- By Precious Olusayo || Premier World News
More than 100,000 officers of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) are currently deployed to protect politicians and other Very Important Persons (VIPs), significantly straining national security coverage for ordinary citizens, according to a new report by the European Union Agency for Asylum.
The report, released in November 2025, notes that the NPF has an estimated strength of 371,800 officers serving a population of 236.7 million people, but a large portion of available manpower is diverted to VIP protection instead of community policing and crime prevention.
“This shortage in police personnel is compounded by the fact that more than 100,000 officers were assigned to politicians and VIPs rather than tasks serving the general population”, the EU agency stated.
The report highlights long-standing concerns about inadequate police presence across many communities, citing manpower shortages, corruption, insufficient resources, and slow emergency response times as key challenges.
It further noted repeated incidents of arbitrary arrests, extortion, and excessive use of force due to weak accountability structures.
Despite repeated directives from the Inspector-General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, ordering the withdrawal of Mobile Police Force operatives from VIP duties, in June 2023 and again in April 2025, the EU report suggests that VIP protection continues to dominate police deployment.
In August, Hadiza Bala-Usman, President Bola Tinubu’s Special Adviser on Policy and Coordination, also called for an end to deploying police officers as personal guards, describing it as a misuse of national security assets.
She argued that elite protection should not come at the expense of communities left without adequate policing.
Efforts to obtain comments from the Force Public Relations Officer, Benjamin Hundeyin, were unsuccessful as calls and messages were unanswered at the time of filing this report.
