Elnathan John@elnathan_john
It is deeply revealing how casually Nigerians say things like “X (a private citizen) arrested Y”—as though it were normal, even acceptable, for private individuals to deploy the police as personal enforcers. Hardly anyone pauses to ask how, in a so-called democracy, a person can be abducted and detained by armed agents of the state simply for saying something offensive, when clear legal remedies for libel and slander already exist. That silence tells you everything.
The Nigerian Police is not a law-enforcement institution in any meaningful sense. It functions largely as a marketplace for coercion—thugs for hire, available to whoever can pay or threaten enough. A society policed this way cannot develop. It cannot mature. It cannot be trusted to protect anything fragile: dissent, minorities, truth, or even basic fairness.
What makes this worse is the moral incoherence of the public outrage that occasionally erupts. Nigeria’s violence is not merely institutional; it is cultural. Many who protest injustice do so only because they are on the receiving end of it—not because they believe in dignity as a principle, or equality as a value, or restraint as a civic virtue. They do not oppose cruelty; they simply resent being its targets.
I learned this the hard way. I once joined others in calling for the release of a man unlawfully detained by a politician in Kaduna. Months after his release, I came across his tweets calling for violence against gay people—describing them as disgusting and deserving of harm. The same man we had defended. The same man invoking rights when power turned against him, and brutality when it did not.
This is the country as it is. Nigerians do not yet want justice; they want advantage. They do not yet want dignity for all; they want immunity for themselves. When Nigerians truly desire equality, restraint, and a humane public order, they will organise, resist, and demand it—consistently, even when it protects people they dislike. Until then, the present reality is not an accident. It is the outcome of collective choices, rehearsed daily and defended loudly.
For now, Nigerians deserve each other.