By EPLF Fellows 2025 Cohort
Topic: Community Building: The Role of Community Engagement in Solving Insecurity Crises and Community Needs.
The discussion was held on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday, 30th August 2025, moderated by Aishatu Usman with panellists Tessy Pepple, Femi Oladele, Waris Sakariyau, and Anthony Eromosele, attracting 178 viewers over and the space lasted for 82 minutes.
Introduction
Insecurity is unfortunately one of Nigeria’s greatest challenges impacting all strata of our existence – agriculture, transportation, tourism, and the economy. While it is widely agreed that security is a collective responsibility, it is also agreed that security is local. Local, not just by nomenclature, and Waris puts it succinctly that insecurity stems from among people, carried out by the people and against the people. Hence the solution is also for people and by people leading to Waris’ ascription of ‘come in unity’. Here lies the crux of our discussion, which is how to optimise community engagement to solve insecurity and thereby contribute significantly to solving one of Nigeria’s core challenges.
Pertinent questions
To ensure that our discussion is focused and targeted, we explored these nine (9) distinct themes:
- Effective community engagement in communities facing high levels of insecurity.
- Trust building initiatives between communities and Government institutions such as the Police and local governments.
- Case studies of community engagement and crime reduction.
- Challenges in mobilising community members to participate in security and development initiatives.
- The role of inclusive diversity (of especially marginalised or vulnerable groups) in community safety strategies.
- Community engagement initiatives to identify and prioritise local needs beyond security, such as education, employment, or healthcare.
- Amplifying the roles of youth, women, and faith leaders play in strengthening community resilience and addressing local challenges.
- Strategies to ensure sustainable community engagement efforts.
- Impact assessment of community engagement on safety and community development.
Key learnings and outcomes
Fear is real, traumatic, and can be self-limiting in communities: Communities that have suffered extensive onslaught can become fearful, which can impact their receptiveness to any security initiative. Those with first-hand experience of violence, crime and other forms of unrest in their communities mostly turn their lived experiences into a self-limiting barrier – they become uninterested in government efforts and may be unwilling to support security initiatives.
Trust is better built from within communities: while external support plays a significant role in community building, it is better built with persons who communities can identify with. People who have lived within those communities, know and feel their pain and understand the nuanced dynamics of the communities. Paternalistic approaches to community needs are likely to fail.
Conversely, Nigeria’s security architecture is overburdened and struggling. For example, the centralised security architecture limits response time leading to significant calls for community policing which is still a hot button topic. The need to strengthen the software (people and their families) and hardware (equipment) of our security architecture has become imperative to deal with the varied moving parts of our insecurity situation.
Additionally, inclusivity is key. We cannot continue to exclude women and youth and expect the best of outcomes. Additionally, the relegation of local knowledge is disastrous. Furthermore, capacity building is imperative for safe and secure communities. It is expected that continuously building a culture of learning to reinforce leadership, conflict resolution can improve community mindset and ownership. This will help to reduce vandalization of government assets. For example, an enlightened community is aware that despite their grievances, it is not profitable to burn down a Police post.
Finally, the need for strong institutions and improved synergy among stakeholders cannot be overemphasised. By strong institutions, communities can raise an aware army of people who insist on doing the right thing always.
Response from our audience
The audience agreed that community engagement is necessary to ensure that everyone is carried along on both the policy and programme levels. A question around the challenges of reintegration of ex-convicts for community security raised pertinent concerns. The consensus is that while reintegration is imperative for community building, it should be carefully executed to maintain stability in communities. History informs us that issues of trust and the fear of relapse have caused significant setbacks for communities.
Conclusion and recommendations
The conversation ably moderated by Aishat was indeed an eye-opener of sorts on many accounts. For example, it sheds light on failures of community engagement efforts and initiatives which revolve around the often used top-bottom execution approach and photo-ops. Also, the need for synergy among community members and constituted authorities to inspire peace needs to be… Sustainable community engagement must evolve into a culture that absorbs children, youth, women, and vulnerable groups including a stable process of monitoring and evaluation.
The goal of community engagement is to ensure that ‘nobody is left behind’ and that is our goal as emerging leaders.
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