There is a kind of evil that does not announce itself with a cutlass or a gun.
It comes in a budget line.
It wears a suit and babariga.
It signs documents in air-conditioned offices while, in communities across the nation, families bury what the terrorists and bandits left of their loved ones.
This is the evil of Nigeria’s security votes – and it may be the most consequential corruption story Nigerians are not talking about.
Nigerians have grown exhausted debating the roots of their insecurity.
Religion. Ethnicity. Failed leadership. Poverty.
All of these conversations carry truth, but they also carry the convenient distraction.
If we really pay attention, we will find something colder and more deliberate at the centre of the crisis: corruption.
Not corruption as metaphor.
Corruption as mechanism of power. As industry. As enterprise.
As organised crime wearing the mask of governance.
Nigeria now operates what can only be described as a security mafia – a hierarchy as structured and territorial as anything the Cosa Nostra ever built.
Just like in the Italian mafia, there are bosses and underbosses, power brokers and foot soldiers, each with a stake in the perpetuation of the very violence they are paid to prevent.
Islamic cleric and former army officer Sheikh Ahmad Gumi has, with his unsettling candour, confirmed what many suspected: the government knows who the bandits are.
It negotiates with them. It accommodates them.
And then it budgets billions of naira, theoretically to fight them, while funneling that money into private accounts and political war chests.
Gumi behaves less like a peacemaker and more like the public relations officer of a racket.
He sells the ugly premise that insecurity is simply a feature of modern Nigerian life.
But what he is really describing is a complex protection scheme – where the Nigerian people pay politicians, who in turn pay criminals who terrorise the people.
It is a dangerous cycle of evil.
Gumi sells the unappealing truth that insecurity has not been dealt in the country because the politicians want it so.
And this is the reason why many call the issue a political phenomenon.
Many Nigerians now see terrorism and banditry as a man-made issue with a political solution for which leadership failure is the real problem.
They point to the amazing fact that four presidents have failed to deal with internal security issue even when the military has been brought in, funded and equipped.
But let’s look at the problem from another angle – corruption.
I tell whoever cares to listen all the time that corruption is a malignant cancer that eats its way into anything along its way.
Drop corruption anywhere, it messes it up.
And Nigeria allowed corruption settle into everything, including security. We must, and we are, paying a high price for it.
Dasukigate, a $2 billion arms procurement scandal during the Jonathan administration, illustrates how the elite, not just politicians, profit from insecurity.
Religious leaders, politicians, military officers, even media owners grabbed money allocated to fighting insurgents.
This is the story of the security vote.
Since the era of military rule, Nigeria’s federal, state, and local governments have maintained a pool of funds – separate from defense budgets, and from appropriations for security agencies – that elected and appointed officials can spend with zero accountability.
No receipts. No audits. No questions.
The term “vote” has its roots in British colonial administration, where it once described contingency allocations.
In Nigeria, it became something else entirely.
General Yakubu Gowon institutionalised it in the 1970s as a tool to keep civilian elites placated.
Shehu Shagari used it to grease political machinery in the Second Republic.
Babangida and Abacha, predictably, perfected it as a personal enrichment instrument.
Olusegun Obasanjo allowed it to multiply like a virus when he returned as a civilian president.
Each successive administration inherited the system, found it useful, and passed it forward – expanded, more normalized, more deeply embedded.
The numbers and effect are staggering.
According to Transparency International’s special report, Camouflaged Cash: How Security Votes Fuel Corruption in Nigeria, state governments alone budgeted ₦525.23 billion in security votes between 2023 and 2025, with annual figures rising from ₦150.47 billion in 2023 to ₦210.68 billion in 2025.
That trajectory is not the arc of a government fighting insecurity.
That is the growth curve of a racket.
The Punch, Nigeria’s most widely read daily, examined the budgets of 32 state governors and found that some refused to disclose their security vote allocations entirely.
Ekiti State did not even include the line item clearly enough to be analysed.
The total, the newspaper noted, was likely higher than officially reported.
They are hiding the money because it is free money.
And free money, in a system without accountability, is stolen money.
The late Fela Kuti knew this country, singing that even when things seem to be changing, the truth is that: “everyday na the same thing.”
After decades of security votes, all we have ended up with is rising insecurity.
The votes do not provide for the people’s safety.
They votes are for the comfort of those in power.
In a bitter irony that is almost poetic in its cruelty, security votes have become insecurity votes – funds diverted from the public treasury, leaving communities naked before the violence that those funds were supposedly designed to suppress.
Even the third tier of government is not spared. Local government councils – the level of government closest to the suffering – have their own security allocations.
But in most states, local government chairmen serve as subordinates to governors who control the purse.
The money ascends upward and inward, away from the people, away from the roads where kidnappers operate, away from the villages where bandits raid at will.
The civil society organization SERAP sent Freedom of Information requests to all 36 state governors, demanding a full accounting of security vote spending since May 2023.
The response from the governors?
Silence.
Thirty-six silences.
That silence is its own confession.
So where do we go from here?
The first step is legal.
Nigeria’s National Assembly must pass legislation that defines, caps, and mandates the transparent reporting of security votes at all levels of government.
The current arrangement – where the funds exist without constitutional basis and cannot be explicitly banned – is a legal vacuum that corruption fills naturally.
Every naira labeled “security vote” must be subject to the same procurement rules, public disclosure requirements, and post-expenditure audits that govern other budget lines. No exceptions for state governors.
No exceptions for local government chairs.
Second, civil society and the Nigerian press must continue what SERAP and The Punch have started – but with more force and coordination.
Investigative journalism that names names, tracks allocations, and maps the gap between security vote spending and measurable security outcomes is not just good reporting.
It is a public service.
Media organisations should publish annual security vote scorecards for every state, holding governors accountable in print and online.
Third, the judiciary must be weaponized – in the best sense of the word – against security vote abuse.
The 1984 conviction of former Kwara Governor Adamu Atta for embezzling what amounts to $6.3 million in today’s dollars shows that prosecution is possible.
What is missing is political will and judicial independence.
Nigeria’s anti-corruption agencies, EFCC and ICPC, must treat security vote theft as the national security threat it is – not as a low-priority financial crime, but as conduct that directly funds insecurity by defunding protection.
Fourth, communities must demand local security budgets. Governors who refuse to disclose security vote allocations should face organised, sustained pressure – not just from civil society organisations in Abuja, but from the market women of Kano, the farmers of Benue, the teachers of Ebonyi.
The people who bury the dead have the most moral authority to demand accountability from those who were paid to prevent those deaths.
Finally, Nigeria needs a reckoning with the architecture of impunity itself.
The security vote is not an aberration in an otherwise functional system.
It is a symptom of a governing culture in which public office is primarily understood as an opportunity for private accumulation.
Until that culture is confronted, no legislative fix will hold.
Nigeria does not have an insecurity problem it cannot solve.
It has a corruption problem that it has, so far, lacked the collective will to confront.
The bandits in the forests and the officials in the government houses are not separate problems.
They are partners in the same enterprise, sustained by the same system, both fed by the money that was supposed to keep Nigerians safe.
It does not have to be this way.
But it can remain this way until Nigerians decide that silence – including the silence of 36 governors answering no Freedom of Information request – is no longer something they are willing to accept.