Former Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Lucky Irabor (rtd), has called for Nigeria to move beyond the declaration of a state of emergency on insecurity and match the pronouncement with the political will, resources and institutional reforms required to defeat the country’s worsening security challenges.
Irabor, who spoke from nearly four decades of experience in the military, including his service as Theatre Commander of Operation LAFIYA DOLE in the Northeast and later as Chief of Defence Staff, said Nigeria’s security crisis could no longer be treated as a conventional policing problem.
He spoke on Tuesday in Abuja as keynote speaker at the First Daily 6th Anniversary Public Lecture and First Daily National Dialogue on Security, held at the Shehu Yar’Adua Conference Centre.
The theme of the dialogue was “Declaration of State of Emergency on Insecurity: Matching Words with Action.”
For Irabor, the subject was not merely academic.
He told the gathering that his assessment of Nigeria’s security situation was informed by experiences accumulated over decades on the frontline, where he confronted Boko Haram insurgents, coordinated military operations and witnessed first-hand the human cost of insecurity.
“With almost 40 years of service growing through the officers’ cadre, serving as Theatre Commander of Operation LAFIYA DOLE, now HADIN KAI, in the Northeast, where I confronted Boko Haram insurgency head-on, culminating as the Chief of Defence Staff, I can say that I have first-hand experience to talk about the state of Nigeria’s security,” he said.
Irabor urged Nigerians to look beyond the statistics surrounding killings and abductions and recognise the human beings behind the numbers.
He recalled the headline published by First Daily on July 1, which reported that 79,323 Nigerians had been killed and 34,773 abducted in six years.
According to him, the figures should not be reduced to statistics.
“There is a tendency, when we encounter figures of this scale, to process them as statistics, to file them somewhere in the mind as data points about a security situation,” he said.
“I want us to resist that today because behind every one of those 79,323 deaths is a name, a face. A child who no longer has a father. A community that buried one of its own and has not fully recovered.”
He said the scale of kidnapping and ransom payments provided another grim illustration of the crisis.
Between July 2024 and June 2025, he said, SBM Intelligence recorded 4,722 abductions in 997 incidents, with families paying ₦2.57 billion in ransom.
“They had to pay the money not because they had it but because they had no choice,” Irabor said.
‘I Have Buried Colleagues’
The former defence chief’s most personal account came towards the end of his address, when he reflected on what years of military service had exposed him to.
“In the course of my active military duties, I have buried colleagues,” he said.
“I have visited hospitals where young soldiers were recovering from injuries sustained in service. I have sat with communities across the country who had lost everything.”
But those experiences, he said, had also shown him the capacity of Nigerian security forces when they are properly led, equipped and supported.
“I have also seen what Nigerian security forces, properly led, properly supported, and properly equipped, can achieve,” he said.
“I have seen the discipline, the courage, and the professionalism that exists in this institution.”
It was this experience, Irabor said, that informed his argument that Nigeria’s problem was not simply a lack of brave men and women in uniform.
Rather, he identified political will, inadequate resources, institutional weaknesses, poor coordination and structural deficiencies as some of the major obstacles to defeating insecurity.
Emergency Declaration Must Mean More Than Words
Irabor said a state of emergency under Section 305 of the Constitution was not merely a political expression or rhetorical device.
It was a legal instrument designed to allow government to concentrate powers, attention and resources on an extraordinary threat.
“When you declare a state of emergency, certain processes of government are suspended. Certain functions are deprioritised and resources are concentrated on the emergency,” he explained.
“In effect, Emergency declaration suspends the normal to address the critical.”
He then posed what he described as the critical questions confronting the country: what has actually been suspended since the declaration of an emergency on insecurity? What has been deprioritised? What resources have been concentrated? What procedures have been altered?
Irabor said he had previously advocated a state of emergency on insecurity, but argued that Nigeria should go further by declaring what he described as a genuine war against insecurity.
“I believe we should declare war on insecurity and I do not mean a metaphorical war,” he said.
“I mean a formal, constitutional, resource-backed declaration that says: we have identified an existential threat to the Nigerian state and we are mobilising every element of state power at our disposal to defeat it.”
In his assessment, Nigeria had not yet reached that level of mobilisation.
He nevertheless acknowledged what he described as “glimmers of hope”, particularly President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s moves towards state police and the expansion of the Nigerian Army.
Political Will Is the Missing Link
Irabor identified political will as perhaps the most consequential gap in Nigeria’s security response.
Technical capability, he said, was important, as was the courage of soldiers and other security personnel on the battlefield. But those attributes could not compensate for political decisions that failed to adequately back the security architecture.
Political will, he explained, meant the willingness to make difficult choices, including diverting resources from popular programmes to less visible but essential security needs.
“It is the willingness to tell the public: we are in an emergency, and in an emergency, not everything can happen at once. Some things must wait. Security cannot,” he said.
Irabor cited budget implementation figures to illustrate the problem.
He said the Nigerian Army had an approved equipment budget of ₦20.56 billion for 2025 but that only ₦1.46 billion, or 7.1 per cent, had been released as of the reporting period he referenced.
He also cited an approved Nigerian Air Force aircraft maintenance allocation of ₦34.71 billion, of which only 13.98 per cent had reportedly been released.
The former defence chief further referenced reports that only ₦16.71 billion, or 4.96 per cent, of the ₦336.76 billion budgeted for Army defence equipment had been released.
Such figures, he argued, were difficult to reconcile with the declaration of a national security emergency.
Irabor, however, commended recent military operations, including rescue missions, the disruption of kidnapping networks and the clearance of some operational zones.
“These are genuine accomplishments by men and women who are doing extraordinary things under very difficult conditions,” he said.
The challenge, he added, was to make such successes “not occasional victories but the consistent standard.”
Why Irabor Backs State Police
Drawing on his understanding of internal security operations, Irabor strongly endorsed the establishment of state police.
He argued that the police, rather than the military, should remain the primary security agency for internal security in a democracy, with the military serving as a supplementary instrument.
But he warned that simply establishing state police without institutional safeguards could reproduce existing problems.
“None of those objectives are achieved simply by renaming a police station and putting a state logo on it,” he said.
He acknowledged concerns that governors could weaponise state police against political opponents, but argued that the risk should be managed through strong accountability mechanisms rather than used as a justification for retaining what he described as a dysfunctional status quo.
He recommended independent state police service commissions, legislative oversight, judicial recourse for citizens and a federal framework capable of intervening where state police structures are abused.
“What we must not do is repeat the error of creating a structure that looks like reform and functions like the same old problem in a different uniform,” he warned.
‘There Is No Strong Nation Without a Strong Military’
Irabor’s argument for greater investment in national defence was grounded in his operational experience.
“There is no strong nation without a strong and professional military,” he said.
He listed night-fighting capability, protective equipment, all-terrain mobility, reliable communications, surveillance and other combat-enabling systems as minimum requirements for modern military operations.
He also placed soldiers’ welfare at the centre of military effectiveness.
“The family of a soldier serving in a forward operating base needs to know that their housing is secure, that their children can go to school, that medical care is available, that if the worst happens, their sacrifice will be honoured and supported,” he said.
For Irabor, welfare was not a peripheral benefit but an operational necessity.
He also welcomed the recent expansion of Nigerian Army formations, but warned that expansion without corresponding investment in personnel, training, equipment, accommodation, healthcare and administrative support could create new institutional weaknesses.
Poverty, Corruption and Institutional Silos
Irabor argued that Nigeria could not defeat insecurity solely through military operations.
He identified poverty and unemployment, institutional coordination failures, corruption and the absence of a whole-of-government approach as four major impediments.
An unemployed and hungry young person without prospects, he said, could become vulnerable to recruitment by criminal groups.
He rejected approaches based primarily on stipends and political “empowerment”, arguing instead for labour-intensive infrastructure projects, mechanised agriculture and construction programmes capable of putting young Nigerians into productive employment.
He also criticised the tendency of security and law enforcement agencies to operate in silos.
The military, police, intelligence services, Customs, EFCC, Immigration and Correctional Service, he noted, all possess pieces of information relevant to national security.
“The criminal networks we are fighting do not observe our institutional boundaries. Our response must not be constrained by them,” he said.
Irabor also warned against what he called the “corruption tax on security”, arguing that every naira lost to procurement fraud, undelivered contracts or equipment that exists only on paper represented a lost opportunity to protect Nigerians.
Nigeria Must Build Its Own Defence Industry
One of Irabor’s strongest recommendations was the development of a Nigerian military-industrial complex.
He warned that dependence on foreign suppliers for military hardware constituted a strategic vulnerability.
Referring to arguments contained in his book SCARS and Rear Admiral Sola Oluwagbire’s Shadows of Power, he said Nigeria needed to reduce its dependence on foreign sources for defence equipment and develop the capacity to produce, maintain and innovate its own systems.
The objective, he said, should not be expected to materialise overnight.
Rather, it should become a declared national objective supported by a funded roadmap involving research institutions, universities, polytechnics and deliberate technology-transfer requirements in foreign procurement agreements.
He also advocated the wider deployment of technology for surveillance, intelligence gathering, biometric systems, integrated communications and community reporting.
“Technology is not an option in this environment. It is a requirement,” he said.
‘The War Against Insecurity Can Be Won’
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Irabor concluded by challenging Nigerians and political leaders to redefine the central question surrounding the country’s security crisis.
The question, he said, was no longer whether Nigeria was facing a security crisis or whether something needed to be done.
“We know the answer to that,” he said.
The real question, according to the retired general, is whether the country has “the will, the structure, and the commitment to do what the situation actually requires.”
He outlined what a genuine emergency response should look like: full mobilisation of state power, release of budgeted resources, urgent procurement, implementation of state police under world-class standards, productive engagement of unemployed youths, systematic deployment of technology and mandatory coordination among security agencies.
Above all, he called for political leadership willing to tell Nigerians the truth about the scale of the crisis and the sacrifices required to confront it.
Looking back on his own military career, Irabor said his experiences had convinced him that Nigeria possesses the human capacity to defeat insecurity.
“I have seen the discipline, the courage, and the professionalism that exists in this institution,” he said.
“That capacity deserves to be properly harnessed. Nigeria deserves it.”
He described the emergency declaration as a “statement of intent” but said the time had come to turn the declaration into action.
“We need to back the security agencies with resources as the emergency demands,” he said. “Implement the state police with world class standards on the key parameters. Build the military-industrial complex that will reduce our strategic dependency.”
And to Nigerians, he delivered a final appeal:
“This is your country. Love it. Its security is your business. Play your part. Ask questions. Demand answers.”
“The war against insecurity is a war that can be won. It must be won.”