“You will never find justice in a world where criminals make the law.” — Bob Marley.
The reggae prophet’s words, uttered decades ago with a Caribbean lilt, have never felt more prophetic on Nigerian soil than they do today. And nowhere is this tension between political convenience and civic responsibility more dangerously exposed than in Lagos State, where the machinery of electoral permutation now threatens to eclipse the urgent business of securing over 20 million lives.
Let us be blunt. The emergence of Dr. Kadri Obafemi Hamzat as the All Progressives Congress governorship candidate for the 2027 election, secured through a landslide primary that many regard as the orchestrated handiwork of the Lagos political establishment, raises a question far weightier than who sits in Alausa: Who is minding the gates while the politicians play musical chairs?
This is not an attack on Dr. Hamzat’s credentials. He is a trained engineer and has served capably in his lane. But credentials do not automatically translate into the urgency, courage, and structural seriousness that the present security environment in South-West Nigeria demands. The region is no longer merely watching fires burn in the North-East from a comfortable distance. The flames are licking southward.
Ekiti, Ondo, and Oyo States have each, within recent memory, recorded terrorism attacks and painful civilian experiences. What was once a northern affliction is now a South-West reality. Farmers have been slaughtered. Communities have been displaced. Schools have become corridors of dread. The South-West, long celebrated as Nigeria’s economic and intellectual engine, is being systematically destabilised.
If UNICEF estimates that the North-East alone has suffered cumulative economic losses approaching $100 billion from deaths, displacement, and lost productivity, then those who govern the South-West must understand what prolonged insecurity will cost this region’s industries, agriculture, commerce, and institutions of learning. The arithmetic of negligence is merciless.
Yet Lagos, the commercial capital, the port city, the artery through which Nigeria breathes, continues to project a veneer of normalcy while deep vulnerabilities quietly deepen. Official data may point to relatively low incidences of mass casualty events within school premises, and the Safe Schools Lagos framework (SSLAG), alongside the mandates of the Lagos State Safety Commission Law No. CI87 of 2011, represents genuine institutional effort. But vulnerability assessments and safety audits cannot substitute for command-level political will to confront insecurity at its roots.
Lagos is a porous city. Its waterways, shanty corridors, unchecked border communities, and the sheer density of its informal settlements create conditions that are, frankly, a security planner’s nightmare. The response rate to incidents across the state’s sprawling geography remains deeply uneven. You cannot police a megacity with the same architecture designed for a mid-sized administrative capital.
This is precisely why the Lagos State Neighbourhood Safety Corps (LNSC), Nigeria’s most ambitious community-policing initiative — carries so much weight and promise. The Corps operates at the grassroots, across all local governments, focused on intelligence gathering, emergency response, and localised surveillance. It supplements a police force chronically stretched beyond capacity. It is, in the language of security theory, the nerve endings of the state’s protective body.
But recruitment into the LNSC must not become another avenue for political patronage. The corps must be trained, adequately remunerated, equipped with functional communication infrastructure, and genuinely empowered to serve — not as political foot soldiers during election cycles, but as professional safety operatives throughout the year. Workers at the community level deserve the protection of swift-response protocols. Market traders, school teachers, public transport operators, and the urban poor must not be left to fend for themselves while governors budget ₦1.429 billion monthly, that is over ₦17 billion annually, in security votes whose accountability remains opaque.
Nigeria’s experience in the North-East has taught us one irreversible lesson: schools are targets. They are visible, symbolic, and populated by the defenceless. When Boko Haram chose Chibok, it chose a school. When bandits raid communities in the North-West, schools empty first. The terror playbook is not a secret.
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In Lagos today, the dominant security threats within educational environments are cultism, gang violence, and behavioural deviance among adolescents. These are not minor disciplinary matters. They are the gateway pathologies through which young men are inducted into criminal ecosystems that eventually serve wider criminal and political interests. Left unaddressed systematically, they metastasise.
Any incoming administration, whether led by Dr. Hamzat or another, must treat school safety not as a checkbox in a government brochure, but as a front-line security imperative. SSLAG frameworks must be funded adequately, audited transparently, and their recommendations implemented with urgency. A Safe Schools framework without enforcement is bureaucratic theatre.
The deeper problem is structural. When governorship transitions in a state as consequential as Lagos are determined by internal party choreography rather than open, competitive democracy, the incoming occupant of Alausa arrives already indebted to the machinery that installed him. His first loyalty, inevitably, is not to the twenty million but to the few. This is not governance. This is custodianship on behalf of a cartel.
Political abracadabra, the Lagos tradition of producing candidates through carefully managed outcomes, cannot solve the problem of insecurity. Security requires hard decisions that often alienate powerful interests: dismantling criminal networks with political connections, holding errant security contractors accountable, resisting the temptation to use community safety infrastructure for electoral mobilisation. These decisions require genuine political independence, and political independence is precisely what the abracadabra system is designed to eliminate.
This is not a period for arm-twisting political madness and cowardice. It is a period that demands statesmanship. The South-West is at an inflection point. The region can choose to take security seriously before tragedy forces its hand, or it can learn the terrible lesson that every region ravaged by terrorism has learned, that the cost of prevention is always far cheaper than the cost of recovery.
Dr. Hamzat and every aspirant to leadership in Lagos must commit publicly and credibly to these irreducible obligations: strengthen and professionalise the LNSC with proper training, living wages, and swift-response infrastructure; enforce and fund school safety audits transparently under the SSLAG framework; establish clear accountability mechanisms for the state’s security vote; and build inter-agency intelligence coordination across Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, and Ondo to track terror migration southward.
The time for political distraction is over. Lagos cannot afford a governor whose primary occupation is debt to his patrons. It needs a leader who understands that security is not a campaign promise, it is the foundation upon which everything else, commerce, education, democracy, and dignity, stands or falls.
Bob Marley warned us. The question is whether we are listening.
Moshood Oshunfurewa writes from Lagos and can be reached thro:
moshoodho2025@gmail.com