The well-known statement, “We need more boots on the ground,” started to resurface in Nigerian public discourse not too long ago. It sounds decisive and somewhat reassuring. Movement, determination, and outward action are implied. The idea of more uniforms on the field can seem like a solution in and of itself in a nation where far too many communities live in terror.
The President has given that attitude tangible form during the last two weeks by announcing intentions to recruit 20,000 additional police officers and 20,000–25,000 new army members, as well as proclaiming a state of emergency due to insecurity. These are crucial measures. 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 framework 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, our government is divided into three tiers, with local governments being the 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 void in governance has been filled by alternative authorities. Extremist preachers, warlords, criminal gangs, 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 predatory and cruel. When citizens experience these non-state actors more frequently than they do efficient government, insecurity ceases to be an anomaly and instead becomes the norm.
Many communities have also had their economic basis surreptitiously destroyed. In far too many places, farming, which was once the backbone of the community, 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 more sinister economy has surfaced in the wreckage of this former one. Artisanal mining, in name, sometimes hides sophisticated criminal enterprises that harm the environment while fueling arms purchases. The distinction between illegal activity and political patronage is hazy in many areas. People believe that influential individuals are protecting the networks that profit from turmoil when they observe illicit mining sites functioning with impunity.
In a situation like this, insecurity is more than just a lack of order; it’s a business strategy. Guns are investments. Violence serves as a tool. Abductions are revenue sources. This underground economy’s reasoning is straightforward: the weaker the state, the more formidable its shadow rivals are.
Identity has become a weapon due to the disintegration of social cohesion that is layered on top of these structural problems. Long-standing complaints over land, political representation, and historical injustice have solidified into interfaith and intercommunal hostility in southern Kaduna, Benue, the Plateau, and other hotspots. Communities come to fear each other 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 ethnic or religious lines. Once that logic takes root, a single incident might unleash years of accumulated bitterness.
This standard is frequently failed by law enforcement, which ought to act as a buffer between complaints and violence. Community-rooted, accountable policing remains more rhetoric than reality. Too many people see the police not as defenders of their rights but rather as “checkpoint police,” or officers connected to arbitrary stops, extortion, and humiliation. This is a dramatic slide from a period when the Nigerian police garnered global reputation for their expertise in peacekeeping missions across the world.
The drug epidemic has made these issues worse. When the NDLEA Chairman referred to narcotics as the “number one problem fuelling conflict in Nigeria,” he did not exaggerate. Narcotics numb conscience and enhance anger; they also fund crime. Young people who have easy access to drugs, no prospects, and no jobs are at risk of being recruited by violent networks. 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. The public’s faith has been undermined by widespread corruption and political actors’ 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 indication of government assistance sends a strong message about their worth. An armed patrol or a tax demand can be the child’s first actual 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. The army could be able to concentrate on its primary defense duties and lessen the militarization of civilian areas if the police were strengthened.
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However, the subject is more complex than just whether we need extra staff. It is the kind of institution we are asking these recruits to join. Which ideals will influence them? What incentives will govern them? Which systems are going to direct and limit their power? Instead of merely increasing disorder, political will and bravery are necessary to turn numbers into true security.
Therefore, hiring should focus on skill and character rather than merely meeting quotas. Beyond simple drills, training must incorporate human rights, community involvement, information collecting, conflict de-escalation, and technology use. Equipment needs to be up to date, dependable, and appropriate for the threats 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 of the twenty-first century are dynamic, networked, and adaptable. The labor alone cannot overpower them. They necessitate strategic planning, interagency collaboration, real-time information, and creative use of technology, including drones, surveillance systems, secure communications, and data analysis. They also demand something less tangible but equally critical: trust.
Communities won’t exchange information if they lack confidence. Even the best-equipped army is working in the dark without information. Maintaining discipline, proportion, and accountability in security operations is essential to fostering that trust. Instead of justifying abuses, it entails condemning them. It entails realizing that every unfair murder, arbitrary detention, and dehumanizing interaction at a checkpoint is a strategic defeat that drives communities farther away from the state rather than a trivial event.
To his credit, the President has emphasized that insecurity is now at the core of the national agenda. It matters that political signal. But there needs to be substance to match symbolism. Addressing the causes of insecurity—governance deficiencies, distorted political economics, social fragmentation, and the disregard for human development—represents the true task.
It’s not that we don’t have ideas. 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 increase access to justice, rebuild livelihoods, invest in healthcare and education, and consciously repair strained social ties must be integrated with security operations.
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 oversight of law enforcement, openness in security spending, and the insistence that those who conspire with criminal enterprises—whether in uniform or in office—face serious repercussions.
In the end, Nigeria must decide whether to manage insecurity or change the circumstances that lead to it. Managing insecurity can be done by announcements, deployments, and occasional shows of power. Slower, less dramatic, and much more difficult is transformation. 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 commerce can once again support livelihoods. 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 using communication, justice, and equitable access to resources to mend the damaged fabric of intercommunal relations.
More boots on the ground may quieten violence in the short run. However, the peace that Nigerians yearn for won’t materialize until the village, 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 might have joined a gang finds a better life in a workshop, a farm, a school, or a real mine. When people feel that their lives are important to the state, they do so based on personal experience rather than religious convictions.
Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface are the two best-selling books written by Dakuku Peterside.
