You have a grievance. Something has gone wrong—perhaps badly wrong—and you do what any rational citizen is expected to do in a functioning state: you go to the police.
At the station, the theatre begins.
An officer greets you warmly, almost disarmingly so. There is no hostility, no intimidation—just a polite smile and an offer to help. You explain your situation in full, laying out facts, suspicions, and concerns. The officer listens attentively. Then comes the first procedural requirement: your statement must be taken formally.
There is, however, a fee.
₦20,000.
This is not framed as a bribe. It is presented as administrative necessity—a cost of documentation. You pay, your statement is written, stamped, and handed back to you as though it were a receipt for legitimate service rendered. At this point, the illusion of due process remains intact.
Then the case progresses.
You are introduced to the Investigating Police Officer (IPO), the man who will “handle” your matter. He listens again, this time more strategically, probing for actionable details. He outlines a plan—calls to be made, visits to be conducted, arrests if necessary. It sounds like policing.
But policing, it turns out, requires “mobilisation.”
₦100,000.
This fee is not stamped. It is not receipted. It is explained away as operational cost: petrol, paperwork, logistics, even lunch. The machinery of law enforcement, you are told, does not run on air. Conveniently, a POS agent is stationed just outside to facilitate the transaction. Efficiency meets informality.
You pay again.
The officer moves swiftly. A suspect—now reframed as a defendant—is picked up. The spectacle of arrest follows. It is public, performative, and deeply satisfying to the complainant. The state has acted.
But the process is symmetrical.
The same system now engages the other party. Bail is set—₦100,000. The same language is used. The same urgency is conveyed. The same absence of receipts persists.
In a single dispute, the system has extracted ₦200,000—shared across both sides of a conflict that, in most cases, is not even criminal.
Because here lies the deeper issue: the overwhelming majority of these cases are civil disputes dressed in criminal clothing. Contracts gone sour. Debts unpaid. Personal disagreements escalated. None of these belong in a police station. They belong in court.
But the courts are slow, distant, and, in the public imagination, unreliable.
So citizens improvise.
They substitute legal process with coercive immediacy. The police become not investigators of crime, but instruments of leverage. When someone says, “I will deal with you” in Nigeria, it is rarely a threat of legal redress. It is a promise to weaponise the state—specifically, its coercive arm.
The goal is not justice. It is pressure.
The arrest is the point.
The embarrassment is the point.
The inconvenience is the point.
And the police, positioned at the centre of this dynamic, become brokers of that pressure. They are no longer neutral enforcers of law but active participants in a transactional ecosystem—extracting value from both complainant and accused, regardless of the legal merit of the case.
This is not policing. It is rent-seeking in uniform.
It thrives because it aligns with incentives on all sides. The complainant gets swift, visible action. The defendant gets a chance to negotiate their way out. The police get paid—twice. And the state, in its formal sense, remains largely absent.
What emerges is a parallel system of dispute resolution—faster than the courts, more coercive than mediation, and entirely unaccountable.
In such a system, the police station is no longer a place of justice.
It is a marketplace.
And in that marketplace, everyone pays.
The tragedy is not merely that corruption exists—it is that it has become structured, predictable, almost procedural. Citizens walk into police stations not expecting justice, but budgeting for extraction.
At that point, the social contract has already collapsed.
Because a police force that sells its services to the highest bidder is not a guardian of the public.
It is just a pickpocket with paperwork.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 