Vehicle checkpoints in Nigeria predate the Police Act. Under the 1930 Native Authority Ordinance, emirate and chieftaincy police manned tax and tribute posts on trunk roads in the Northern and Western Provinces. The 1943 Police Ordinance — the foundation of today's Nigeria Police Force — folded these into a unified federal force but retained the checkpoint as a routine instrument of order.
The Nigerian Civil War (1967–70) normalised them as a national institution. Permanent military checkpoints ringed Lagos, Ibadan, Enugu, Port Harcourt and the federal capital corridor. Post-war they were never removed: the Murtala/Obasanjo regime used them in 1975–76 to enforce the WAI-precursor 'Operation Ease the Traffic'; the Buhari/Idiagbon War Against Indiscipline (1984) institutionalised them as moral policing; IBB's 1986 SAP riots and the 1993–98 Abacha years embedded them in counter-protest deployments.
By the late 1990s the checkpoint had become the daily revenue interface between the police and the motoring public. SERAP, CLEEN Foundation, Human Rights Watch and BudgIT documented per-vehicle 'tolls' ranging from ₦20–₦100 at the bottom (motorcycles, taxis), through ₦200–₦500 (private cars), ₦500–₦2,000 (commercial buses), up to ₦5,000–₦30,000 (articulated lorries and containerised freight). Section 36 of the Police Act 2020 explicitly limits checkpoints to specific lawful purposes; in practice the daily collection has continued.
The October 2020 #EndSARS protests were ignited by viral evidence of extortion and violence at SARS checkpoints in Ughelli, Lagos and Ogun. The Lagos Judicial Panel of Inquiry (Doris Okuwobi, J., rtd) received 235 petitions; a substantial share concerned non-SARS uniformed police at routine checkpoints. The Federal Government's 2021 reform pledge included the removal of all unauthorised checkpoints. By 2026, audits by Dataphyte and Stears found checkpoints reduced on some arteries but unchanged or denser on others — particularly the South-South oil corridor and the Abuja–Kaduna highway.
Related on this register: The Nigeria Police Brutality Register, 1929 — present · State Police — The Return of an Old Idea (1886 → 2026) · The Nigeria Police Force institutional line · Inspectors-General of Police.