At the recent Nigerian Bar Association Conference in Enugu, Chief Mike Ozekhome, SAN, made a chilling observation: “There is nothing like national security in Nigeria; what we have is government security.” That statement is not mere rhetoric — it is an unmasking of a reality that daily confronts Nigerians.
Consider the Auchi–Benin tragedy. Nigerians were kidnapped in broad daylight. A man, shot and left helpless, lay on the ground. Security personnel — agents whose existence is justified only by their duty to protect — drove past. No rescue. No intervention. Not even the human instinct to check for life. This grotesque indifference is not just failure; it is betrayal.
And that was only the one captured on camera. Who knows how many of these atrocities happen daily, off camera, unrecorded, unseen, swallowed by silence? For every documented incident, countless untold horrors are buried in forgotten corners of our highways and villages.
What then is the meaning of security in a nation where the taxpayer bleeds to fund an apparatus that serves only the political class? What we have is not a security architecture for the people, but a protective cordon for the state elite. Convoys bristle with arms to guard those in power, while ordinary citizens are left to the claws of bandits.
Thomas Hobbes, my namesake, warned that without security, life collapses into a state that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Nigeria seems to have circled back to that primitive stage, where survival depends not on the social contract, but on individual strength and sheer luck. The very idea of the state — as articulated by John Locke — is that men surrender some freedom in exchange for the guarantee of life and property. Where the state reneges, Locke argues, sovereignty reverts to the people.
Even our own Constitution in Section 14(2)(b) is unambiguous: “The security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.” When that clause is mocked in practice, what remains of the legitimacy of governance? Jean-Jacques Rousseau foresaw this when he wrote: “The moment a people gives itself representatives, it ceases to be free.” If those representatives do not protect life, then Nigerians are not free, but enslaved by insecurity.
Meanwhile, criminals flaunt their weapons and their wealth on social media, as though mocking the state. Banditry is not only unchecked; it is almost normalized. In a society where criminals enjoy visibility and impunity, and citizens live invisibly in fear, we must ask: who truly governs?
Wole Soyinka once declared, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” Silence now would be complicity. Nigeria is at the crossroads of statehood: either to reclaim the social contract and reassert that the citizen is supreme, or to drift fully into a neo-Hobbesian jungle where government exists only for itself.
This is no longer about policy debates. It is about the survival of the Nigerian state itself. What we have is not national security. It is government security — a fortress for the few, and a graveyard for the many. Until Nigeria reverses this order, the claim of being a modern state is nothing but a hollow boast.
