Are we a country of lambs?

BY ISAIAH KUMUYI

Nigeria stands at a crossroads of existence, a perilous one where it would not be wrong to describe her as a nation where citizens live in fear – not of fate or nature –  but of fellow men emboldened by impunity.

From the highways to the homesteads, lives are lost while seeming silence reigns. The country’s security architecture, ideally designed to protect the law-abiding, now feels like an elaborate façade: centralised, sluggish, and increasingly incapable of securing its people. By concentrating power at the centre, we have rendered communities defenceless, forcing citizens to live as prey in their own homeland.

A few wolves have learned how to exploit the weakness of this system. Who are these wolves? Boko Haram terrorists and their godless mutations, bandits and cattle rustlers, kidnappers, and even foreigners who stroll into Nigeria’s sovereign space to commit heinous crimes. When authority is distant and decision-making delayed, response falters and accountability fades.

Governors, the chief security officers of their states, in name, remain powerless in practice. The absurdity of a governor pleading for armed forces deployment while his people are under attack betrays a broken federation. We cannot continue to mistake hierarchy for efficiency, or central control for safety. Security, by its very nature, must be local because insecurity itself is a local evil resident.

To restore order, Nigeria must embrace courage and common sense: restructure the security architecture and devolve policing powers to states and local governments. True reform will empower local actors to act swiftly in protecting their land, livelihood, and limbs, seeing that they know their terrain best. This is not a call for fragmentation but for functionality, for a federation that works as one because each part can stand on its own. A reimagined, multi-level security system is not a luxury; it is the price that Nigeria must now pay for her survival and continued existence as a sovereign state.

We are not lambs to be slaughtered, nor a people without power. But unless courage, consensus, and decisive action return to guard the gate, the wolves will keep feasting and the flock will keep bleeding. Our salvation lies not in louder cries for rescue from Abuja, but in a brave and balanced redistribution of responsibility.

Let every tier of government be constitutionally empowered to defend those they govern. The ongoing process of constitutional amendments gives Nigeria a golden opportunity to reinvent herself security-wise. President Bola Tinubu’s reported favourable disposition to the idea of State Police is encouraging.

Now is the time for all tiers of government to band together and gift Nigeria a new security architecture – a decentralised one that restores agency to the States and Local Governments, and to Nigerians as a whole. It is time for our leadership to prove to us that Nigeria is not a country of helpless lambs. Now is the time.

Nigeria shall rise again.

Isaiah Kumuyi, a writer and communicator, writes from the University of Lagos.