Our Security Men Work for the Criminals — Shocking Confessions From Inside a Lagos Estate
The gateman at the estate on Adeba road told me something in February that I have not stopped thinking about. We were standing outside the small guardroom, the one with the plastic chair and the handwritten logbook that nobody actually checks, and he was eating rice from a takeaway container with the focused energy of a man who has been on his feet since five in the morning. I asked him, casually, how well he knew the residents. He laughed. Not a happy laugh. The kind of laugh that means the question itself is the joke.
He said he knew which apartments were empty, which ones the owners visited only on weekends, and which tenants paid their caretaker separately to handle things quietly. He said all of this without looking up from his rice. I wrote it down in my phone notes under a contact name that is not his name, because that is how this kind of conversation works in Lagos.
What he said next is what I am here to tell you about.
He said that two months before I arrived, three units in the estate had been robbed within the same week. Same method each time. Entry through the back, nothing broken, nothing forced. The kind of entry that requires either a key or knowledge of which locks are faulty and which dogs are real and which ones are just a recording someone plays from their phone at night. He said the estate management investigated and found nothing. He said this with the same flat, tired voice people use when they have already decided that finding nothing was always going to be the outcome.
I am not telling you this to frighten you. Fear is cheap and easy to sell. I am telling you because the security architecture inside most Lagos estates, including some of the ones behind Abraham Adesanya roundabout that are charging service charges that would make your eyes water, is built for aesthetics, not function. The uniform is real. The logbook is real. The barrier that lifts when you press the remote is real. The actual protection? That is a more complicated conversation.
Here is what I have come to understand after speaking with people on both sides of this, security personnel who are underpaid and exhausted and living inside the same compound they are supposed to protect, and residents who are paying two, three, sometimes four hundred thousand naira a year in service charge for the privilege of feeling safe. The security infrastructure at most of these estates was designed to be seen. It was designed to appear in the property listing and justify the price per square metre. It was not designed to prevent anything from happening to you at one in the morning when the generator goes off and the CCTV camera that faces the car park has been showing the same frozen frame since August because nobody replaced the hard drive.
I spoke with a woman, a teacher, who lives in a block not far from the Ajah axis. She told me her estate had six security men covering three shifts. She found out by accident, when a new security man told her himself, that two of the senior guards had a standing arrangement with a group who moved stolen electronics through the estate back gate on Sunday mornings, when traffic was light and the estate management office was closed. She reported it. The guards were questioned. One was transferred to a different post inside the same compound. The other is still there.
What changed? The logbook now has a supervisor’s signature column that is initialled every four hours. That is what changed.
I am not saying every security man in every Lagos estate is compromised. That would be stupid and unfair and also inaccurate. What I am saying is that the incentives are badly designed, and badly designed incentives produce predictable outcomes. A man earning forty thousand naira a month, sleeping in a guardroom no bigger than a storage cupboard, working twelve-hour shifts with one day off, protecting the property of people whose monthly service charge alone is ten times his salary, that man is not your enemy. But he is also not your security system. He is a human being in an impossible position, and some people in impossible positions make choices that make sense to them even when those choices do not make sense for you.
The estate managements that are doing this properly are the ones that rotate guards between properties so familiarity does not become a liability, that use third-party verification for security personnel rather than relying on referrals from the existing guards, and that treat the security staff as professionals rather than afterthoughts. They exist. There are not enough of them.
Before you pay a service charge, ask to see the security company’s contract and their staff rotation policy. If they look at you like you have asked something unreasonable, that look is your answer.
Lukmon Isiaq is a Lagos-based property researcher and street-level writer who has spent years studying the Ajah corridor the way most people never bother: on foot, in compounds, and in conversation with landlords, tenants, caretakers, and estate agents who operate where the listings end and the real story begins.
He is not a property developer. He is not a real estate marketer. He is the person you call before you sign anything. The one who has personally walked flood-prone streets after October rain, argued with agents over undisclosed charges, and documented how the Lagos housing market actually works for ordinary Nigerians trying to make serious decisions with serious money.
His writing on Abraham Adesanya Estate Lekki Ajah covers the Ajah corridor, Ikota Villa, Ajao Estate, Ogudu GRA, and the wider Lekki property market with one consistent standard: the honest version, not the brochure version.
He understands the gap between what a listing promises and what a tenant discovers on their first rainy season.
