Good morning,
On Monday, the youths of Auchi decided they had paid enough. They surrounded a police officer and a group of local vigilantes on Old Aviele Road and ordered them to empty their pockets, demanding the money they were accused of extorting from motorists and riders. The men complied. A Mercedes driver said they had taken ₦30,000 and his jewellery from him earlier. The police have not commented, no one has been arrested, and no money has been returned. When citizens no longer trust the complaint process, they take the law into their own hands. In Zamfara, the police at least moved faster, arresting 22-year-old Umar Ibrahim Gandi Maradun after a video showed him in JIBWIS First Aid Group uniform chanting for rifles to kill Christians in Enugu and Jos, with children marching behind him. JIBWIS handed him over and condemned the footage. Amnesty called it a vicious display of indoctrination. The arrest is a start. The children are still being taught that murder is a hymn.
The state police amendment is gaining momentum without anyone explaining the safeguards. Kano passed the bill after a clause-by-clause review, and Sokoto adopted it unanimously, bringing the count of approving assemblies closer to the 24 required. Osun went first, Delta followed, and the framework now says federal police handle terrorism, cybercrime and borders, while state forces handle local crime and public order. It sounds orderly. It is not. Funding comes from state consolidated revenue, the governor appoints the commander on the Council’s recommendation, and nobody has written the oversight rules that would stop a governor from turning his own force into a private militia. At the Nigerian Economic Summit, J.P. Morgan, Chevron and the telecom operators said the quiet part aloud: they are investing in Nigeria’s reforms, but they want laws, not policies that expire with an administration. J.P. Morgan is establishing a merchant bank. Chevron wants multi-decade certainty. Investors care more about permanence than politicians do.
The Federal Government has agreed to pay workers a ₦70,000 monthly transport allowance for six months from November, alongside peculiar allowance arrears and 19 months of outstanding health workers’ allowances, after the NLC’s two-week ultimatum. It is a concession, not a fix, and the minimum wage remains worth about $42. In Benue, the police rescued 29 kidnapped victims in October, arrested 48 suspects including 34 foreign nationals, and recovered seven locally fabricated firearms. That is real work, and it deserves to be named. In Lekki, the EFCC scaled fences at Applewood Estate at 5am, arrested 21 suspected cyber fraudsters and seized five exotic cars, prompting Skales to compare the tactics to robbery. The fraud is real. So is the discomfort of watching enforcement arrive like a break-in.
The quieter stories are the ones that tell you where the country is. A Kaduna Shari’a court has given a father three weeks to finish investigating his daughter’s suitor, after he told his ex-wife to find “any of her boyfriends” to marry the girl off and then spent months stalling. The wali system is meant to protect a bride. It can also trap her. Northern Christian leaders gathered in Abuja and said the killings in Plateau, Benue and Kaduna must stop, describing the violence as a war between brothers, while the bodies keep arriving. Traders at Modebe Market in Onitsha have written to the Inspector-General of Police over a two-year dispute about leadership, ownership, and a demolished plaza, because the state government that removed their leaders has not settled the question.
A checkpoint emptied by the people it taxes. A chant taught to children. A bill moving faster than its safeguards. A father stalling a wedding. A market waiting for the police to settle what the state cannot. These are not separate stories. They are the same story: a country where the institutions keep arriving late, and the people keep inventing their own justice in the meantime.
Warmly,
Lolade