Jeff Ukachukwu
There was a time, not too long ago, when Monday in Enugu State felt like a weekly rehearsal for despair. Streets that once throbbed with keke horns and market chatter went silent. Ogui Road, that restless artery of the Coal City, could look like a film set after the crew had packed up: shops shuttered, banks dark, schools empty. A criminal order, issued from nowhere and enforced by fear, had more authority over people’s lives than any law.
It is against that memory that today’s security story in Enugu must be read. Because when Governor Peter Mbah says “Tomorrow is here,” and his team posts aerial shots of patrol vehicles, AI-embedded surveillance cameras watching over the state from many strategic points, and security drones criss-crossing the skyline, they are not just showing off gadgets; they are trying to tell citizens that yesterday, including its broken order is gone.
What has emerged in Enugu over the last two and half years is not a perfect security system, but it is unmistakably very different. You see it first in the hardware: long lines of white Distress Response Squad (DRS) cars parked at strategic points front of the new Command and Control Centre, each fitted with AI-enabled cameras and manned by police officers wearing body cameras instead of just faded name tags; and now, the headline grabbers – high-impact security drones designed to look where human patrols cannot go.
Supporters describe these drones in almost cinematic language: powerful enough to monitor Enugu and beyond, to pick out heat signatures in the forest, to trace kidnappers and bandits, who once vanished into thick bush after attacking highways. In the state’s political storytelling, they are portrayed as “first of their kind in Nigeria,” a visual proof that Enugu is not just complaining about insecurity, but trying to outthink it. Whether or not the “first ever” claim stands up to national comparison, the symbolism is evident: for a region traumatised by abductions, seeing your government put eyes in the sky matters.
But the more interesting story is how all this equipment connects. The Command-and-Control Centre is the nervous system. From this building, feeds from cameras mounted across the state — on streets, in markets, on DRS vehicles — are streamed into a single room glowing with screens. Security chiefs who toured the facility called it “wonder-evoking,” not just because of the fancy hardware, but because from that one space, they could zoom into streets and junctions that used to be blind spots. “We will appear to them like ghosts,” the former Commissioner of Police, CP Anayo Uzuegbu, said of criminals who thought Enugu was still the old playground.
The DRS is the muscle attached to that nervous system. Over 150 patrol vehicles, each tagged, tracked and camera-fitted, are deployed as a special police unit focused on rapid response. Instead of waiting for crime reports to drip into a station logbook, the state is moving toward live alerts: a suspicious gathering here, a vehicle flagged there, an emergency call relayed instantly from a control console.
Then, above all this, the drones. In a country where abductions are often planned and executed from forests, valleys and abandoned farmlands, the ground has always had the advantage. Drones invert that logic. A farmer who hears gunshots no longer has to choose between silence and suicide; in theory, he can call a number, and somewhere in the Command Centre, a team can send an eye overhead without risking lives. Even if reality lags behind that ideal, the architecture now exists for Enugu to fight forest-based crime as a coordinated intelligence problem, not a guesswork patrol.
None of this comes cheap, and Enugu has not pretended otherwise. In February 2024, Mbah finally activated the Enugu State Security Trust Fund (ESSTF), a law that had been sleeping since 2020. He amended it, appointed a Board of Trustees led by investment banker Ike Chioke, and set an ambitious goal: 20 billion for security, roughly 5 billion a year.
The Trust Fund’s own literature is revealing. It talks less about buying more guns and more about the five pillars: fundraising, capacity building, technological advancement, advisory support, and community engagement. The money is meant to underwrite exactly what citizens cannot do on their own — the cameras, the communication systems, the training, the forensic tools, the drones — and to create a standing platform where businesses, diaspora professionals, and wealthy individuals can put their money where their security concerns are.
There is a philosophical shift buried inside that institutional design. Security is no longer framed as “what Abuja sends us” or “what the police can manage,” but as a shared, long-term investment. In a state chasing a $30 billion GDP target, the message is straightforward: without sustained security, the numbers will never materialise.
Has it worked? The answer depends on where you stand and what you remember. Governor Mbah says violent crimes have reduced in the state by 80 per cent.
If you remember those ghostly Mondays of enforced sit-at-home, you cannot deny that something has changed. The government not only outlawed the order; it threatened sanctions for schools and markets that obeyed faceless directives, insisted that “we no longer take orders from non-state actors,” and backed those words with visible policing.
If, however, your reference point is a kidnapping in Udenu or a robbery on the outskirts of town, the story feels less tidy. Crime has not vanished, and no serious analyst will claim that. The fact that these isolated events are no longer a norm, but news, underscores the difference the Mbah Administration has made. What has changed is the state’s posture: from denial and helplessness to a visible, sometimes aggressive presence — patrols at odd hours, cameras where none existed, aircraft buzzing overhead. The security chiefs themselves warn criminals to “steer clear” and urge parents and traditional rulers to preach peace, a subtle acknowledgement that technology cannot replace community vigilance.
A reflective assessment of Enugu’s strategy has to wrestle with three big questions.
The first is sustainability. Drones, AI cameras and command centres do not maintain themselves. They require steady power, skilled technicians, updated software, spare parts and training refreshers. The Trust Fund model offers a way to finance this, but Nigerians have seen too many “white elephant” systems decay after the ribbon-cutting.
The real test will come not in the first two years of excitement, but in year five, when repairs are boring, spare parts are expensive, and political attention has drifted elsewhere.
The second is trust. Surveillance at this scale is double-edged. AI-enabled cameras that track kidnappers can also track protesters. Drones that map forests can also hover over opposition rallies. If citizens begin to feel that the system is as interested in dissent as it is in crime, the fragile consensus around “security first” will fray. Clear rules on data storage, independent oversight, and transparent reporting will matter as much as any gadget on the governor’s shopping list.
The third is depth. Enugu’s strategy has rightly focused on making crime harder and riskier. But durable safety rests on more than fear of arrest. It depends on whether a young man in Nsukka or Nike sees more dignity in a job than in joining a kidnapping ring. It depends on whether the rural farmer, abandoned by her children, believes the state cares whether she returns alive from the farm. The administration’s wider agenda — smart schools, ward-level health centres, road networks that reconnect rural economies — is part of this deeper security story, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into a press release about drones.
So, is Enugu safe? It is safer than it was. It is more serious about security than it was. And it is better equipped technologically than most states in the federation. A president has flown in to commission its Command-and-Control Centre; an Inspector General of Police has publicly praised its infrastructure; investors now openly tie their confidence in the state’s growth prospects to its emerging security architecture.
But safety is not a medal you win once. It is a habit you must renew every day. Enugu’s new drones and patrol fleets are impressive not because they make crime impossible — they don’t — but because they mark a state that has decided to stop treating insecurity as an inevitable fate. The real genius will be to make that decision outlive this administration: to build systems that still function when the campaign jingles have faded and “Tomorrow is here” is no longer a slogan but an expectation.
For now, when the drone lights blink over the forests also manned by the re-energised and reequipped Forest Guards, and the monitors glow late into the night at the Command Centre, they carry a simple, quiet promise to the people below: you are no longer alone in this fight. If Enugu can keep that promise — in the forests, on the roads, in the markets, in the minds of its young — then “Enugu is safe” will cease to be a boast and become something far more powerful: a normal sentence that no one feels the need to emphasise.
Dr. Ukachukwu is a public affairs analyst and writes from Enugu
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