There is a particular brand of lawlessness that wears the disguise of authority. It does not skulk in the shadows like common criminality. It marches boldly in camouflage, boots striking the ground with the arrogance of impunity, summoned not by the state, but by a man with a grievance, a vendetta, and the dangerous privilege of knowing someone in uniform. This is the story of a nation that has confused the barrel of a rifle with the gavel of a judge, and in doing so, has allowed the rights of its citizens to be trampled underfoot quite literally by the very boots sworn to protect the soil of the republic.
Let us be unambiguous about what the law says, for clarity is the first casualty when power is abused. In Nigeria, the authority to arrest a citizen for a civil or criminal offence is vested, by law, in the Nigeria Police Force. Section 4 of the Police Act empowers the police to make arrests, investigate offences, and present offenders before a court of competent jurisdiction. The Nigerian Army, the Navy, the Air Force these are institutions of national defence. Their mandate is the territorial integrity of the nation, the repulsion of external aggression, and in specific constitutional circumstances, the support of civil authority when formally invoked. A personal dispute between two neighbours over land, money, a bruised ego, or a perceived slight does not constitute a constitutional emergency. It does not warrant the deployment of a man trained for war into the living room of a civilian.
And yet, it happens. With disturbing frequency. With breathtaking casualness.
A businessman quarrels with a debtor. He does not go to court. He does not file a police report. He makes a phone call. And before long, a soldier armed, uniformed, and radiating the menace of state power arrives at the door of the offending party. There are no charges read. There is no warrant produced. There is no lawyer present. There is only fear the raw, paralyzing fear of a citizen who knows that in this moment, no institution stands between him and the fury of a man in uniform acting on personal orders. He is dragged. He is humiliated. He may be beaten. And somewhere in all of this, both the soldier and the man who summoned him believe, with a sincerity that is itself an indictment of our civic education, that justice is being served.
It is not justice. It is a crime.
The Nigerian Constitution, in its Chapter IV, is unequivocal. Every person has the right to personal liberty. No citizen shall be deprived of that liberty except in accordance with a procedure permitted by law. An arrest made by a soldier acting outside lawful civil authority, at the behest of a private individual, with no warrant, no charge, and no due process, is not an act of law enforcement. It is kidnapping. It is an assault on constitutional rights. It is the violent usurpation of a judicial process that belongs not to the aggrieved, not to the uniformed, but to the courts of this land.
The court and only the court determines guilt. Not the soldier. Not the man who paid for the soldier's transport. Not the army barracks where the victim is taken and made to kneel on gravel until his knees bleed repentance for sins he may not have committed. The judiciary exists precisely because we, as a society, agreed long ago that no man shall be the judge of his own cause, and that no grievance however legitimate entitles the aggrieved to become the arresting officer, the prosecutor, the jury, and the executioner simultaneously.
But perhaps the gravest indictment in all of this is not the man who weaponized his connection. He is a product of a system that has normalized impunity. The gravest indictment belongs to the soldier himself.
A soldier is not above the law. He is not exempt from the Constitution because he carries a weapon. He is not granted immunity from civil liability because he wears a rank on his shoulder. When a soldier abandons his lawful duty to serve as a personal enforcer for a private citizen when he arrests without legal authority, assaults without legal justification, and intimidates without constitutional backing he has not upheld the honor of his uniform. He has desecrated it. He has transformed the symbol of national service into the instrument of personal vendetta. And the law must see him for exactly what he has become in that moment: a perpetrator.
The Armed Forces Act is clear. Soldiers are subject to both military law and the civil law of the land. A soldier who commits assault, unlawful arrest, or torture against a civilian does not escape civil liability by virtue of his rank. He does not escape criminal liability by virtue of his uniform. He must face the law the very law he swore to defend for every right he trampled, for every door he kicked in without warrant, for every citizen he degraded in the name of someone else's grudge.
The Human Rights Violation Unit of the Nigerian Army exists on paper. The courts exist in practice. Civil society organisations exist with voice. And the victim of such illegal arrest exists with standing the right to sue, to report, to demand accountability, and to pursue justice through the very due process that was denied to him.
To the soldier who answers private calls to do a civilian's dirty work: you are not enforcing the law. You are breaking it. Your camouflage does not make your actions invisible to justice. Your rank does not make you sovereign. The citizen you dragged from his home has a name, a right, and a Constitution that speaks on his behalf even when his voice has been silenced by fear.
To the man who makes the call, who leverages connection over process, who mistakes access to power for the right to wield it: the courthouse is not a place of weakness. It is the architecture of civilisation. Your refusal to use it speaks not of strength, but of an intent that the courtroom would not absolve.
And to Nigeria, as a nation still striving toward the rule of law: we cannot build justice on the foundation of fear. We cannot speak of democracy in the morning and allow paramilitaries in the afternoon. Every citizen dragged from their home without warrant, every body bruised in a barracks courtyard as a favour to the aggrieved, every right ignored in deference to a uniform these are not isolated incidents. They are the slow, corrosive erosion of the social contract. They are the evidence that we have not yet fully decided whether this is a nation of laws, or a nation of men with the right connections.
The law is not a weapon to be borrowed. Justice is not a service to be arranged over the phone. And a soldier's oath is not a blank cheque written to whoever shouts the loudest or calls the most persuasively.
Let the courts breathe. Let due process live. And let the law reach without fear or favour even those who believe the uniform makes them unreachable.
"No man is above the law, and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it." Theodore Roosevelt
Nigeria is a crime scene in desperate need of forensic
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