IG Tunji Disu: He Saw the Storm Coming. Now He Commands the Response | By Oludare Ogunlana ‘Above Jordan’

The author, Oludare Ogunlana (left), with Inspector-General of Police Olatunji “Tunji” Disu at the Force Headquarters in Abuja, 25 June 2026, thirteen years after Disu first warned of the insecurity to come.

In December 2012, in a hall at the University of Ibadan, a police officer looked into Nigeria’s future and saw fire. I had convened a symposium under the banner of the Global Alternative Agenda, themed “Tackling Kidnapping, Hijack and Terror,” and paired with the presentation of The African Journal of Counter Terrorism. The program was sponsored by Zacch Adelabu Adedeji, then the Commissioner for Finance in Oyo State, and today the Executive Chairman of the Nigeria Revenue Service. I invited the Oyo State Police Command to speak. The Command sent a senior officer, a Chief Superintendent of Police named Olatunji Disu.

He did not give the comfortable speech we have learned to expect from officialdom. He warned, plainly, that within a decade Nigeria could face insecurity on a scale we had not yet imagined, unless the country took drastic action. The room listened. The country did not.

On 25 June 2026, I stood with that same officer in his office in Abuja, surrounded by his aides, among them his Chief of Staff, Tunji Wusu. The Chief Superintendent who spoke at Ibadan is now the 23rd Inspector-General of Police of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, a man of sixty who has spent his entire career inside the Force he now leads. Fate has placed the warning and the instrument to answer it in the same pair of hands.

We should sit with the weight of that.

A Warning Delivered, and Ignored

When Disu spoke in 2012, banditry had not yet hollowed out the North-West. Mass abduction had not become a business model. The kidnapping of schoolchildren had not entered our national vocabulary as routine. He saw the trajectory before the data confirmed it. Therefore, his words were not pessimism. They were diagnosis. The tragedy is not that he was wrong. The tragedy is that he was right, and the warning went unheeded while the threat compounded.

He was right, and the warning sat unattended while the threat compounded.

Nigeria has spent the years since proving his point. We have buried too many. We have paid too many ransoms. We have watched communities negotiate with armed men because the state could not reach them in time.

The Measure of the Man

I know the measure of the man from more than a podium. Years ago, a member of my family was murdered in a hotel in Ife. I reached out to him. His answer has stayed with me. He told me that if the victim was my blood, then the victim was his blood too, without qualification, and that justice had to be served. He resisted every temptation to compromise the case. In a system where too many investigations dissolve under pressure, money, or political weight, he held the line. That is not a small thing in Nigeria. It is almost everything.

So when I asked him the hard questions on 25 June, I was not speaking to a stranger.

The State Policing Question

Our conversation centered on state policing. Both chambers of the National Assembly have now passed the constitutional alteration bill, and it awaits ratification by two-thirds of the state assemblies and the assent of the President. It would be the most far-reaching change to Nigeria’s security architecture since 1999. It would end a century of centralised policing and create state police services operating alongside a federal force.

I put the central objection to him directly. Some senior officers resist the reform. Some politicians resist it. Many citizens fear that governors will weaponise state police against their opponents. Does the Inspector-General believe in state policing, despite the pushback from within his own ranks?

He did not flinch. He reaffirmed his strong commitment to twenty-first-century community policing. His career has been a long argument for it. As Commander of the Lagos Rapid Response Squad, he rebranded his officers as “The Good Guys” and proved that a police unit could be both effective and trusted by the people it served. He believes, plainly, that security is built closest to the ground, by officers who know the streets they patrol and answer to the communities they protect.

Security is built closest to the ground, by officers who answer to the communities they protect.

The fear of abuse is legitimate. However, the bill anticipates it. It prohibits any governor from directing a state police service to unlawfully target specific persons, political parties, or groups. It bars governors from arbitrarily dismissing a state commissioner, who may be removed only for stated cause, after a fair hearing, and by a two-thirds vote of the state assembly. It preserves federal authority over terrorism, organised crime, and national security. These are not perfect guardrails. They are serious ones. The danger of abuse is real, but it is a danger to be managed, not a reason to keep a failing system that already leaves millions unprotected.

A Force Built to Serve

Disu also spoke of the reform closest to his oath. He is moving to rid the Nigeria Police Force of its bad eggs. Every Nigerian knows what those words mean. They mean the officers who extort at checkpoints, who brutalise the citizens they swore to defend, who sell justice to the highest bidder. A community policing system cannot work without trust, and trust cannot survive a force that preys on the public.

Cleaning the ranks is not separate from the state policing debate. It is the precondition for it.

His central aspiration is the simplest and the most radical. He wants a police force that serves the Nigerian people, not one the people must fear. Everything else flows from that inversion. He intends to build a modern force, driven by technology, with real capability in artificial intelligence and in cybersecurity for both defense and offense. This is not a vanity project. The threats have changed. Fraud syndicates, cybercrime, and online radicalisation now move at a speed and scale that analog policing cannot match. A force that cannot operate in the digital domain will lose ground it can never recover.

Moreover, he places the welfare and morale of his personnel at the center of the plan. This is the part reformers too often forget. You cannot demand integrity from officers you underpay, under-equip, and demoralise. A well-treated officer is the first line of a trusted police force. A neglected one is a liability waiting to happen.

Cooperation Without Subordination

We also spoke about Nigeria’s place in the wider world of policing. Disu wants deeper cooperation with law enforcement and intelligence agencies across the globe, and he welcomes peer review of the Nigerian force against international standards. This is the right instinct, handled the right way. Cooperation is not subordination. Nigeria should share intelligence on threats that cross borders, learn from what works elsewhere, and measure itself honestly against credible benchmarks. However, it must do so as a sovereign partner setting its own priorities, not as a junior client importing frameworks built for other realities. A confident police force studies the world and then decides for itself. That was the posture he struck.

The Choice That Begins Today

Here is the lesson that outlasts one man’s foresight. Disu was inside the institution when he raised the alarm in 2012. The failure that followed was not a failure of knowledge. It was a failure of will, of coordination, and of governance. Security is not won by prediction. It is won by the decision to act on what we already know.

That is why his elevation matters beyond the symbolism. An Inspector-General cannot secure a nation alone. He needs funding that arrives, legislation that empowers, governors who cooperate, state assemblies that ratify in good faith, and a political class willing to treat insecurity as the emergency it is rather than a talking point for elections. If we hand him the office and withhold the support, we will repeat the original sin of 2012. We will have heard the warning and done nothing.

There is a smaller story folded inside this one. Two of the men who shaped that Ibadan gathering now sit at the center of national life. One commands the Nigeria Police Force. The other, Zacch Adelabu Adedeji, who funded the program as Oyo’s Commissioner for Finance, now directs the nation’s revenue service. Oyo State has long supplied the country with more than its share of those who carry its burdens.

History has given Nigeria an unusual gift. The man who saw the storm coming now commands the response. Whether that gift becomes a turning point or a footnote depends on choices that begin today.

I have known Olatunji Disu for thirteen years. I have seen him be right once, at great cost to the country that did not listen. I have seen him refuse to bend when bending would have been easy. For the sake of every Nigerian living under the shadow of insecurity, I hope he is given the chance to be right a second time.

Oludare Ogunlana is Founder and CEO of OGUN Security Research and Strategic Consulting LLC, a Professor of Cybersecurity, and a national security scholar who advises global intelligence and policy bodies on counterterrorism, African security, and the governance of emerging technology.