Nigeria’s impunity crisis

On the night of April 25, 2026, Abdulsamad Jamiu, 24, a youth corps member, was asleep in his room, in his family house at Shagari Quarters, Dei Dei, Abuja, when some soldiers from the Guards Brigade allegedly stormed the house, shot through his bedroom door and killed him. Perhaps the shooting was a mistake. But […]

On the night of April 25, 2026, Abdulsamad Jamiu, 24, a youth corps member, was asleep in his room, in his family house at Shagari Quarters, Dei Dei, Abuja, when some soldiers from the Guards Brigade allegedly stormed the house, shot through his bedroom door and killed him.

Perhaps the shooting was a mistake. But everything that happened before and after the shooting did not suggest professional conduct from the soldiers and the military as a whole. First, the soldiers claimed they were pursuing a criminal and were returning fire, but no evidence suggests that they had been fired upon, or if there was any weapon in the house. How the soldiers scaled the fence and accessed the property also raised questions.

Realising that they had killed an innocent man, the soldiers activated a cover-up mechanism. First, they tried to prevent the deceased’s sister, the only other person in the house at the time, from accessing the scene to confirm what had happened to her brother. Then they called in the police to evacuate the body, without due diligence, as police are wont to do. Then they ordered members of the local vigilante group to clean up the crime scene, mopping up the blood stains using kitchen supplies from the house. They collected the scattered pieces of his brain and skull from the floor and secretly buried them in the compound, only for the family to discover this later.

While the military was running helter-skelter to cook up a convincing story to explain this massive misconduct, the police themselves were involved in their own PR disaster because two days earlier, police officer, ASP Nuhu Usman, and his team took custody of 28-year-old aspiring musician, Mene Ogidi. He had been apprehended by officials of the Effurun Motor Park on suspicion of gunrunning for taking possession of a parcel containing a gun.

Ogidi was restrained, arms and legs, stripped of his shirt. He was being cooperative with the police and pleading for his life when ASP Usman, in full glare of the public and mobile phone camera lenses, shot him dead. They swept up the corpse into their truck and drove away.

Gory. Horrible, but sadly routine practice. It seems there is even a protocol for extrajudicial killing that often includes stripping the victims of their shirts for some reason, binding them hand and foot, and then shooting them in cold blood. We all remember the case of a certain Muhammad Yusuf, right? Shirtless, bound, under complete control of the police but then shot dead instead of being subjected to a trial for his crimes. It was as if the police did not want a trial, did not want the truth to come out. Did not want Yusuf or Ogidi to talk.

Yusuf’s death has fed into the narrative that brought about the Boko Haram insurgency—after all, he was the founder of that terrible terrorist group. There is a major security situation in the country; both the police and the military are stretched and tense. Ogidi might be involved in gunrunning or possibly worse, but there are always professional ways of handling suspects as enshrined in our policing laws.

The extrajudicial killings of Jamiu and Ogidi are only the latest instalments of the crisis of impunity that has existed in our system for so long and defied the non-committal claims of reforms the government has made. Six years after the #EndSARS protests over police brutality and the promised reforms of the policing system, the needle has hardly shifted.

Instead, the crisis has continued to fester, and the consequences have continued to grow. When the state kills unlawfully and is slow to investigate itself—or even attempts to cover up and protect its erring officers—it teaches citizens that life is negotiable, like the price of tomatoes at the market, and the law is optional.

While the police promptly acted in arresting Nuhu and his team, dismissed them from the force, and offered them up for prosecution, as it should, the military is still investigating itself for the killing of Jamiu after already making prejudicial statements that have branded the victim as a criminal while attempting to protect the shooter, whose identity has remained undisclosed.

The Guards Brigade is supposed to be guarding the president and securing the seat of power; it was never their mandate to be a community vigilante for select estates. Reports, however, indicate that the soldiers had an arrangement to provide security for the estate, and in the course of this service, the soldiers have often acted with impunity. They have been accused of inflicting corporal punishments and beating okada riders.

Yes, law enforcement sometimes entails the use of force; acts of impunity such as public humiliation, torture, physical, verbal, and emotional abuse, and extrajudicial killings are not included in the manual. These are unprofessional conduct and criminal behaviour that blur the line between professionals and criminal gangs. Yet these patterns are so entrenched that they have become the norm every time military and policing operations spill into public spaces.

The consequence, as we have seen with Boko Haram, is not curbing crimes, but raising a divergent army of people with reasons to be angry at the state and its institutions of law enforcement, especially in cases where instead of justice, the state covers up, protects its erring officers, and strings up the victims as criminals when they are often not.

This matters a lot because, aside from extrajudicial killings and other grievous acts of impunity, the abuse of power by security personnel has become so widespread that when the victims are not killed, they are often damaged for life. Who can explain the damage that the 16-year-old girl from Kwara would suffer after the police, who were pursuing her brother, detained her, tortured and beat her up, and made sexual advances at her?

Or that 14-year-old girl who, in 2017, while running an errand, was kidnapped by police corporal Barau Garba, who sexually abused her for six days? Despite his summary dismissal from the force following an orderly room trial, there has been no report of his subsequent trial and conviction for his criminal offences nine years after the crime. There were even serious attempts at the time by the police to give Barau a soft landing away from the eyes of the outraged public. They attempted to negotiate with the victim’s family to let the officer off the hook.

Sadly, offending officers are often shielded by the institutions and given soft landings when complaints are made. Severe actions, such as dismissals, are often taken only after public outrage.

The military and the police do not have to be compelled to sanitise their institutions from unprofessional conduct, as routine housekeeping should be mandatory. These institutions cannot operate on the default assumption of covering up the crimes of their personnel, blaming the victim, and burying his or her body along with the truth. The cost of these liabilities on the institutions, financially, and the reputational harm they incur on account of this self-inflicted impunity crisis cannot be quantified.

Institutional reforms are inevitable. These institutions must create truly independent investigation teams that are objective, fair, and accessible to the public. They must publish mandatory timelines for proceedings instead of allowing investigations to drag into obscurity until public outrage is dead. Security operatives must receive regular training to enhance their professionalism; public conduct and accountability infrastructure must be put in place. While this may seem fancy for our low-tech policing operations, the use of body cameras should be essential to protect both the officers from false claims and the victims from impunity.

The impunity crisis is a government failure. When the state kills its people outside the law, it weakens the very law it claims to defend and perpetuates a state that answers insecurity with unlawful killings and abuses.

The reforms will not weaken military or police power but will rather make state power lawful, disciplined, and accountable. Without this, the only difference between our lawmen and the outlaws is the uniform, and even that is a contested field.