In 1960, Nigeria had roughly 20,000 security personnel — army and police combined — for a population of 40 million. That is one officer for every 2,000 citizens. No surveillance grid. No digital network. Yet the country held. Until the Army decided on January 15, 1966, that five years without a major internal conflict was too long for an army to stay out of politics. The result was a coup that morphed into a 30-month civil war.
Today Nigeria has approximately 370,000 police officers and 230,000 military personnel. Six hundred thousand security personnel for 229 million people. One officer for every 382 citizens. Thirty times the total force. Five times the per-capita density, better equipment, more money, same geography, yet less peace, less order, less security. The government’s current answer is to recruit more police officers. In fact, state police is the current magic formula to solve our current security crisis.
Here is what the arithmetic says. At the 1960 ratio of one officer per 2,000 citizens, today’s population of 229 million would require 114,500 security personnel to match 1960’s stability. Nigeria already has more than five times that number. It is not recruiting its way to security. It has not been able to do so for sixty years. The problem is not the number of officers.
Crime has expanded. Order has contracted. More enforcement has produced less of what enforcement is supposed to produce.
A system does not accumulate enforcement capacity while losing order unless the enforcement is not for you. We recruit a few members of our society to keep us in check from robbing, stealing, or killing each other. Enforcement is happening to you.
Every functioning society runs on accumulated trust — the honest transaction when cheating was easier, the agreement kept when breaking it cost nothing, the hand extended where help is seldom given. That is not the background. It is the load-bearing structure. Today, to be smart in Nigeria means doing the opposite of all that. Yet the old way we abandoned determines whether an encounter on a road, in a market, between strangers produces cooperation or violence. A peg sets the nominal value of a currency. Trust determines whether that currency works — whether people across a fragmented country, far from any federal presence, accept it in real exchange.
Nigeria’s pound functioned in 1960 because the social fabric made it function. Not monetary architecture. Social fabric. That fabric is built in exchange. It is destroyed the same way.
Corruption is the wrong word to describe what we are faced with. But corruption implies a healthy system with deviants. This is a cancer — not as metaphor, but as structural cancer.
Cancer redirects the body’s own resources to sustain itself at the host’s expense. The citizens whose savings were destroyed by devaluation pay the taxes that fund the police assigned to protect the politicians whose decisions produced the devaluation.
The Lagos trader who saved three years for a generator — priced in naira, budgeted in naira — and lost 40 percent of it in a single devaluation. Not through her failure. Through a withdrawal from trust she had deposited by doing everything right.
You know this story. You are inside this story. Those who have won the economic roulette we have been casting for sixty years have decided they can recruit those who could not escape to protect what they won. The statistics on how many of us would have to become police officers or soldiers to bring insecurity down are never put forward. They are not put forward because the answer condemns the question.
We do not have a security deficit. We have a trust deficit that no security budget can fill. The cancer has not won. Markets still function across ethnic lines. Solidarity persists where the formal channel has rotted.
The problem is not the crimes. It is the collapse of the moral courage to name behaviour as criminal and treat it as the law requires. Every crime with which the former Central Bank Governor is charged was committed inside the federal system, supervised by the federal system, visible to the federal system.
Three years on, no criminal conviction and people are still paid to handle the case. The evidence is not missing. The integrity required to use it is.
A minister forges a certificate and the punishment demanded is resignation. Not prosecution. Not conviction. A request.
We cannot define and punish crime because those charged with administering punishment would have to apply standards they cannot survive.
That is not a justice problem. That is the trust well at zero.
Whatever is preventing us from admitting this failure is also the reason the failure has reached this depth.
Not the Sahel. Not Boko Haram. Not ISWAP. Not Libya.
The incapacity for honest acknowledgement is not separate from the security crisis. It is the security crisis. Every external explanation is a mask. And the mask is what the cancer hides behind.
This is not a political party, ethnic or religious fight. Anyone who reaches for those frames is not diagnosing the cancer. He is feeding the cancer. It is a civilisation battle we must fight and win now because the outcome will determine the quality of life in this part of the globe in the coming years.
Every election that asks only who holds the ceiling — and not whether the ceiling is still connected to the floor — is a meal the cancer did not have to work for.
What is the total number of terrorists in this country that more than 229 million people cannot generate the social energy to confront? What does victory mean in this war? Are we waiting for the killing to stop on its own, or for deliverance to arrive from across the Atlantic?
This cannot be the standard. We cannot survive as a free people in this century at this level of performance. Where the trust well runs dry, the floor is already gone. Farmers do not harvest because the road belongs to men with guns. Communities do not call the police because the police make it worse. Throats are cut in daylight, in towns that were ordinary a decade ago.
There is no man strong enough to fix this. No party is powerful enough. No religion is spiritually gifted enough.
The treatment has no inauguration day. It cannot be voted in or prayed into existence on your behalf. It is built in the classroom, the market, the agreement honoured when no one is watching, the stranger not turned away.
When First Lady Patience Jonathan could not contain her emotion and spoke from an open heart following the kidnap of the Chibok girls — “This blood we are shedding, there is God ooo” — we ignored the collective responsibility she was inviting us to assume. She was mocked as unpolished, unstrained, uneducated. Mockery has replaced fear in too many of us now. She warned us. Before her, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote these lines two centuries ago. They have not aged.
In each human heart terror survives
The ruin it has gorged; the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true
Hypocrisy and customs make their mind
That fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man’s estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The good want power but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all the best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.
The cancer is fed or starved at the transaction. Not in Abuja. In the exchange you are about to make.
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Damilare Ebeniza studied Political Science and International Relations in Nigeria, Benin Republic, and France, with a research focus on Nigerian history, economy, and foreign politics. He has experience as a conference interpreter and external relations management across Chad, Niger, Mali, and Guinea Conakry, for governmental, regional and international organisations in West Africa. Proficient in French, English, and four additional non-Nigerian African languages, he embodies a commitment to cross-cultural understanding and effective communication. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com
