in a report published in January 2024, documented CJTF members implicated in extrajudicial killings, extortion at checkpoints, and the recruitment of former insurgents into their own ranks. In Maiduguri's Gomari neighbourhood, residents told me in February 2024 that CJTF members had begun demanding "protection fees" from market traders, threatening to label them Boko Haram sympathizers if they refused to pay. In Bama, former Boko Haram members were reportedly recruited into the CJTF as part of "deradicalization" programmes, only to use their new positions to settle old scores against rival families and ethnic groups.

The degeneration was not sudden. It followed a familiar trajectory. In 2015, CJTF members were volunteers risking their lives for nothing but community gratitude. By 2018, they were receiving stipends. By 2021, they were competing for leadership positions that controlled access to donor funds and government contracts. By 2024, some units had evolved into protection rackets with guns. The same young men who once pointed out insurgent hideouts to the military were now pointing out market traders who could not pay their "taxes." The Borno State government knew. The military knew. But the CJTF was still useful, still providing intelligence that no one else could, and so the abuses were documented, denounced, and tolerated.

The Borno State government, facing mounting pressure, announced a "revalidation" exercise in 2024 to screen CJTF members. The exercise was slow and incomplete. By the time I visited in March 2024, the screening had reached only a fraction of the total membership. The ones who had already been vetted wore new ID cards and blue uniforms. The ones who had not continued to man checkpoints with their old khaki and their old habits, collecting fifty naira from commercial drivers and glaring at young men who looked at them wrong.

This is the caution that runs through every serious conversation about community policing in Nigeria. Decentralization without professionalism does not create security. It creates fiefdoms. It replaces one predator with many smaller ones. The CJTF saved Maiduguri from Boko Haram, and no honest account can deny that. But what it became by 2024 is a warning written in blood: community security without institutional accountability becomes community predation.

The Money That Kills

To understand why the blueprint stalls, follow the money.

Every Nigerian state government receives a "security vote"—an allocation for security expenses that is not subject to normal auditing or public disclosure. The amounts are enormous. In 2023, Lagos State budgeted over N20 billion for security votes. Rivers State allocated N30 billion. These figures are public. What they purchase is not. Security votes are spent without legislative oversight, without procurement rules, and without published accounts. They are, in the assessment of many governance researchers, slush funds dressed in khaki.

The security vote system creates a perverse incentive structure. A governor who solves his state's security problems no longer needs a security vote. A governor who maintains a permanent emergency can justify ever-larger allocations while directing contracts to political allies. The private security firms that supply vehicles, communications equipment, and armed guards to government officials are often owned by politicians or their relatives. Insecurity is not just a problem to be solved. For some, it is a revenue stream.

This is why the state police debate frightens the political class. State policing would require transparent budgeting. Salaries would have to be paid through official channels. Recruitment would have to follow civil service rules. The Inspector-General in Abuja would lose his monopoly on patronage. And governors, for all their public complaints about federal failure, would have to explain why their own forces were any better.

The fear is not irrational. Consider Oyo State's Amotekun. In 2024, the command structure was still unclear. Who investigates when an Amotekun operative shoots an unarmed civilian? The police? The military? The state human rights commission? In practice, the answer has been: no one. In January 2024, an Amotekun patrol in the Ibarapa area shot dead a Fulani herder during a raid on a settlement. The herder's family filed a complaint with the police. The police referred it to the state government. The state government formed a committee. No updated report on the committee's findings has been published since March 2024—itself a measure of institutional opacity. This is the accountability gap that RULAAC warns about. Decentralization without a clear chain of legal responsibility is not reform. It is delegation of impunity.

At the federal level, the Nigeria Police Force budget has grown steadily while its performance has declined. In 2023, the police received over N600 billion in appropriations, yet officers in rural stations still buy their own stationery and sleep in barracks with collapsed roofs. The money does not reach the streets because the streets are not where the money is allocated. It is absorbed by headquarters, by administrative overheads, by contracts for equipment that sits in warehouses, and by the phantom names on payrolls that anti-corruption investigators have been trying to purge for a decade.

Any blueprint for security reform must address this financial architecture. A state police force without transparent budgeting becomes Amotekun with a bigger cheque. A community protection team without independent oversight becomes the CJTF with new uniforms. The structure matters, but the money matters more.

The Constitutional Corridor

The 10th National Assembly, inaugurated in June 2023, revived the state police debate within months of taking office. Senator Benson Agadaga of Bayelsa State and others introduced bills to amend Section 214 of the constitution. The bills proposed concurrent legislative authority over police, allowing states to establish their own forces subject to minimum national standards for training, recruitment, and discipline.

The debate followed familiar lines. Southern governors, particularly from the Southwest and Southeast, argued that federal policing had failed their regions and that state control was essential. Some cited Amotekun's successes as proof that locally controlled forces could perform where the NPF had not. Others pointed to the EndSARS protests of October 2020, when federal police brutality against youth demonstrators in Lagos and other cities exposed the dangers of a force accountable only to distant power.

Northern governors were divided. Some, like those in Benue and Plateau, supported the idea in principle, having watched federal forces fail to prevent massacres in their states. Others opposed it outright, fearing that state police would become ethnic militias under official colour. The Governor of Kano State, at a Nigeria Governors' Forum meeting in February 2024, reportedly asked his colleagues a pointed question: if every state had its own police, what would stop a governor from using them to rig elections, harass opponents, and settle ethnic scores?

By early 2025, the bills had stalled in committee. The constitutional amendment process requires two-thirds of state houses of assembly to concur—a threshold that has defeated every previous attempt at structural reform. The 9th National Assembly (2019-2023) had considered similar bills and failed to pass them. The 10th Assembly seemed poised to repeat the pattern, not because the idea lacked merit, but because the political will to surrender central control over violence did not exist.

Yet the pressure for change is not going away. In February 2024, the Nigeria Governors' Forum debated state police again. The communiqué was non-committal, noting only that "further consultations were necessary." But the fact that it was on the agenda at all signalled a shift. When governors in a federal system begin to agree that the centre cannot protect their citizens, the constitutional dam is cracking. The question is whether it will break before the next flood.

The Dissenters

Not everyone who opposes the current system supports state police. Some reform advocates argue that decentralization is a distraction from the harder work of fixing the Nigeria Police Force itself.

The Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre—RULAAC—has been vocal in this critique. Its executive director, Okechukwu Nwanguma, argues that creating thirty-six state police forces without first professionalizing the existing force would simply multiply corruption by thirty-six. "You cannot pour dirty water into thirty-six cups and expect clean drinking," he told me in Lagos in November 2024. "The problem is not federalism. The problem is impunity. Until you address the culture of impunity—where an officer kills a civilian and is transferred instead of prosecuted, where a commander sells weapons to bandits and is promoted—decentralization will only create thirty-six smaller tyrannies."

RULAAC's argument has teeth. The Nigeria Police Force is underfunded, undertrained, and underpaid, but its fundamental ailment is political subordination. Officers owe their loyalty to the politicians who post them, not to the communities they serve. A constable who knows that his next transfer depends on the whim of a local government chairman or a senator's aide will not enforce the law impartially. Decentralizing this structure without insulating it from political interference would simply move the locus of interference from Abuja to state capitals. Instead of one Inspector-General serving the President, we would have thirty-six commissioners serving thirty-six governors.

There is another opposition, less heard in Abuja policy circles but potent in the North. Northern traditional rulers—the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa'ad Abubakar; the Emir of Kano, Aminu Ado Bayero; the Shehu of Borno, Abubakar Ibn Umar Garba El-Kanemi; and dozens of district heads across the region—have historically opposed state police. Their concerns are rooted in lived memory, not constitutional theory.

During the First Republic, the Native Authority police in Northern Nigeria were instruments of the ruling party, the Northern People's Congress, used to harass opposition members, suppress dissent, and enforce the will of regional premiers. The emirs remember this. They remember what happens when a state governor controls the guns and the judges and the prisons. In 1962, the Native Authority police in Tiv Division arrested and detained hundreds of opposition activists without trial. In 1964, they were deployed to break up rallies and intimidate voters. The tradition of using local armed forces as political instruments is not ancient history. It is living memory for men whose grandfathers wore those uniforms.

In November 2023, the Northern Traditional Rulers' Council issued a statement cautioning against "hasty decentralization of security without adequate safeguards." The statement was diplomatic, but the underlying message was clear: state police in the hands of ethnic majorities could become tools of persecution against minority communities. In Plateau, a state police force controlled by the dominant group could ignore attacks on Berom villages. In Kaduna, it could enforce segregation rather than prevent it. In Taraba, it could become an instrument in the ongoing contest between farming and herding communities.

These are not theoretical fears. In Ebonyi State, where Ebube Agu operates, there have been documented cases of vigilantes targeting political opponents. In Oyo, Amotekun has been accused of ethnic profiling, of treating all Fulani herders as suspects. The traditional rulers are asking a question that the constitutional amendment bills have not adequately answered: who guards the guardians when the guardians are hired by the governor?

What the Blueprint Would Change

So what would a genuine security reform look like? Not the consultant's diagram with three pillars and a five-year timeline. Not the activist's manifesto with thirty demands and no pathway. But the actual, brick-by-brick reconstruction of protection in Nigeria.

First, the constitution must be amended. Section 214 must be modified to allow concurrent legislative authority over police, enabling states to establish forces with clear mandates, standardized training, and transparent budgets. This is not radical. It is federalism. The United States, Germany, India, and Brazil all operate multi-layered policing systems. Nigeria's insistence on a single federal force is an anomaly among large federations, and it is an anomaly that has failed.

Second, the amendment must include non-negotiable safeguards. State police commissioners should be appointed on the recommendation of state police service commissions, not directly by governors. Tenure protections should prevent arbitrary removal. A National Police Council, with representation from the judiciary, civil society, and the legislature, should set minimum standards for recruitment, training, and discipline. Officers should be prohibited from engaging in political campaigns or serving as bodyguards to politicians—functions that currently consume a shameful percentage of the NPF's manpower.

Third, community protection teams must be formalized and regulated. The men and women who currently patrol their neighbourhoods under names like vigilante, neighbourhood watch, or civilian task force deserve legal status, training, and oversight. They also deserve the protection of the law. When a vigilante arrests a armed robber and hands him to the police, only to see the suspect released the next day because the officer was bribed, the vigilante learns that the law does not protect the protector. That lesson breeds contempt, and contempt breeds the very abuses that discredited the CJTF.

Fourth, security votes must end. Every naira spent on security at the state level should be appropriated by the legislature and audited by the accountant-general. No more opaque envelopes. No more "special services" that cannot be named. Security is too important to be financed in darkness.

Fifth, and most difficult, the political class must accept that protection requires giving up power. A governor who controls his own police force can no longer blame Abuja for every failure—but he can also no longer hide behind Abuja's failures. The Inspector-General must accept that his empire will shrink. The federal legislators who currently influence police postings in their constituencies must accept that their influence will diminish. This is why reform stalls. Not because the blueprint is unclear, but because the blueprint requires those who hold the pens to sign away some of their own authority.

Sixth, the federal police must be reformed even as it is decentralized. The NPF cannot simply be abandoned to rot while states build new forces. Its specialized units—the anti-terrorism squad, the cybercrime division, the forensic laboratory in Lagos—must be strengthened, not starved. A state police force in Zamfara cannot analyze a bomb fragment. A community protection team in the Niger Delta cannot trace a ransomware attack on a bank. Federal capacity must be preserved and focused on precisely these trans-state threats, while state and community forces handle the local violence that makes up the bulk of Nigerian insecurity.

In the midst of this debate, the everyday work of protection continues—badly, unevenly, sometimes not at all.

Inspector Grace Mbamalu, stationed at a division in Enugu State, told me in December 2024 that she had not received her salary supplement for six months. Her station had one functioning radio for twelve officers. The police barracks where she lived with her two children had not had running water since October. "We are asked to protect people who hate us," she said. "And they hate us because we fail them. And we fail them because we have nothing—not fuel, not equipment, not justice, not even water to bathe before shift."

This is the human material from which any new social contract must be forged. The blueprint is elegant on paper. It requires a constitutional amendment to Section 214. It requires a framework for state police with minimum national standards for training, recruitment, and discipline. It requires independent oversight commissions at state and federal levels with the power to investigate and prosecute misconduct. It requires community protection teams embedded in neighbourhoods, not imposed upon them, with clear mandates and strict accountability.

But paper does not patrol streets. Amendments do not arrest kidnappers. What transforms blueprint into reality is the willingness of those in power to surrender some of that power. And that willingness has never been Nigeria's strong suit.

The alternative is not stability. It is what we already have: a proliferation of armed groups, some in uniform and some out of it, all claiming to protect and all, in their ways, preying upon the same exhausted populations. Amotekun and Ebube Agu, the CJTF and the Yan Sakai, the federal police and the army—they are all responses to the same vacuum. The vacuum is the thing that matters. And the vacuum is constitutional.

The blueprint is not a dream. It is a constitutional amendment away. The only question is whether those who profit from the current chaos will ever vote for order.

Sources

1. CLEEN Foundation, National Crime and Safety Survey, 2023.
2. 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Section 214.
3. Human Rights Watch, Nigeria: Civilian Joint Task Force Abuses in Borno State, January 2024.
4. SBM Intelligence, Nigeria Security Report, quarterly editions 2023-2024.
5. Interview with retired Deputy Inspector-General Hakeem Odumosu, Maiduguri, March 2024.
6. Interview with Okechukwu Nwanguma, Executive Director, RULAAC, Lagos, November 2024.
7. Interview with Inspector Grace Mbamalu (pseudonym), Enugu State, December 2024.
8. Premium Times, Plateau Christmas Eve Attacks, 25-30 December 2023.
9. HumAngle, Coordinated Assaults in Bokkos and Barkin Ladi, December 2023.
10. Reuters, Nigeria Christmas Attacks Kill Scores in Plateau State, 26 December 2023.
11. Ujasusi Blog Terrorism Monitor, ISWAP Resurgence in Borno: Q1 2025 Assessment, 22 July 2025.
12. EUAA, Nigeria Security Situation: Borno, June 2025.
13. Northern Traditional Rulers' Council, communiqué on security decentralization, November 2023.
14. Nigeria Governors' Forum, meeting records and communiqués, February 2024.
15. National Assembly records, 10th Assembly, state police bills introduced 2023-2025.
16. Oyo State Budget, 2024, Amotekun allocation.
17. Lagos State Ministry of Finance, budget documents 2023-2024.
18. ACLED Nigeria dataset, 2023-2024, compiled by ACCORD, 8 May 2024.
19. Interview with multiple CJTF members and Maiduguri residents, Borno State, February-March 2024.
20. World Bank, Nigeria Development Update, June 2023.