The unit built to stop abductions in Imo became the abduction

Nigeria didn't build Tiger Base from nothing. It built it from a real problem.

Kidnapping in the Southeast is real. Communities were suffering. The Anti-Kidnapping Unit in Owerri was the government's answer: a dedicated squad with authority, a facility, and a mandate. What it discovered, quickly and logically, is that ordinary citizens are easier to extort than actual kidnappers. The pivot was rational. The impunity made it permanent.

This is the pattern. Not corruption as accident. Corruption as adaptation.

Amnesty International's report, released last week after three research missions to Owerri between May 2025 and February 2026, documents what that adaptation looks like in practice. Four cells, each 12 feet by 12 feet, with more than 70 people crammed inside at any time. Officers with handheld POS machines withdrawing cash from detainees' relatives in real time. One survivor held for 809 days without ever being charged. Women forced into hard labour under threat. Men beaten with iron rods, machetes, and cables to extract confessions to crimes they didn't commit.

Cell 1 was where people disappeared. A former detainee described it plainly: "If you survive Cell 1, it is only by God's grace. Many people disappeared after being moved there; nobody ever saw them again."

Here's the thing you already know but need to see named: this is not unique to Imo. It's the institutional logic behind every "special unit" Nigeria has ever created without oversight. SARS. The task forces. The squads with names and mandates and no one watching what they do inside the building. The unit gets authority. Authority becomes leverage. Leverage becomes income. Income becomes the whole point. The kidnapping mandate was just the door.

Amnesty's Nigeria director Isa Sanusi put it directly: "It appears the police have not learnt any lessons from the #EndSARS protests. Instead of being held accountable, corrupt police officers have been emboldened to commit human rights violations by the impunity they enjoy."

Six years after Nigerians burned down SARS stations to make this exact point. Survivors in a conference room in Enugu last week, crying through their testimonies. No Inspector General response. No suspension. No investigation announced.

This is what the absence of accountability produces. Not occasional misconduct. A system that runs on it.

If you're in Imo State and you encounter Tiger Base, you don't have a legal recourse that will save you in time. That's not a failure of one unit. That is the Nigerian state's promise to its citizens: protection is available, but only to those with lawyers on speed dial. Everyone else enters at their own risk.

The question worth sitting with isn't whether Tiger Base should be disbanded. It should. The question is what Nigeria builds next, and whether it'll be any different without the accountability structures that make the difference.

So far, nothing suggests it will be.