When Donald Trump visited Scotland in July this year, I watched his motorcade arrive at Prestwick Airport under the vigilant eyes of Police Scotland. His aircraft and convoy rolled in with precision, while journalists, protesters, and curious citizens lined the perimeter. Some locals grumbled that taxpayers’ money would fund the heavy police operation. The next day, The Associated Press confirmed: “His visit requires a major police operation that will cost Scottish taxpayers millions of pounds as protests are planned over the weekend. The union representing officers is concerned they are already overworked and will be diverted from their normal duties.”
However, despite the discontent, order prevailed because a civilised state recognises that public security is a collective good, not a commodity. Every officer deployed served the common interest, which is the protection of the law, and not the preservation of class.
Nigeria’s VIP policing system is a House of Fortune, where safety is a luxury spun by the whims of power. In this house, officers are not guardians of the people but servants to the privileged, and protection is doled out like inheritance, not obligation. Just as the wheel of fortune turns unpredictably, the deployment of police resources is arbitrary, sometimes lavish for the elite, often absent for the ordinary citizen. The state, meant to be a sanctuary for all, becomes a fortress for a few, exposing the majority to danger while fortifying the comfort of the influential.
Sadly, in Nigeria, the opposite of the Scottish experience with Trump is tragically persistent. The revelation that over 100,000 police officers, nearly one-fifth of the Nigeria Police Force’s operational strength, are assigned as private guards to politicians, business magnates, and other VIPs (Nigeria Police Service Commission, 2021; SBM Intelligence, 2022) constitutes a grave betrayal of the social contract. This diversion of manpower from public duty to private comfort is both inefficient and immoral. The outcome is an abysmal police-to-citizen ratio, estimated at over 1:1000, far below the UN-recommended 1:450. The result is visible chaos, unchecked kidnapping, pervasive banditry, and communal violence.
While billions in public funds subsidise the personal safety of the few, the vast majority are left unprotected. In this arrangement, security ceases to be a right and becomes a luxury, a privilege distributed by power and influence.
This crisis is not born of ignorance but of political cowardice. Every Inspector General of Police in recent years has issued orders withdrawing Mobile Police Force officers from VIP protection duties. Contrarily, these directives are routinely flouted. Officers are rarely withdrawn and, when they are, quietly reassigned after public outrage fades. The persistence of this practice proves that the paralysis is not administrative but political. Nigeria’s elite class simply overrides institutional authority, transforming the police into personal ornaments of power.
As scholar Adekeye Adebajo noted in The Curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War (2010), “The postcolonial African state often reproduces the colonial logic of power: it protects rulers from their people rather than protecting people from their rulers.” Nigeria’s VIP security culture is a modern enactment of that colonial inheritance. The police, created to preserve authority, not to serve humanity, have evolved little beyond their colonial template. The state continues to exist more as a fortress for the powerful than a refuge for the citizen.
The origin of this pathology can be traced to the colonial Native Authority Police, designed to enforce the will of the Crown, not to protect the colonised. Post-independence governments merely replaced colonial masters with local elites but retained the same coercive machinery. Centralisation of the police under federal control entrenched dependence on political authority rather than public accountability. Thus, proximity to power, not performance, became the route to promotion and protection.
The consequences are systemic and moral. When the average citizen sees that protection is reserved for the connected, trust in the state collapses. Trust is the first casualty of inequality; crime follows swiftly. It is no coincidence that the most neglected communities are now the most violent. Vigilante groups and mob justice have become alternative systems of “law enforcement”, a desperate response to a system that sees citizens as expendable.
As Nigerian criminologist Innocent Chukwuma observed in The CLEEN Foundation Police Services Report (2023), “Where formal policing fails, informal policing fills the vacuum, but often with violence and impunity.” From Zamfara’s banditry to Anambra’s lynch mobs, the pattern is the same: the absence of justice creates its own monsters.
The fiscal cost is equally staggering. Every officer assigned to guard a private individual drains collective security resources such as vehicles, fuel, arms, and manpower. According to SBM Intelligence (2022), this elite protection culture costs the Nigerian state over N100bn annually in salaries, logistics, and maintenance, excluding the opportunity cost of reduced patrol presence nationwide. The CLEEN Foundation further estimates that more than 70 per cent of police patrol vehicles in Nigeria are funded or maintained through private or state-level patronage. Such dependency erodes professionalism and undermines federal accountability.
Dishearteningly, morale within the force deteriorates when junior officers are reduced to domestic aides, who open gates, walk dogs, or chauffeur children. The professional dignity of policing evaporates when the gun, a symbol of public trust, becomes a tool of private luxury. A police officer sworn to serve the public should not be the butler of the privileged.
Comparatively, other countries have successfully reversed similar distortions. In South Africa, the outsourcing of non-essential protection duties to licensed private security firms freed over 15,000 officers for public patrols between 2016 and 2021 (South African Police Service Annual Report, 2022). The United Kingdom’s Police and Crime Commissioners Act allows private contractors to handle low-risk escort and event duties, preserving public police for core law enforcement. Even in Kenya, the National Police Service Commission banned the use of state security personnel for private errands in 2019, citing the “erosion of public safety capacity”. Nigeria can learn from these reforms by enforcing accountability and professional boundaries.
A first step should be the creation of a National Community Policing Bureau, under civilian oversight, to decentralise security and rebuild citizen trust. Local officers, trained in conflict resolution, intelligence gathering, and digital surveillance, can deliver responsive, preventive policing. Community engagement, not brute force, must anchor security.
Furthermore, the government must legislate the regulation of private security outsourcing, ensuring that licensed firms meet strict training, insurance, and oversight standards. This approach not only professionalises protection services but also reduces the moral hazard of deploying public police for private gain.
Nigeria’s police reform must also address welfare. A poorly paid and poorly housed officer cannot resist inducement from the powerful. According to BudgIT (2023), over 60 per cent of police barracks are “unfit for human habitation”. Reform is not sustainable unless welfare matches responsibility.
At this juncture, the words of Max Weber ring sharply true: “The state is that human community which claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” (Politics as a Vocation, 1919). When that monopoly is leased to private interests, the state forfeits its legitimacy. Nigeria’s policing crisis is thus not only institutional but existential: a challenge to the very idea of statehood.
“Detty December” is approaching, and thousands of wealthy Nigerians and returnees will again hire police escorts to shield their SUVs from imagined dangers. Each of those deployments weakens an already overstretched force, leaving the vulnerable further exposed. The government’s silence is complicity. It’s inaction, endorsement.
The VIP security dilemma mirrors the moral disrepair of governance. A democracy that guarantees safety only to the powerful is already halfway to tyranny. The true measure of a nation’s civilisation lies not in how many guards surround its leaders but in how safe its citizens feel without one.
Reform must be practical and principled. The government should withdraw all non-essential VIP police details and redeploy those officers to community policing and public patrols, ensuring that the force serves the collective rather than private interests. Clear boundaries must be established between state policing and private protection, and the police ethos must be reoriented from servitude to service through rigorous training, welfare improvements, and reinforcement of professional ethics. Anything less is mere performance. Nigeria cannot credibly claim to fight terrorism while its best-trained officers are busy directing traffic for billionaires.
Finally, you and I need to ponder whether Nigeria continues to subsidise the fear of the rich, or will finally invest in the safety of its people. The health of a republic is not measured by the size of its convoys but by the calmness and security of its streets.
By Folorunso Adisa @ThePUNCH
