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Fellow Nigerians, we seem to be at the crossroads again. This is as regards the issue that is staring Nigerians in the face. An average Nigerian today wonders how secure he is. This necessitates my interrogating the subject that is of utmost and immediate concern to all Nigerians: the worsening insecurity across the country and the urgent need to rethink our national approach to confronting it. This is not the first time I am addressing the issue of insecurity in our dear country. In several of myprevious interventions, I have drawn attention to the dangers of treating insecurity as a purely military or combat problem.
Unfortunately, like many well-intentioned interventions from concerned Nigerians, those warnings appear not to have received the desired attention from those entrusted with the duty of securing lives and property. The result is what we are witnessing today: a continuous spread of fear, abductions, killings, banditry, terrorism, communal violence, kidnapping for ransom, and other forms of violent criminality that have reduced many communities to theatres of anxiety.
The truth must be told without embellishment. Nigeria is not merely facing a security challenge; we are facing a security emergency. It is an emergency that touches the farmer in the village, the trader on the highway, the student in school, the parent at home, the commuter on the road, the investor in the market, and the ordinary citizen who simply wants to live in peace. When a people can no longer travel freely, sleep peacefully, farm productively, worship safely, or transact business confidently, then the state must know that the matter has gone beyond routine security briefing.
While it is good and necessary to invest in arms, ammunition, patrol vehicles, aircrafts, communication gadgets, and other combat infrastructure, we must not deceive ourselves into believing that weapons alone can solve the current security scourge. Arms may kill criminals when they are identified, located, and engaged, but arms do not by themselves identify enemies. Guns do not gather intelligence. Fighter jets do not understand community dynamics. Armoured vehicles do not decode the movement of informants. Ammunition does not distinguish between a genuine villager and a criminal collaborator.
That work belongs to intelligence. This is why I say without equivocation that Nigeria needs to invest more in intelligence than in combat. Combat is important, but intelligence is superior. Combat without intelligence is like a blind hunter shooting into the forest. He may make noise, he may expend bullets, he may even frighten innocent passers-by, but he is unlikely to hit the real target. It is only when the enemy is properly identified, profiled, located, monitored, and understood that a meaningful strike can be launched. Anything short of this is guesswork, and guesswork in security operations is dangerous. Where intelligence fails, innocent citizens become casualties.
We have witnessed several unfortunate instances in which wrong targets were hit, innocent people were arrested, communities were wrongly profiled, and citizens were subjected to avoidable trauma because the information available to security operatives was either weak, false, manipulated, or completely absent. In security matters, bad intelligence can be as dangerous as no intelligence at all. Indeed, it can be worse, because it gives false confidence to those taking decisions. The starting point, therefore, must be the rebuilding of our intelligence architecture.
As presently constituted, the Department of State Services, despite the commitment of many of its officers, lacks the numerical strength, logistical reach, technological depth, and human spread required to man the entire country effectively from an intelligence perspective.
Nigeria is too vast, too complex, and too porous for a centralised and under-resourced intelligence structure to adequately cover every forest, community, border route, urban settlement, religious centre, transport hub, school, market, and local criminal network. This reality calls for urgent and massive investment in the intelligence sector. We must stop treating intelligence as an afterthought.
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It must become the foundation of our security strategy. The country needs more trained intelligence officers, more field operatives, better surveillance capacity, stronger databases, improved coordination, enhanced technology, and deeper community penetration. Intelligence work is not guesswork; it is a professional, patient, disciplined, and highly specialised endeavour. It requires training, resources, motivation, and coordination. As a matter of urgency, Nigeria must integrate the intelligence units of other security agencies into a common national intelligence framework under a coordinated structure. The police have intelligence units. The military has intelligence capacity.
The Immigration service has useful border information. Customs has data on movement of goods and persons. Civil defence has grassroots presence. Correctional authorities have information on criminal networks. Financial intelligence units can track suspicious flows of money. Local vigilante groups and community security outfits possess street-level knowledge. All these must not continue to operate in silos. There must be a deliberate division of labour and cooperation among these agencies for efficiency and impact.
One agency cannot do everything. Where everybody is doing the same thing without coordination, nobody is effectively responsible for anything. The security architecture must be harmonised in such a way that intelligence gathered by one agency is useful to the others. We cannot continue to have agencies competing for glory while criminals collaborate across territories. Criminals share information faster than the state. Bandits, kidnappers, terrorists, informants, arms suppliers, ransom negotiators, and logistics providers operate as networks. The state must therefore respond with a superior network.
The current system where agencies sometimes hoard information, distrust one another, duplicate efforts, or even undermine each other is counterproductive. Security is not a competition for institutional ego. It is a sacred responsibility. When agencies refuse to share intelligence, the ultimate victim is the Nigerian citizen. The farmer killed on his farm is not interested in which agency had jurisdiction. The kidnapped student does not care which department failed to act. The traveller attacked on the highway does not want to hear excuses about inter-agency rivalry. What the citizen wants is safety.
Beyond formal intelligence agencies, Nigeria must urgently embrace community-based intelligence. No modern state can defeat internal insecurity without the cooperation of credible citizens. Criminals do not live in the sky. They live among people. They buy food. They move on roads. They communicate with informants. They lodge somewhere. They recruit people. They spend money. They have collaborators. They are seen by someone. The tragedy is that many of those who see something either say nothing out of fear, distrust, or frustration, or they report to authorities who fail to act. This is why the government must create a safe, credible, and rewarding system for citizen intelligence.
We must massively engage credible Nigerians to complement official intelligence. Traditional rulers, religious leaders, transport unions, market associations, professional bodies, youth groups, hunters, farmers, herders, artisans, private security operators, landlords, school authorities, and local residents all have roles to play. They are the eyes and ears of the state. However, they will not cooperate meaningfully if they believe that their identities will be exposed or that nothing will be done with the information supplied. Whistleblowing in security matters must be protected and incentivised.
A citizen who risks his life to provide information on criminals must not be abandoned or betrayed to the mercy of the criminals. There must be confidential channels of communication, protection mechanisms, financial incentives, and visible evidence that useful information leads to action.
Where citizens report criminals and the criminals return to threaten them, the state has failed. Where informants are exposed, no reasonable person will volunteer information again.
