Mohammed Bello Doka
30 April, 2026
There is a certain kind of monster that does not emerge from the shadows by accident. It is bred in the open, fattened on impunity, and unleashed by the very institution sworn to protect. The Boko Haram fighter, the Zamfara bandit, and the #EndSARS protester are not enemies of the state. They are the grotesque offspring of the state's own violent excesses. And the mother of them all is the Nigeria Police Force.
For decades, the trigger-happy officers of the Nigerian Police have been more than just incompetent. They have been the primary incubator of three of Nigeria's most devastating security crises. By executing a handcuffed cleric, they birthed the Boko Haram terror machine. By backing brutal vigilantes, they fuelled the banditry consuming the North-West. And by gunning down unarmed protesters, they created the #EndSARS movement that nearly tore the nation apart. The evidence is not circumstantial. It is a death sentence passed on the credibility of the Nigerian state.
It is easy to forget that Boko Haram was once a minor religious sect, a fringe group of preacher Mohammed Yusuf that posed little threat to national stability. The transformation occurred in July 2009. The immediate trigger was a police enforcement of a crash-helmet law in Maiduguri. When followers of Yusuf refused to comply on religious grounds, the police opened fire on the funeral procession. Seventeen members of the sect were killed on the spot. That singular act of police overreach lit a fuse that would consume the North-East for nearly two decades.
The state responded with overwhelming force, killing nearly 1,000 people in five days of brutal retaliation. But the real crime happened after the guns fell silent. Mohammed Yusuf was captured alive by the army and handed over to the police. Within hours, he was dead. The police claimed a shootout. The video told a different story. It showed a handcuffed Yusuf answering questions calmly, pleading for his life. He was summarily executed by the police on camera. The footage spread worldwide. Human Rights Watch condemned it as a shocking example of the brazen contempt by the Nigerian police for the rule of law. Those who escaped used the images of that execution to recruit a legion of revenge-driven fighters. Yusuf's deputy, Abubakar Shekau, stepped in, and the rest is a graveyard of over 40,000 Nigerian souls.
If the North-East fell to terrorists, the North-West was surrendered to bandits again, by police-enabled violence. Throughout the late 2010s, the Zamfara State government backed an outlawed vigilante group known as the Yansakai. These armed men, operating with the total support of the government during the tenure of former Governor Abdulaziz Yari, subjected the Fulani people of Zamfara to so much humiliation, reducing them to third-class citizens. The police did not stop them. They looked the other way. In 2020, the state Commissioner for Security admitted that Yansakai groups constantly unleashed terror on the Fulani people at will, suffering no consequences because they enjoyed the backing of the state.
The inevitable consequence was reprisal violence. The same official stated bluntly that almost all offensive operations by Fulani people have been recorded to be reprisal attacks against Yansakai brutality. In May 2020 alone, a single reprisal attack saw 15 people killed in five communities. The bandits we see today, armed to the teeth, were forged in the fire of police negligence and state-sponsored vigilantism. The men who now hold entire states hostage were not born criminals. They were manufactured by the institutional cruelty of a police force that refused to protect them.
The pattern never changes. When the youth rose up in October 2020 to say EndSARS, demanding the scrapping of a police unit infamous for extortion, torture, and extrajudicial killings, the police did not listen. Instead, the state sent soldiers and police to the Lekki Toll Gate. Amnesty International confirmed that security forces killed at least 12 peaceful protesters. A judicial panel later described how security personnel shot, injured and killed unarmed, helpless and defenceless protesters, without provocation or justification. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad was disbanded in name only. Five years later, reports confirm that the same patterns of police impunity, corruption, and abuse remain firmly in place. The police reform promised after EndSARS has barely moved beyond rhetoric. Human rights lawyer Deji Adeyanju blamed Nigeria's systemic culture of impunity and executive interference for stalled accountability. Nearly 300 EndSARS protesters are still detained without trial in Lagos State. The cry has changed, but the bullets have not.
That same trigger-happy instinct remains alive today as it ever was. On April 26, 2026, a video emerged showing Assistant Superintendent of Police Nuhu Usman shooting an unarmed, handcuffed man named Mene Ogidi at a motor park in Effurun, Delta State. The 90-second video shows Ogidi seated on the ground with his hands bound behind his back, pleading, "I don't know anything, officer. I beg, I go tell you everything. Na my friend deceive me. Carry me go Sapele, I go carry you go meet am, please." The officer ignored him. He loaded his rifle and fired at point-blank range. The killing was condemned by the Police Service Commission as a violation of Nigerian law, the Anti-Torture Act, and the Nigeria Police Act 2020. The officer has been arrested and transferred to Abuja for prosecution. But history tells us that convictions will be slow, and justice will remain elusive.
The cowardice of the Nigeria Police Force is as legendary as its cruelty. When full-blown crises erupt, the police do not stay to fight. They pack up and run. Police stations across the North-East have been repeatedly abandoned in the face of Boko Haram attacks, leaving civilians defenceless. In Kukawa town, Boko Haram terrorists invaded and set the police station ablaze. In Gwoza, an attack on a police training facility left about 30 policemen missing months later. Police infrastructure has come under repeated attacks, with little resistance mounted in defence. When bandits storm entire villages in Zamfara and Katsina, killing dozens including seven policemen in a single day in June 2024, the response is always after the fact. The police are the least effective force in protecting the lives and property of Nigerians, yet they remain the most brutal in extrajudicial killings.
Perhaps the most terrifying statistic of all reveals the depth of the police's criminal negligence. The Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation revealed that between 2000 and 2020, over 178,000 firearms were unaccounted for in police armouries across the country. Of these, 88,078 were AK-47 rifles. In February 2025, the Senate Public Accounts Committee raised the alarm over the disappearance of approximately 4,000 additional firearms, including AK-47s, from police armouries. The Senate demanded answers. The police failed to provide credible explanations. Lawmakers expressed concerns that these firearms may have fallen into the wrong hands, exacerbating the country's security crisis. They were right to be afraid. In December 2025, a Deputy Superintendent of Police attached to the Mobile Police Force in Niger State died by suicide while under investigation for allegedly supplying arms to bandits. Investigators discovered that 13 AK-47 rifles and more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition could not be traced. An Inspector attached to the Government House confessed that the late DSP supplied him with arms and ammunition, which were later delivered to bandits operating in Shiroro Local Government Area. The guns used to kill Nigerian citizens are, in many cases, the very guns issued by the Nigerian state to its own police officers. This is not negligence. This is criminal sabotage. And the beneficiaries are the same monsters the police claim to be fighting.
None of this would persist without a deep and entrenched culture of impunity. Between 2000 and 2007 alone, Human Rights Watch estimated that police shot and killed over 8,000 Nigerians, many labelled as armed robbery suspects without trial. Police kill an average of 4.6 people per day, according to statistics provided to Human Rights Watch by a former Inspector-General. Yet convictions are virtually non-existent. Officers who commit murder are quietly redeployed, promoted, or retired with full benefits. The Police Act 2020, a landmark legislation signed into law just a month before the EndSARS protests, provided a comprehensive framework for democratic policing emphasising accountability, human rights, and community partnership. If it had been faithfully implemented, much of what triggered EndSARS could have been prevented. Instead, implementation has been slow, selective, and largely unsatisfactory. The problem has never been the absence of good laws. The problem has been the absence of political will.
Here is the honest truth. The Nigeria Police Force will not reform itself. It has proven, for nearly three decades of uninterrupted civilian rule and decades of military rule before it, that it cannot be trusted to protect the people or respect the law. The only way forward is radical, structural reform. The ongoing proposal for state police, which the Inspector-General of Police submitted to the Senate in March 2026, offers a pathway. The framework creates State Police Services that would handle local criminal offences and community policing as their primary mandate, retaining officers who speak local languages, serve their own communities, and answer to local accountability mechanisms. Community policing must become the operational nerve centre, not a slogan on a faded poster at a police station. A National Police Standards Board must be constitutionally established to set and enforce minimum standards on recruitment, training, conduct, accountability, and funding across all police services.
But laws alone change nothing. Nigeria needs the prosecution and imprisonment of every police officer who has ever executed a handcuffed suspect. It needs an annual audit of every single rifle in every single police armoury, conducted by independent civilian oversight bodies. It needs the families of Mene Ogidi and Mohammed Yusuf and every #EndSARS victim to see the men who killed their loved ones hanged. It needs officers who supply arms to bandits to face treason charges. It needs a police force that is afraid to break the law, not one that breaks the law without consequence.
If these reforms are not pursued with genuine urgency, the Nigeria Police Force will ignite the fire that burns down Nigeria. The Boko Haram insurgency, the Zamfara banditry, and the EndSARS protests were not warnings. They were the opening acts. The next time the police pull the trigger on a helpless civilian, there may not be a country left to investigate it.
The mother of terror lives. And she wears a badge.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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