Another “Emergency”? Nigerians Have Memorised the Script. By Chidi Ekeh
Another “Emergency”? Nigerians Have Memorised the Script. By Chidi Ekeh
I was still scrolling through the President’s nationwide-security-emergency speech on Tuesday when my cousin in Kaduna sent a voice note: “They’ve declared another one. Let me go and lock my door before the bandits receive the memo.”
Dark humour is the last firewall Nigerians have against despair.
The headline promises are blockbuster: 20 000 new police recruits, DSS “forest guards”, VIP escorts pulled to the frontlines, even a constitutional route to state police. Yet the nation’s collective shrug is louder than any press-release applause. We have seen this movie before—same cinema, same plot twists, same credits rolling to darkness.
In July 2023 the same administration announced a “state of emergency on food security.” We were told 500 000 hectares would spring to life, 2 000 tractors would hum across the savanna, and special farm-protection squads would keep cultivators safe. Two planting seasons later the tractors vanished into the fog of bureaucracy, fertilisers were auctioned off in night markets, and food inflation galloped from 24 % to 41 %. Nobody resigned; nobody was queried. The emergency died of natural causes—neglect.
Today the structures that asphyxiated the agriculture rescue are intact: opaque budgeting, procurement black boxes, VIP-first policing, and a National Assembly that applauds first and asks questions never. You cannot parachute 20 000 fresh constables into a pipeline that still leaks uniforms, rifles and morale, and call it victory. You cannot withdraw escorts from governors who legally control the same police budget. You cannot promise “state police” while the same Constitution treats governors as tenants of Abuja on security matters.
But the bigger insult is the calendar. Within 24 hours of the proclamation, bandits stormed a village in Niger State and herded 40 people into the forest. Negotiations for their release, we learnt, are “ongoing.” In other words, the emergency was declared, the kidnappers clocked in for work, and the ransom economy kept its 9-to-5. When criminals no longer pause to notice your “strongest ever” response, you are not governing; you are performing.
Nigeria’s insecurity is no longer a single hydra; it is a whole zoo on the loose. Boko Haram taxes farmers in Borno. ISWAP beheads soldiers on camera. Bandits run a Nasdaq of abduction in Zamfara. Herdsmen and vigilantes trade reprisals across the Middle Belt. Yet the common denominator is a state that reacts late, investigates nothing, and forgets everything. The same intelligence reports that warned of the Mafa massacre sat on desks. The same police helicopters budgeted for surveillance are rented out for wedding confetti drops.
What then should the President have announced? Not another theatrical state of emergency, but a 90-day performance contract published on a public dashboard: how many men recruited, trained, kitted and deployed weekly; which forests cleared; which ransom payments blocked; which commanders fired for dereliction. Give Nigerians a bar graph, not a sermon. Second, publish every security contract above N100 million—who got the order, at what unit cost, and delivery date. Sunlight is cheaper than any fighter jet. Third, strip the Office of the National Security Adviser of its monopoly on coordination; let governors, traditional rulers and civil-society groups sit on an oversight council with veto power on deployments. Fourth, criminalise—really criminalise—ransom payments. You cannot keep financing the market you claim to be destroying.
Until these steps are embedded in law and budget, every “emergency” will remain what my cousin in Kaduna calls it: government by WhatsApp broadcast—long on pixels, short on bullets.
The President still has a narrow window to convert cynicism into confidence. But the clock is measured in graves, not headlines. Stop declaring; start doing. And if you must declare anything, declare an emergency on announcements.
