Former Inspector-General of Police Mike Okiro (retd.) has accused the Federal Government of worsening Nigeria’s security crisis by deliberately starving the Nigeria Police Force of the weapons and equipment needed to fight criminals.
Speaking on Tuesday at the First Daily National Dialogue on Security in Abuja, Okiro said the government’s failure to properly arm and support the police had left officers helpless against increasingly dangerous criminal gangs.
“The government, I would say, is contributing to insecurity itself.
“The police is the lead agency for internal security. But the government deliberately, I say deliberately, without any fear of contradiction, disarmed the police. The result is insecurity,” he declared.
Okiro said the era of policemen patrolling with only batons was over, stressing that officers now require modern weapons, communication gadgets, armoured vehicles and other operational equipment to combat today’s security threats.
“We have passed the stage of a policeman walking on the street with a baton. No more batons.
“The government should equip security agencies because they need equipment. They need communication gadgets, armoured vehicles and other operational tools,” he said.
The former police boss also blamed the worsening manpower shortage in the force on years of government failure to recruit new officers.
He recalled that while serving as Chairman of the Police Service Commission in 2013, it was discovered that no recruitment had taken place for five years despite thousands of officers leaving the force through retirement, death and other causes.
“We found that for five years there was no recruitment into the police. The police lost 59,730 personnel to retirements, deaths and other causes without replacement.
“Yet, you have young men and women, graduates and degree holders, who are citizens of Nigeria without jobs,” he said.
Okiro further knocked security agencies for poor intelligence sharing, saying needless bureaucracy often allows criminals to escape before action is taken.
“When I was Inspector-General, I wrote a memo to the National Security Adviser that agencies should work together. If the DSS director in Mubi gets information, he should discuss it immediately with the Divisional Police Officer instead of sending reports through Abuja before action is taken.
“Two or three days would have gone by. Will the criminals wait? They won’t,” he said.
Also at the event, former Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Lucky Irabor (retd.) warned that Nigeria’s defence spending is heavily skewed towards salaries, leaving little money for weapons, equipment and military modernisation.
He revealed that more than three-quarters of the country’s defence budget is spent on personnel costs, while military expenditure remains below one per cent of Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product despite the country’s growing security challenges.
“Furthermore, over three-quarters of Nigeria’s total defence budget is consumed by personnel cost alone… leaving an extremely narrow margin for procurement, maintenance and modernization.
“Nigeria’s total military expenditure remains below one percent of our Gross Domestic Product. For a country facing a security emergency and desirous of a quantum leap in development, that figure requires our attention,” Irabor said.
He added that figures from the Open Treasury Portal showed that although the Nigerian Army was allocated ₦20.56bn for equipment in the 2025 budget, only ₦1.46bn—representing just 7.1 per cent—had been released.
