There are mornings in Nigeria when the news breaks like a wound. A community awakens to yet another night attack, yet another farm invaded, yet another commuter robbed on a familiar road that should have been safe. Often, when survivors speak, they describe the same pattern. The police arrived hours late. The officers who came did not know the terrain. They did not speak the language. They had no relationships with the community, no familiarity with previous threats, no deep understanding of the tension lines simmering beneath the surface.
In the end, they collected statements, made promises, and left. The criminals, however, remained embedded in the unspoken knowledge of the community they had terrorised. This story is not an exception; it is Nigeria’s recurring security tragedy.
If security begins at the level of familiarity and not force, then Nigeria’s centralised, externally posted policing model is fundamentally misaligned with reality. A police officer who cannot speak the language of the people cannot speak to their fears. A security system dominated by non-indigenes will struggle to earn trust, gather intelligence, or respond with context-sensitive accuracy. This disconnect has grown into one of the most profound, yet least addressed, contributors to Nigeria’s worsening insecurity.
Community policing, properly understood, goes far beyond stationing officers in communities. It means aligning policing with local knowledge, cultural fluency, shared ownership, and trust-building. It means creating a system where officers are not strangers in the places they serve, but members of the social fabric. It is this deeper version of community policing, anchored on indigenous participation that offers Nigeria a historic opportunity to rebuild security from the ground up. The idea that at least 75 per cent of officers deployed to a state, local government, or community should be indigenes is not a sentimental argument; it is a strategic necessity born from decades of systemic failure.
Nigeria’s current policing model places officers in areas where they lack cultural knowledge, historical context, or a sense of belonging. When an officer has no roots in a community, accountability weakens. When officers are posted from faraway regions, and often rotated swiftly, they treat communities as temporary assignments instead of places whose safety is tied to their own dignity, family, and future. This detachment contributes to extortion, repression, excessive force, and a transactional approach to policing.
Worse still, the presence of officers who share ethnic backgrounds with cross-border criminal networks has, in some cases, created pathways through which arrested criminals are quietly shielded, released, or warned ahead of enforcement actions. Communities across the southern states have repeatedly narrated experiences in which violent offenders of external origin were released through the backdoors of policing units. These are not isolated events; they reveal a structural flaw.
In this context, it is important to commend the President of Nigeria for the recent directive to withdraw police officers attached to VIPs. This move is a positive step toward refocusing policing on communities and public safety rather than personal protection for individuals. Such redeployment has the potential to release hundreds of officers back into communities where they are desperately needed, thereby strengthening indigenous policing. However, past directives on similar issues have often been ignored or only partially implemented. There is an urgent need to ensure that this latest presidential order is fully enforced across the country so that officers can be redeployed without obstruction, and communities can genuinely benefit from their presence.
The argument for indigenous policing is strengthened when global examples are considered. Rwanda’s community policing transformation stands as one of Africa’s most successful modern security reforms. Local officers, recruited from within communities, not only reduced crime but also built a surveillance network rooted in trust and mutual responsibility. Japan’s Kōban system shows how small neighbourhood-based policing structures, staffed by officers who live among the people, create some of the lowest crime rates in the world.
Kenya’s Nyumba Kumi initiative demonstrates that security improves dramatically when communities and security agents share information through culturally grounded networks. Scandinavian countries have perfected neighbourhood policing where officers learn the language, social dynamics, and emotional rhythms of the communities they protect. In each of these cases, one principle stands firm: policing is most effective when rooted in the soil of local knowledge.
Nigeria’s own experience validates this truth. The success of the Civilian Joint Task Force in the northeast was not driven by superior weapons or larger numbers, but by intimate knowledge of local terrain, clan networks, and insurgent movement patterns.
Amotekun in the southwest has demonstrated how cultural familiarity and linguistic fluency can disrupt criminal operations more effectively than conventional units. Even in rural communities battling banditry, farmers and hunters often provide more actionable intelligence than formal policing structures. These examples are signals of what Nigeria could achieve with a deliberate, institutionalised form of indigenous community policing.
To be continued tomorrow.
Prof. Chiwuike Uba is economist, policy expert, and security consultant with over 25 years of experience in governance, public financial management and international development.
