Nigeria under President Bola Tinubu is described officially as a period of “reform-driven governance,” but a more critical reading reveals a state struggling with four interlocking governance failures: inconsistent public safety, selective law enforcement, controlled political space, and unequal protection. These are not abstract claims. They are observable in recurring incidents involving mass insecurity, protest crackdowns, critics detentions, and uneven application of state power.
The most visible failure is inconsistent public safety. Across Nigeria, the state’s ability to protect life and property is uneven, fragmented, and in many regions persistently absent. In the northwest, armed bandit groups continue to operate with relative impunity, conducting mass kidnappings, rural raids, and school abductions. In widely reported attacks, hundreds of students have been abducted in these states in repeated school attacks, underscoring the inability of security forces to prevent large-scale, predictable violence rather than merely respond after it occurs.
In the northeast, Boko Haram and ISWAP insurgent activity continues despite years of military operations. In the north-central region, communal violence in places such as Plateau State repeatedly escalates into mass killings and displacement. Amnesty International and other rights monitors also document continued civilian casualties linked to both armed groups and security responses. The result is not simply insecurity, but normalization of insecurity, where large populations adapt their daily lives to the absence of reliable state protection.
The deterioration of public safety is no longer confined to northern Nigeria. Insecurity is increasingly spreading into parts of the South that were previously considered relatively stable. Oyo State has become a notable example, where armed groups have carried out school abductions and rural kidnappings in recent years. These incidents highlight the expanding geographic reach of kidnapping networks beyond their traditional northern base. The significance lies in the erosion of the assumption that the South is insulated from mass abductions, reinforcing the broader reality of a nationwide security system under severe strain.
Closely linked to this is selective law enforcement, where the application of justice appears uneven across political and social categories. While Nigeria maintains formal legal equality, enforcement patterns suggest asymmetry in practice. Security agencies have been documented using broad legal tools such as cybercrime laws and public order statutes to detain journalists, activists, and critics following reports on corruption or during protests. For example, critics and investigative journalists have been arrested and detained after publishing corruption-related stories, with press freedom groups arguing that cybercrime provisions are increasingly used to suppress critical reporting. At the same time, major corruption scandals involving politically connected actors move slowly through the justice system or fade without comparable urgency. This creates a perception that the intensity of law enforcement is not consistent, but conditioned by political sensitivity and proximity to power.
A particularly sensitive dimension of this selective enforcement debate is the pattern of arrests linked to protest movements and political dissent. During nationwide protests against economic hardship in 2024, Amnesty International reported that security forces killed at least 24 protesters and detained over a thousand people, including minors, in mass arrests across multiple states. In several cases, protesters were charged with serious offenses such as treason, highlighting how quickly protest activity can be escalated into national security framing. While the government has sometimes released detainees under public pressure, the pattern reinforces the perception that enforcement can be harsh and expansive when dealing with dissent, while remaining uneven in other domains of crime control.
The third dimension is a controlled political space, where democratic structures remain intact but civic freedom is increasingly pressured through legal and administrative tools. Nigeria continues to hold elections and maintain multiple political parties, and opposition activity is not formally banned. However, journalists, activists, and civil society actors frequently report harassment, arrests, and legal intimidation. Amnesty International notes that critics of authorities have been arbitrarily detained and that security agencies have used excessive force during protest dispersals.
Press freedom organizations also document a broader trend of declining media space. Reports of journalists being arrested under cybercrime laws, SLAPP-style lawsuits, and repeated intimidation have contributed to a worsening press environment. In 2024 alone, dozens of journalists were reportedly assaulted or detained while covering protests, and Nigeria’s global press freedom ranking has declined in recent assessments. The overall effect is not total censorship, but a managed civic environment where expression remains possible but increasingly shaped by legal risk and institutional pressure.
Finally, there is the issue of unequal protection, which may be the most structurally damaging feature of the current system. In theory, the Nigerian state guarantees equal citizenship and protection under law. In practice, protection is highly stratified. Rural communities affected by banditry lack consistent security presence and are left to negotiate survival with armed actors or rely on informal self-defense arrangements. Meanwhile, political elites, senior officials, and wealthy individuals are more likely to have access to private security, rapid state response, and legal insulation. This creates a layered security order in which safety is not uniformly distributed but mediated by status, geography, and influence.
This inequality of protection extends beyond physical security into institutional responsiveness. High-profile cases involving elites tend to attract different levels of attention and procedural urgency compared to cases involving ordinary citizens. Over time, this produces a perception that the state does not function as a neutral guarantor of safety, but as a differentiated system where proximity to power determines the degree of protection one receives.
When these four dynamics are considered together, a consistent governance pattern emerges. Nigeria under Tinubu is not defined by institutional collapse, but by institutional asymmetry. Public safety is inconsistent, law enforcement is selectively applied, political expression is conditionally protected, and access to security is unevenly distributed. The state is present, but its benefits are not evenly delivered.
The political consequence is a gradual erosion of equal citizenship in practice. A state can endure hardship and even insecurity if citizens believe that rules are fairly enforced and protection is broadly shared. However, when safety becomes unreliable, law appears selectively applied, dissent carries variable risk, and protection depends on social position, governance shifts from a shared civic framework to a stratified system of access. That gap between formal equality and lived inequality is the defining feature of Nigeria’s current political condition under Tinubu.
