Kayode Adebiyi insecurity emotion policy warning argues Nigeria cannot defeat insecurity through outrage alone, urging systemic reforms instead
Every time another gruesome killing, mass kidnapping, or terrorist attack occurs in Nigeria, a familiar cycle begins.
The videos emerge.
The tears flow.
Social media erupts.
The outrage becomes volcanic.
The President is insulted, governors are abused, politicians are cursed and blame travels in every imaginable direction. Within hours, everyone becomes a security expert, a political analyst, and a judge.
Then, after days of emotional exhaustion, another tragedy occurs elsewhere and the cycle begins again.
The uncomfortable truth Nigerians often do not like to hear is this: emotional reaction is not security policy.
No nation has ever shouted its way out of insecurity.
This is not to suggest that people should become emotionless in the face of barbarity, nor is it an argument against grief, anger, or public outrage.
Human beings are emotional creatures, and any society that ceases to mourn innocent victims has already begun to lose its humanity.
We must grieve, we must condemn evil, and we must demand accountability from leaders.
However, we must also confront an inconvenient reality: outrage by itself solves nothing.
If insulting presidents were a security strategy, Nigeria should have become one of the safest countries in Africa by now.
Former President Goodluck Jonathan was criticised relentlessly during the height of insurgency.
He was mocked, ridiculed, and labelled weak, clueless, and incapable of protecting the nation.
Then came Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general whom many Nigerians believed possessed the military credentials necessary to crush insecurity decisively.
Yet when kidnappings, terrorism, and banditry continued under his administration, he too became the subject of public anger and relentless criticism. Today, that frustration has shifted toward Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The names change, the faces change, but the insecurity remains stubbornly persistent.
The pattern never changes. One government leaves office under a cloud of outrage, another comes in under fresh hope, and eventually the same insecurity problems persist, leading citizens to once again search for a political figure to hold singularly responsible.
At what point do we stop and ask ourselves a more difficult question: what if the problem is larger than personalities? What if insecurity in Nigeria is fundamentally systemic?
This is where emotion often clouds national reasoning.
Many Nigerians appear to believe that if enough citizens scream loudly enough at the President online, somehow insecurity will disappear.
It is almost as though we subconsciously imagine that public insults will suddenly make a president omnipresent, invisible, and capable of personally confronting terrorists in forests, kidnappers on highways, or violent criminal networks spread across vast territories.
While frustration with leadership failures is understandable, this way of thinking oversimplifies an extraordinarily complex crisis.
The reality is that Nigeria’s insecurity challenge is structural. It is rooted in weak institutions, poor intelligence gathering, inadequate policing, porous borders, corruption, outdated security frameworks, insufficient technology, judicial inefficiencies, unemployment, poverty, and decades of accumulated governance failures.
These are deeply embedded problems that cannot be solved merely through emotional reactions or public condemnation. You cannot cure a structural disease with emotional medicine.
The United States offers an uncomfortable but useful comparison.
Whenever there is a school shooting in America, particularly one involving children, the country erupts emotionally.
Parents cry before television cameras, citizens protest, communities grieve, politicians are attacked verbally, and presidents are heavily criticised. Social media becomes flooded with outrage and demands for justice.
Yet despite the emotional intensity that follows every tragedy, the shootings continue. Why? Because America’s gun violence crisis extends beyond emotion into the realm of systemic dysfunction.
Many Americans argue that stricter gun laws could significantly reduce mass shootings, yet meaningful reform continues to stall because of constitutional protections, political lobbying, partisan division, and legislative resistance.
In other words, America’s problem is not a shortage of outrage. Americans are outraged after nearly every school massacre. Their problem is systemic paralysis, where institutions struggle or refuse to enact the structural reforms many believe are necessary.
Nigeria suffers from something remarkably similar. We have become experts in emotional reaction but lag behind in institutional reform.
Following every kidnapping or massacre, Nigerians understandably ask: Where was the President? Where was the Governor? These are fair questions because leadership matters, and governments deserve scrutiny.
Security failures should never become normalised, and those entrusted with power must be held accountable for protecting lives and property. Yet accountability is different from emotional scapegoating.
No governor can physically police every village in a state. No president can personally secure every forest, highway, or remote community across a country as large and complex as Nigeria.
Security succeeds when institutions function effectively. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s institutional framework remains deeply inadequate for the scale and sophistication of the threats confronting the nation.
One of the biggest elephants in the room remains the question of state policing.
Nigeria continues to operate one of the most centralised policing systems in the world despite enormous geographical, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural complexities.
A police command operating from Abuja cannot reasonably understand every local criminal network in remote communities better than people who actually live there.
Bandits understand the terrain. Kidnappers know the escape routes.
Terrorists exploit intelligence gaps and local vulnerabilities.
Yet local authorities often lack sufficient operational autonomy to respond swiftly and effectively.
This does not mean state policing should be introduced recklessly or without safeguards.
Legitimate concerns exist regarding potential abuse by governors, political intimidation, and weaponisation against opposition voices.
These concerns deserve serious constitutional safeguards. However, refusing to seriously reconsider Nigeria’s security architecture while expecting different results amounts to national self-deception.
We cannot continue doing the same thing in the same way and expect a fundamentally different outcome. That is not governance. That is wishful thinking.
The recent gruesome murder of a teacher in Ogbomoso, accompanied by disturbing footage deliberately circulated by terrorists, painfully illustrates another dangerous dimension of modern insecurity: psychology.
Terror groups understand something many ordinary citizens do not fully appreciate, namely that violence alone is not their only weapon. Emotion is.
The deliberate release of graphic videos is often strategic, intended not merely to document violence but to spread fear, provoke anger, deepen public distrust in government, and emotionally destabilise society.
Terrorism thrives not only on bloodshed but also on psychological victory.
This is why the issue is not whether Nigerians should show emotions.
Of course we should.
The murder of innocent people should hurt us.
Communities should mourn.
Parents should cry.
Citizens should demand accountability from leaders.
Anyone unmoved by such brutality risks becoming dangerously detached from human suffering.
However, what must change is our tendency to stop at emotional reaction without advancing the deeper conversation about systemic solutions.
The real question should no longer simply be: Who do we blame? A more important question is: What systems must change? How do we improve intelligence gathering?
How do we modernise surveillance and strengthen local intelligence networks? How do we reform policing to become more community based and locally responsive?
How do we secure vulnerable rural communities?
How do we reform constitutional frameworks to address modern security threats more effectively?
Unless these questions become central to national discourse, Nigeria risks remaining trapped in a painful and repetitive cycle: attack, outrage, blame, temporary outrage fatigue, and repetition.
A nation cannot emotionally react itself into security.
At some point, outrage must mature into institutional reform.
Only then can insecurity begin to retreat, and only then can Nigerians begin to see meaningful progress beyond the endless cycle of grief, anger, and helplessness.
