Public Safety in Nigeria: Why We Need More Than Emergency Response

Something happens on a road you use every week. Within an hour, the news reaches you the way it usually does. A voice note in a family group. A screenshot in an estate WhatsApp group. A post on X with no date attached. A colleague who heard it from someone who was there. And then comes the part everyone recognises. You start asking questions that nobody in the group can answer with confidence. What exactly happened? Where precisely did it happen? Was that yesterday or three weeks ago? Is it still going on? Should I take that route this evening? Who would even know? That short, anxious gap between hearing something and knowing what to do with it is one of the most under-examined parts of public safety in Nigeria. We rarely name it. But millions of people cross it every single day, and they cross it mostly alone.

Consider two ways of framing public safety. The first: what do people do after something happens? The second: how do people access relevant information before, during, and after an incident? The first question produces one kind of system, built around dispatch and reaction. The second produces something broader, built around information flow. It asks what a person knew when they chose a route, whether their family could reach them, whether the concern they noticed last week ever reached anyone who could act on it, and whether the incident left behind a record that made the next response faster. Most of the safety decisions Nigerians make are of the second kind. They are ordinary, low-drama choices. Which park to use. Whether to travel at night or wait until morning. Whether to take that call and continue, or turn back. These decisions are made with whatever information is available at the time, which is often thin, unverified, and out of date.

There is one finding that reframes this entire conversation. According to the National Bureau of Statistics Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey covering May 2023 to April 2024, Nigerian households experienced roughly 52 million crime incidents in that period, and only about a quarter of those incidents were reported to the police. The most commonly cited reason for not reporting was not fear. It was a belief that reporting would not lead to anything. Sit with the implication. If three out of four incidents never enter any official record, then the picture available to everyone, from a family choosing a route to an agency allocating patrols, is built from a fraction of what actually happened. This is not primarily a story about individual failure. It is a story about feedback loops. A person does not report because they doubt it will matter. Because it is not reported, it does not appear in the data. Because it does not appear in the data, the response does not adjust. Because the response does not adjust, the next person also doubts that reporting will matter. The same survey found that about a third of respondents said security agencies responded to an emergency call within thirty minutes. That figure is often read as an indictment of responders. It is more accurately read as a description of a coordination problem. You cannot respond to what has not reached you, and you cannot allocate resources against a map that is missing most of its data. Note on sourcing: this survey was published by the NBS in 2024 and was subsequently withdrawn from the Bureau’s website. It remains the most comprehensive national household crime survey conducted in Nigeria and continues to be widely cited by Nigerian media and researchers. We cite it here with that caveat stated openly.

If you wanted to find out whether an area was safe this evening, where would you look? In practice, most people would check a WhatsApp group. Then perhaps X or Facebook. Then they would call someone who lives nearby. Then they would rely on their own judgement. These informal networks deserve real respect. They are fast, trusted, locally specific, and genuinely effective. A neighbourhood group that alerts residents to a developing situation is doing valuable public safety work, entirely unpaid. Nigerians are not passive about their own safety. The effort is already enormous. But informal channels have structural limits that no amount of goodwill can fix: They are not timestamped. A message forwarded today may describe something from March. They are not verified. A rumour and a confirmed incident travel through the same channel, in the same font, with the same urgency. They are not location-precise. “Along that road” means different things to differentreaders. They are closed. Information is trapped inside a group. The person walking into that area right now, who is not a member, learns nothing. They do not compound. Nothing accumulates. Every incident starts from scratch, and last month’s warning is unsearchable. The result is that Nigeria has a great deal of safety information in circulation and remarkably little safety intelligence. Those are not the same thing.

It is worth being blunt about the limits, because this is a field where overclaiming causes real harm. Technology cannot prevent crime. It cannot dispatch officers, put out a fire, or reach a scene. It cannot replace the Nigeria Police Force, the FRSC, state emergency agencies, hospitals, or the community structures people already rely on. Any product that implies otherwise is misleading its users at the exact moment they are most vulnerable. What technology can do is narrower and still valuable. It can help organise information that is currently scattered. It can attach a date and a location to a report. It can distinguish a claim from something checked. It can make relevant information reachable by the person who needs it, rather than only by whoever happens to be in the right group. It can give people a structured way to report a concern, and it can help someone tell a trusted contact where they are. None of that is glamorous. It is closer to plumbing than to rescue. But the gap between “something is wrong” and “the right person knows” is where a great deal of avoidable harm currently lives, and that gap is an information problem before it is anything else.

The goal is not to build a parallel safety system. Nigeria does not need a private replacement for public institutions, and no responsible company should be trying to build one. The goal is connection. A system where a concern noticed by a resident can travel, in a structured and checkable form, to the people and institutions able to act on it. Where a person can see relevant, dated information about the area they are entering. Where a family member knows a journey has begun and can tell whether it ended. Where what happened last month informs what is done next month. This is the work Quida is building toward: a Nigerian public safety technology companybringing together community reporting, verified safety alerts, location-based safety information, safety check-ins, vehicle information verification, and AI-supported safety guidance in a single ecosystem. Not as a substitute for emergency services, but as a layer that helps people make more informed decisions and helps information move faster between those who have it and those who need it. We are careful about what we claim. Quida does not guarantee anyone’s safety and cannot prevent every incident. What it aims to do is reduce the number of decisions Nigerians have to make in the dark.

Insecurity is rarely only about insecurity. It shapes whether a trader travels to a market, whether a family sends a child to a particular school, whether a business opens a branch, whether a farmer works a distant plot, and whether an investor chooses Lagos or somewhere else. It is an upstream cost that quietly appears in the price of nearly everything. Which is why treating public safety as infrastructure, rather than as a series of individual misfortunes, is more than a philosophical preference. Infrastructure is something a country builds deliberately, maintains, measures, and improves. That framing changes what we expect, what we fund, and what we hold ourselves to. Nigerians are already doing the hard part. They are alert, resourceful, and generous with warnings to people they will never meet. What is missing is not effort. It is the connective tissue that would let all that effort add up to something larger than the sum of its WhatsApp messages.