By Richard Ikiebe

Some politicians depend on massive turnout to win, while others thrive when citizens are too afraid to leave their homes to vote. The recent stream of videos from Benin City, of attacks on politicians and the vandalism of a party state secretariat, reprises a familiar script in Nigeria’s fear-based politics.

In political theory, “politics of fear” refers to the deliberate production and amplification of fear to secure power, shape opinion and justify the measures. In a landscape already saturated by insecurity and weak institutions, violence against segments of the electorate and opposition figures is a cheap and effective way to intimidate, exhaust and demobilise the opposition.

The goal is not to win the argument before the people. It scares enough people off the path to the polling booth so that a small group of loyalists remains. Those forced to abdicate their civic role reconsider and say, “Politics no concern me.” Thus, indifference becomes the first layer.

The next layer is cautious observation. This involves citizens who still watch, talk, and complain. They “sidon look,” attentive but disengaged. They have not entirely abandoned the system they no longer believe in; fear hardens their posture into resignation.

Stories of past electoral violence, thuggery at polling units, ballot snatching, and clashes with security forces add to the mix. Stay away begins to appear quite reasonable and justifiable: nothing will change, they will rig it anyway, and you might get hurt trying. At that point, “sidon look” turns fear and private cynicism into self-preservation and public silence.

Political fear is largely manufactured, crafted and transmitted through headlines, rumour and threats. Around every election, gruesome violence stories multiply about “unknown gunmen,” and neighbourhoods that had been “taught a lesson.” The discreet advice: today is not the day to move around.

With thugs and “area boys” at polling centres, masked security officers with uncertain loyalties, every citizen walking towards the polling unit is forced to ask themselves: is my single vote worth this risk? And the absence of credible protection reinforces the feeling. For many, even the determined, the answer is no. The result is low, skewed turnout, a quiet victory for the architects of fear.

In Nigeria’s patron-client landscape, fear largely travels through intermediaries. Traditional rulers, market leaders, transport union bosses and community gatekeepers sit between political elites and ordinary citizens, wielding mostly economic authority. In a healthy democracy, they would mobilise people to participate freely and defend their rights.

In our reality, these intermediaries “advise” citizens on which candidates must win to “deliver” results, and which parties must not gain a foothold in the community. The pressure for them ranges from loss of access to removal from office, or worse – physical harm. Under such conditions, their instructions become menacing signals not to come out at all. Bloc voting and mass apathy are the unlikely twins, the result of organised fear.

Fear-based politics has a simple electoral logic. High turnout creates uncertainty and genuine possibilities for change; low, selective turnout protects those already in control. When urban youth, minorities, or disillusioned swing voters decide it is safer to stay home, the electorate is filtered.

Those who remain are loyalists, dependants in patronage networks, or people mobilised by local intermediaries who can guarantee safety in return for forced obedience. In that narrower Nigeria, a winner need not be broadly popular. Fear has already structured the electorate in their favour.

As the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) releases the timetable for next year’s elections, fear-based politics risks hardening into the system’s default setting. Voters betrayed or endangered in 2015 and 2023 are already inclined to withdraw. Every election cycle that rewards intimidation and demobilisation tells politicians, this works, do more of it.

If this continues, elections will rest on the consent of a shrinking, skewed slice of the population, and state legitimacy will continue to erode steadily. Over time, a culture of learned helplessness takes root; the people assume that “they” will always rig elections, and the alternative begins to feel impossible. And democracy is devoid of popular choice.

Breaking this cycle requires justified outrage and a deliberate effort to change both the emotional climate of elections and the structures that make fear politically profitable. First, physical risks must be visibly reduced. Election security cannot be an afterthought or a mere show of force; it must credibly guarantee that voters can come and go unharmed, and that perpetrators and sponsors of violence face real consequences.

Second, intermediaries must be protected. Traditional rulers, religious leaders, and market associations will stay influential, while law and public scrutiny must limit how their authority is coerced or weaponised.

Third, fear narrative must shift through counterstrokes of courage, solidarity and efficacy. Civic and political education must speak directly to fear and “sidon look,” helping citizens recognise demobilisation tactics and see abstention as a costly choice, and not neutral self-protection.

If fear remains a most reliable political instrument, each election will become another expression of a paper-thin democracy that evaporates at the polling unit. The challenge is to move from rule by fear to rule by consent, from a politics defined by who stays away to one genuinely shaped by who dares to show up.

Dr Richard Ikiebe is a Media and Management Consultant and Teacher.

By Deji Olatoye

In late 2025, an unusual consensus on the need for decentralised policing emerged. Driven by the twin pressures of rampant internal violence and a damaging US designation of Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern,” functionaries from President Bola Tinubu to the Governors’ Forums of both the southern and northern states all agreed to it, employing the familiar language of “state police.

Many are asking, almost rhetorically, “won’t governors simply turn state police into enforcers of thirty-six political fiefdoms?” Such doubts, while understandable, risk obscuring a basic truth: the current system has severely underserved citizens, a failure rooted in a fundamental design flaw that now demands correction.

Yet, this public caution is our most valuable asset. It compels us to see that the goal is not decentralisation for its own sake, but the creation of a functional system. At the heart of the current dysfunction lies a flawed constitutional framework.

Section 11(2) of the 1999 constitution empowers the Houses of Assembly of the states to make laws for the maintenance and securing of public safety and public order in their respective states, similar to the powers of the National Assembly with respect to the federation in Section 11(1). Yet, item 45 of the Exclusive Legislative List in the same constitution reserves policing exclusively to the Federal Government. In fact, securing supplies and services – essentially personnel and materiel – for the actualisation of the powers under Section 11(2) has to be specifically designated by the National Assembly.

This contradiction puts a lie to the popular designation of governors as the chief security officers of their states. It creates a security architecture in which two critical gears grind at odds. The emerging consensus hears the noise. The task is to reengineer the machine carefully.

For years, Nigerians accepted this flawed design as a necessary, if clumsy, compromise for national unity – a post-civil-war necessity. But the evidence of failure is now overwhelming. The 2023 World Internal Security & Police Index ranks Nigeria 124th out of 125 countries. The lived experience of citizens confirms the statistic.

Between 2020 and 2024, the North-West accounted for 59.6 per cent of all kidnappings (driven by banditry), while the North-Central suffered 72.3 per cent of farmer-herder conflict fatalities (Nextier’s Nigeria Violent Conflicts Database, 2025).

The South-East grapples with syndicated kidnapping and secessionist violence, the South-South with cultism and oil theft, while the South-West contends with diverse crimes. One distant, centralised gear cannot mesh with or resolve these fundamentally divergent local crises.

This grinding contradiction has now produced a grey zone of legality to which states respond either through desperate innovation or brazen exploitation, creating outfits of widely varying legitimacy and effectiveness. Regulated experiments exist – Lagos State Neighbourhood Safety Corps and Security Trust Fund – but so do problematic mandates, such as Hisbah in Kano, which at times cram down on constitutionally guaranteed rights.

From the Civilian Joint Task Force in the North-East to Amotekun in the South-West and Ebube Agu in the South-East, the country has become a patchwork of ad-hoc arrangements. The same contradiction sets the pretext for the opaque “security votes.”

In 2025 alone twenty-one states allocated ₦133 billion through this mechanism, with no standardised audit linking expenditure to tangible security outcomes. Formally decentralising policing powers offer an opportunity to close current loopholes by bringing the assorted initiatives under a common, minimum standards.

The fact is that Nigeria stands out of step with the guiding principle for the efficient design of policing structures globally: subsidiarity, by which the policing authority should reside at the lowest effective level of government. Federal systems like the United States and Switzerland constitutionally reserve general policing to their states and cantons.

Unitary states like the UK devolve via legislation to municipalities under the supervision of locally elected officials, while Spain cedes it to autonomous regions. India’s hybrid structure blends state control with a national officers corps. Each nation has engineered a mechanism that suits its peculiarities.

South Africa offers a cautionary tale. On the face of it, a federal system that operates a single police structure, yet the country has merely taken a different tack to subsidiarity – significant privatisation of policing services. A 2025 estimate puts the private security industry, the world’s largest, at 600,000 officers – far outnumbering public police and the military combined.

An Apartheid-era legacy, the historical separation of population groups and deep economic inequality make it possible to apportion police auspices to corporations and gated communities that are able to outsource security to private providers.

However, this has merely produced tiered security outcomes: 60 per cent of whites are able to access private protection, compared with only 5 per cent of blacks, in a 2003–2017 survey. The result is the third worst security outcomes globally on the WISPI index. This speaks to the occasional call – typically by well-heeled Nigerians – for the broader legalisation of firearms. Nigeria’s model must prioritise equity and broad access, not elite privilege.

The emerging elite consensus must evolve into a solution focused on a distinctly Nigerian design. Decentralisation invites thoughtful consideration of the opportunities. Aligning responsibility with authority allows us to reengineer the disjointed elements which, borrowing from the engine metaphor, include operational gearing, fiscal fuel lines, and accountability gauges.

What if we reimagine policing through cooperative federalism? By tailoring our subsidiarity, we could assign general policing powers to subnationals – perhaps states or regions – via constitutional amendment or legislative devolution.

Operational gearing would clearly delineate federal and subnational functions while establishing nationwide minimum standards. Fiscal fuel lines must be rerouted transparently, closing the current spending leakages through accountable channels and realigning revenue distribution to match new responsibilities. Most critically, accountability gauges – tiered independent oversight bodies, community review panels, national regulatory standards – must be embedded from the beginning, not bolted on as an afterthought.

The elite consensus has, at last, acknowledged the terrible grinding noise. The lesson of public scepticism is that opening up the bad engine no longer requires courage, as much as it does wisdom. As the National Assembly deliberates the path forward, we must painstakingly consider the operational, fiscal and accountability factors of a decentralised police against Nigeria’s peculiarities. This we propose to do, at some depth, in the next three articles.

Deji Olatoye is a partner at The Lodt Law Offices, Lagos.

By Fransiscus Nanga Roka, Yovita Arie Mangesti

On 28 February 2026, Israel launched what it called “Operation Lion’s Roar” against Iran, coordinated with a U.S. campaign reportedly named “Operation Epic Fury.” Within hours, Iranian state media confirmed that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead, killed in strikes on Tehran that also hit senior leadership and key military infrastructure—followed by Iranian missile and drone retaliation across the region.

This is not merely another Middle East escalation. It is a strategic decapitation strike against the core of the Islamic Republic’s authority—an act that, whatever its tactical logic, carries the legal and political DNA of a war that can metastasize faster than diplomacy can react.

The other legal questions involving this conflict: was it reasonably necessary in the circumstances? Did a proportionality of means match the threat posed?

Under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, states must refrain from the threat or use of force against another state’s territorial integrity or political independence—unless force is justified by Security Council authorization or self-defense (Article 51). In the public reporting so far, there is no indication of a Security Council mandate; hence the legal center of gravity becomes self-defense.

Washington and Jerusalem appear to be positioning the operation as a preemptive strike against “imminent threats” tied up with missiles, nuclear risk, and regional armed networks. That phrasing means something—but in international law cannot simply represent self-defense. It entails at least these aspects:

Imminence (the threat is about to materialize, not speculative)

Necessity (no other reasonable way, including diplomacy, could render the threat harmless)

The heavier end of the spectrum is even states friendly to America and Israel would be unyielding. If your justification sounds more like preventing a future capability than stopping an imminent attack, it resembles the controversial doctrine of preventative war. This was widely condemned as not part of the Charter.

Targeting the president: “Assassination” by any other name

The death of Khamenei creates a normative shock that can’t be avoided. International law does not harbor among its otherwise neat principles a clear sentence stating “Never you must target a leader”; instead, legality is created from the surrounding circumstance:

If a State is involved in an armed conflict w another state and the person targeted satisfies enough criteria for being a legitimate military objective (through his function, direct participation, command role), then the attack could in principle be legal—in which case.the principal constraints are those of distinction and proportionality under IHL.

If the operation is not lawfully justified in self-defense (jus ad bellum), then even a very accurate operation becomes an unlawful use of force—making the death of a head of state a symbol intensified by this illegality of warfare, thereby augmenting backfire dynamics.

This is why the strike is strategically “successful” and strategically catastrophic at one time: not only may it weaken decision-making at the top, but it also removes that last psychological ceiling which often keeps adversaries from directly targeting each other’s core leadership.

Proportionality isn’t just about bombs and bombers—it’s about consequences

When assessing IHL proportionality, civilian losses projected against concrete and immediate military advantage are weighed. But here, in a region where oil production facilities and military bases as well as nuclear reactors are likely to be next-door neighbors such judgment takes into account predictable second-order effects: attacks on bases, drones overhead in cities to which they have become accustomed anyway, strikes in the Gulf, panic buying in world energy markets, commercial shipping disrupted.

Certainly, financial reporting and live briefings are already a sign that the Strait of Hormuz has the backing of fear and widening regional strikes are on their way.

Simply put, while knocking out one leader could have the “advantage,” human and economic costs mushroom faster than expected, turning into legal issues of guilt when decision-makers could predict a cascade of damage to noncombatants yet proceeded.

The succession problem: war plus a vacuum equal’s big trouble

AP: Khamenei’s death leaves a power vacuum, and while succession technically lies in the hands of Iran’s Assembly of Experts (AOE) it’s shaped in practice by entrenched security institutions.

This is important because while avoiding escalation requires one end of a conversation, it works best if that party has the power to make decisions and then carry them out. A divided leadership will produce the opposite result: parallel lines of counterattack, misunderstanding, and a race to seem “tough enough” take over as Logos.

The “most dangerous war” isn’t doing the first strike—it’s what happens afterward.

What makes this moment so infinitely dangerous is not only that Iran, America, and Israel are all sending signals in the worst three-hours of nations’ lives. No, what’s even worse is the following:

The U.S. and Israel both end up on a regime change course which they may not be willing or unable to follow through on.

Iran’s factions are led into a cycle of retaliation that politically they cannot get out of.

Once leaders are targeted and killed, war becomes less about deterrence and more about who survives it. It quickly becomes distorted so that neither negotiating nor averting destruction have a serious chance—the three craziest-speeding accelerants of all time.

If Operation Lion’s Roar marks the end of Khamenei’s rule, it could also mark the dawn of a nastier era: a Middle East in which the old rules of setting up matches out of eyesight crumble down, new matches are struck as soon they go public retaliative cycles break no holds barred diplomacy, and there’s nobody confesses they can still control.