Security Beyond Boots on the Ground: What Needs to Change

“We need more boots on the ground” is a well-worn expression that recently started to resurface in Nigerian public discourse. It’s a definitive, almost reassuring term. It alludes to motion, determination, and outward action. 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 constant terror.

The President has given that attitude tangible form during the last two weeks by announcing intentions to hire 20,000 more police officers and 20,000–25,000 extra army members, as well as proclaiming a state of emergency due to insecurity. These actions count. 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 infrastructure 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 levels, with local governments being 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 other authorities. Extremist preachers, criminal groups, bandit leaders, and warlords enter areas that the state has left empty. They resolve conflicts, collect taxes, administer harsh “justice,” and establish a kind of order—violent and exploitative, but order nonetheless. Insecurity ceases to be an anomaly and becomes the norm when citizens interact with these non-state entities more frequently than they do with efficient government.

Many communities’ economic underpinnings have also been discreetly destroyed. In far too many places, farming, which used to be 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 darker 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 political patronage and criminal activity is hazy in some areas. People believe that influential individuals are protecting the networks that profit from turmoil when they witness illegal mining sites functioning with impunity.

In this situation, insecurity is a business strategy rather than merely the lack of order. Guns are investments. Violence is a tactic. Abductions are revenue sources. This underground economy’s logic is straightforward: the weaker the state, the more formidable its shadow rivals.

An erosion of social cohesiveness that has made identity a weapon is layered on top of these structural problems. Long-standing concerns over land, political representation, and historical injustice have solidified into interfaith and intercommunal animosities in southern Kaduna, Benue, the Plateau, and other flashpoints. Communities come to dread one another as existential threats rather than as neighbors with common interests. These fears are heightened by political entrepreneurs who frame conflicts along racial or religious lines in order to gain personal relevance. Once that logic takes root, a single incident might unleash years of accumulated bitterness.

This test is frequently not met by law enforcement, which should act as a buffer between complaints and violence. Community-root­ed, accountable policing remains more rhetoric than reality. Too many people view 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 epidemic. When he referred to narcotics as the “number one problem fuelling conflict in Nigeria,” the NDLEA Chairman did not engage in hyperbole. Narcotics numb con­science and enhance anger; they also fund crime. Violent networks are more likely to recruit young individuals who have easy access to drugs, no prospects, and no jobs. 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 eroded 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 healthcare, education, clean water, and working roads. Growing up in a village without a school, a clinic, or any other obvious indication of official assistance sends a strong message about their worth. An armed patrol or a tax demand could be the child’s first true 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 public areas.

The Tinubu
However, it goes beyond just whether we require additional staff. It is the kind of institution we are ask­ing these recruits to join. Which principles will mold them? What incentives will govern them? Which mechanisms will direct and limit their authority? To turn numbers into true security instead of just amplifying disorder, political will and bravery are crucial.

Therefore, hiring must focus on skill and character rather than just meeting quotas. Intelligence gathering, community involvement, human rights, conflict de-escalation, and the use of technology must all be included in training that goes beyond simple drills. Modern, dependable equipment that is appropriate for the terrain and dangers is required. 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.” Threats to security in the twenty-first century are dynamic, networked, and adaptable. The sheer volume of workers cannot overwhelm them. Strategic planning, interagency collaboration, real-time information, and creative use of technology, including drones, surveillance systems, secure communications, and data analysis, are all necessary. They also demand something less tan­gible but equally critical: trust.

Communities won’t exchange information if there isn’t trust. Even the best-prepared force is working in the dark without information. Ensuring that security operations are accountable, appropriate, and disciplined is essential to fostering that trust. It entails penalizing abuses as opposed to 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. The political signal is important. However, substance must equal symbolism. Addressing the causes of insecurity—governance deficiencies, distorted political economics, social fragmentation, and the disregard for human development—represents the true challenge.

Our lack of ideas is not a 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 increase access to justice, reestablish 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 office—face serious repercussions.

In the end, Nigeria must decide whether 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 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 recovering the rural economy from criminal activity and violence so that cultivation and lawful trade may 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 mending the tattered 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 hamlet, which previously only experienced terror, starts to see teachers, nurses, judges, and trustworthy local officials as frequently as it thinks about armed patrols. When a young man who may have joined a gang discovers that a school, farm, workshop, or lawful mine offers a better 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 works.