When Bandits Collect Taxes: Kuku's Warning and the Crisis of State Authority in Nigeria

Kingsley Kuku, former Chairman of the Presidential Amnesty Program, in academic regalia at the unveiling of the Igbinedion University, Okada Journal of Contemporary Law, where he delivered the Faculty of Law valedictory lecture titled "The Nigerian State Under Siege." Photo courtesy of Igbinedion University.

Kingsley Kuku's valedictory lecture at Igbinedion University identifies the correct center of gravity in Nigeria's security crisis. The gravest threat is not terrorism, banditry, or separatism considered individually. It is the progressive erosion of the state's monopoly of legitimate authority. Nigeria cannot shoot its way back to sovereignty. It must govern its way back. That requires institutions that deliver justice, security, and accountability faster and more reliably than the armed groups now competing for the loyalty of Nigerian citizens.

A Constitutional Question, Not Merely a Security Question

Speaking at the valedictory lecture of the Faculty of Law at Igbinedion University, Okada, former Presidential Amnesty Program Chairman Kingsley Kuku posed questions that every Nigerian policymaker should sit with. Why do farmers require permission from criminal gangs to cultivate ancestral lands? Why do entire communities obey the directives of violent organizations more readily than the lawful commands of government?

These questions are uncomfortable because the answers indict the state, not the citizen. A farmer who pays a levy to bandits before planting season is not a collaborator. He is a rational actor responding to the incentives the state has allowed to form. The armed group showed up. The state did not. The armed group enforces its rules predictably. The state does not. In the political economy of survival, predictability wins.

Kuku framed this correctly as a constitutional crisis. The Nigerian Constitution declares in Section 14(2)(b) that the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government. When communities negotiate their safety with non-state armed actors, that provision is not merely unfulfilled. It is being performed by someone else. Sovereignty is not lost in a single dramatic collapse. It leaks, community by community, checkpoint by checkpoint, levy by levy.

Authority Abhors a Vacuum

Kuku's most important line deserves emphasis:

"History consistently demonstrates that authority abhors a vacuum. Where lawful authority retreats, unlawful authority advances."

This is the pattern OSRS has documented across multiple Nigerian security events. In the Lake Chad Basin, Boko Haram and ISWAP did not simply terrorize communities. They taxed them, adjudicated disputes, and regulated markets. In the Northwest, bandit warlords issue farming permits and collect harvest shares with the bureaucratic regularity of a local government council. In parts of the Southeast, non-state actors enforce sit-at-home orders that entire cities obey while government directives go ignored.

Each of these is a governance transaction. The armed group supplies order, however brutal, in exchange for revenue and obedience. That is the elemental bargain on which all states are built. When sub-state actors perform it more consistently than the Nigerian state, they are not merely committing crimes. They are state-building in miniature, and every successful transaction transfers a fragment of legitimacy from Abuja to the bush.

This is why kinetic operations alone cannot resolve the crisis. A military clearance operation removes the armed group but does not fill the vacuum that invited it. Unless the state arrives behind the soldiers with courts, police, schools, and administration, the vacuum reopens, and a new actor, often more ruthless than the last, moves in. Nigeria has run this cycle repeatedly for over a decade. The July 2026 Oriire rescue demonstrated what focused state capacity can achieve. The question that followed, as OSRS argued at the time, was whether the state could convert tactical success into durable institutional presence. Kuku's lecture answers why that conversion matters: without it, victory is rented, not owned.

The Trap of Securitized Lawlessness

Kuku issued a second warning that deserves equal attention. Democracies under siege face the temptation to respond to insecurity with measures that undermine the rule of law. This is the counterinsurgent's oldest trap. A state that suspends due process, tolerates extrajudicial conduct, or governs through emergency decree may win engagements while validating the insurgent's core narrative: that the state's authority is arbitrary power, not legitimate law.

The distinction matters because legitimacy, not firepower, is the contested resource. Bandits have firepower. Terrorists have firepower. What they cannot manufacture is lawful legitimacy, and it is precisely this asset the state squanders when it fights lawlessness with lawlessness. Every wrongful detention, every community punished collectively, every security operation conducted without accountability narrows the moral distance between the state and its challengers. When that distance closes, citizens choose based on proximity and predictability, and the armed group is usually closer.

Rendering Sub-State Actors Unnecessary

Kuku's prescription is the correct one, and it is the harder one:

"The Nigerian state must therefore aspire not merely to defeat sub-state actors, but to render them unnecessary by rebuilding public confidence in constitutional governance."

What does rendering them unnecessary require in practice? OSRS assesses four priorities.

First, decentralized policing. A federation of over 200 million people cannot be policed from the center. Communities obey armed groups partly because the nearest agent of lawful authority is hours away. State and community policing, properly regulated and accountable, puts lawful authority back in the vacuum before unlawful authority claims it. This has been a consistent OSRS position since 2020, and events since then have only strengthened the case.

Second, accessible justice. Where courts are slow, expensive, and distant, alternative dispute resolution by armed actors becomes attractive. Judicial reform is counterinsurgency. A functioning magistrate court in a rural local government area does more to restore state authority than a battalion passing through.

Third, visible service delivery in recovered areas. Clearance without consolidation is theater. Every liberated community should experience a measurable governance dividend within months: reopened schools, functioning clinics, registered land titles. Citizens extend loyalty to whoever improves their Tuesday, not to whoever wins the press briefing.

Fourth, accountability for the state's own agents. Public confidence cannot be rebuilt by institutions that citizens experience as predatory. Anti-corruption enforcement, security sector transparency, and consequences for abuse are not soft governance extras. They are the mechanism by which the state proves it deserves the monopoly it claims.

The More Enduring Victory

Kuku called the restoration of constitutional authority the more enduring victory and the more difficult one. He is right on both counts. Defeating an armed group is an operation. Rebuilding the reasons citizens obey lawful authority is a generational project that offers few ribbon-cutting moments and no decisive battle.

Nevertheless, it is the only project that ends the cycle. Nigeria's adversaries are not strong. The state's absence makes them appear strong. Fill the vacuum with justice, security, accountability, and hope, and the tax-collecting bandit becomes what he always was: a criminal, isolated, unnecessary, and finally defeatable.

The siege Kuku describes is real. Lifting it begins not at the front line but at the courthouse, the police post, and the local government secretariat.

Intelligence. Protection. Strategy.

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