By DARE OJEPE

There are moments in a nation’s life when hesitation becomes a luxury too costly to indulge, moments when the leader must step beyond counsel, beyond caution, and confront the lion at the gate. Last Wednesday, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu crossed that threshold. After months of deliberation, he made the bold pronouncement that states ready to establish their own police formations are now free to do so. With that decision, the President not only touched the live wire of a decades-old national debate, he gripped it firmly and redirected its current toward a future of safer communities.

For years, the talk of state police lingered like a cloud over our federal structure, acknowledged as necessary by past leaders yet avoided for want of political will. President Tinubu, in breaking that inertia, has signaled the end of half-measures. He buttressed this move with decisive directives: fresh recruitment into the Armed Forces and the Nigeria Police, retraining and deployment of Forest Guards to reclaim our shrinking forests from the grip of bandits, and the unprecedented withdrawal of over 11,000 policemen serving as VIP escorts. These steps, taken together, place more boots where the nation needs them most, not behind tinted convoys, but in the open battle for safety and lawfulness.

But it is the embrace of state policing that marks the true tectonic shift. It is another chapter in what has quietly become President Tinubu’s restructuring-by-action, a deliberate remapping of governance that empowers subnationals, decentralizes authority, and untangles decades of bureaucratic knots. The signs have been steady: the liberalization of power generation and distribution allowing states to play meaningful roles; the release of FCT funds from the Treasury Single Account, fueling the infrastructural renaissance in the capital; and the sweeping economic reforms, from removing the double subsidy trap to harmonizing exchange rates and streamlining taxes.

Those moves were not without discomfort, but they were necessary incisions to stop a greater bleeding. The economy is beginning to show green shoots. Yet no economy can breathe freely under the choking hands of insecurity. No reform can flourish when fear is the common language spoken at dusk. For Nigeria’s economic gains to translate into fuller baskets and steadier homes, the nation must first secure its streets, farmlands, highways, and schools.

This is why the state police decision stands as a watershed. Crime has a local address. Communities know their own, the strangers who linger too long, the sudden affluence without labour, the clustered whispers near unlit corners. A police formation woven into the very fabric of the community is better positioned to listen, to detect, to respond. Yes, concerns over abuse must not be dismissed, but to fear misuse is not to abandon reform. Even the federal police has not been immune to manipulation. The task, then, is to build rails stronger than the train and safeguards firmer than sentiment.

But as the framework strengthens, one truth stands out: the future guardians of this new Nigeria are its young people.

Their numbers, their clarity of sight, their relentless energy, these are not ornaments of democracy; they are its engine. The call before them is simple yet profound: step forward, not merely as critics of the present, but as custodians of the future. If state policing will thrive, young Nigerians must be the ones filling its ranks with integrity, joining community vigilance forums, reporting suspicious activity, and transforming raw patriotism into structured service.

This generation has mastered technology, storytelling, organization, and mobilization like no other before it. Imagine these same gifts deployed for neighbourhood intelligence, early-warning systems, digital crime reporting, volunteer safety initiatives, and a national ethic that refuses to normalise wrongdoing. If insecurity is to be defeated, it will not only be through the rifles of officers, it will be through the resolve of young citizens who decide that their streets, their farms, their classrooms, and their dreams are worth defending.

The National Assembly now holds the next lever of destiny: the laws that will give life to state policing and the protections that will shield whistleblowers. EFCC Chairman Ola Olukoyede has cried out for this long enough. Parliament must act, firmly, swiftly, patriotically.

Yet, in the end, the success of this security renaissance will depend on a collaborative triumph, leadership that takes bold steps, institutions that build strong guardrails, and citizens, especially the youth, who refuse to be spectators in the theatre of nation-building.

President Tinubu has taken the bull by the horns.

Now the country’s young people must step into the arena as eyes that see, voices that speak, and hands that secure the nation they will inherit.

•Ojepe is the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Youth Engagement.