By Abdu Rafiu
Three weeks ago, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, former Minister and a frontline activist, wrote in her characteristic thoughtfulness on what should top our national agenda at this moment and her summative conclusion is that restructuring the country should come before the decentralization of police architecture as it stands today. While acknowledging the seriousness of the state of insecurity in the land decentralization of the policing system cannot be treated in isolation. And her thoughts are aptly captioned by this newspaper, The Guardian: “State police is not the answer, restructuring is.”
She reinforces her position saying: “Nigeria does not merely need a new policing architecture. It needs a comprehensive restructuring agenda anchored in a new constitutional settlement one that rebalances the Exclusive, Concurrent and Residual Lists; devolves powers to the lowest effective level of government; strengthens fiscal federalism; guarantees equal citizenship; promotes productivity and competitiveness; and restores sovereignty to the Nigerian people through a Citizens-led Sovereign National Conference and a referendum on a new constitution. That is the true restructuring agenda.”
The part Oby may wish to look at again is where she seems to be suggesting that convening a Citizens-led Sovereign National Conference and a referendum should be the nation’s pre-occupation for now with the issue of state police only built into it. While the necessity for restructuring is so obvious and has been so for a long while and, indeed urgent now, diversifying our means of policing is even more urgent in the circumstances of our country today. Ultimately, yes. There can be no running away from restructuring. The diversification is the establishment of state police. Insecurity has reached a frightening degree of tragic infamy that the possibility of the dare-devil gunmen storming the conference hall and dragging off participants into a forest in the art of kidnapping cannot be ruled out. The communities sending the representatives are themselves not safe.
Oby Ezekwesili has painted the picture well with the statistics of the incidents she possesses. The Administration’s renewed push for state police” has gained momentum because it speaks directly to a painful reality confronting millions of Nigerians. The country’s architecture is failing. Terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, violent extremism, communal conflicts and organised criminality have overwhelmed the capacity of a centrally controlled police force to secure lives and property across a country of more than 230 million people.
“For many citizens, therefore, State Police appears to be an obvious and long overdue solution. The attraction of the proposal is understandable.” She buttresses the point: “Recent Afrobarometer findings show that 79 percent of Nigerians consider kidnapping and abduction a serious national problem; 33 per cent personally know someone who has been kidnapped within the last five years; and 63 per cent say they or a family member felt unsafe in their homes or neighbourhood during the previous year.
Oby Ezekwesili admits that these are not merely security statistics. In her words: “They are indicators of a profound crisis of state effectiveness and citizen confidence. Yet the fact that State Police is necessary does not mean it is sufficient. The danger confronting Nigeria today may once again mistake a symptom for the disease itself. The security crisis is real, but it is not fundamentally a policing crisis…The more important question is whether the constitutional architecture governing Nigerian Federation remains fit for the purpose.” She speaks about how the nation’s capacity has been eroded by the national structure.
“The question, therefore, is not whether policing should be decentralised. It should. The deeper question is why policing alone should be decentralised while dozens of other functions trapped within a constitutional framework inherited from military command structures rather than democratic federal design. The State Police debate is ultimately a debate about symptoms. The Exclusive Legislative List is where the disease resides.”
I have gone quoting Oby Ezekwesili this copiously so that she is not misrepresented.
Restructuring, ultimately yes. There can be no running away from it. It was in recognition of this that the 1914 National Conference was convened by President Goodluck Jonathan. The Conference report produced by the Conference was exhaustive. Dealing with the issue of State Police now is because it supersedes any other issue of human affairs in the land today. We have to be safe in whatever pursuits, economic or political, we may wish to embark upon. State Police is a subject in restructuring. What this means is that it is already being moved to the Concurrent List where it rightly belongs in a federation since it has passed through the crucial stages in both Houses of the National Assembly in the effort to realign the constitution to an urgent national need.
While we never took away our eyes from the imperative of restructuring, realising how pressing the issue of insecurity had become, various state government responded to the challenge by embarking on various policy engineering to set up state police by other names to stem the tide. Anambra State, for example was the first to officially set up and arm a vigilante group. Established by an Act of Parliament, Act 9 of 2000, it was called Anambra State Vigilance Service and signed into Law on 06 December, 2000. The state government officially recognised it, and decided to fund it and pay members salaries. Abia State, Imo and Ebonyi followed suit with their Houses of Assembly passing bills each establishing a vigilance service, resulting in what sounded, if not state police, certainly community policing. This was as far back as 2004.
We may wish to recall, Lagos was the first to break out and signal its readiness to set up its own police and it was so called when the action Governor, first among equals, Lateef Jakande, set up its own in 1980. The formation was downgraded following the controversy that police was on the clog-in-the-wheel Exclusive List of 1979 Constitution. Since then, succeeding Administrations have retained the form but not the essence. The outfit was largely confined to traffic control until the emergence of Akinwumi Ambode who gave it some bite, again in the drive for state police. He established Neighbourhood Safety Corps. The corps is 5,700 men strong. All along, as I have pointed out before, the seriousness with which Lagos has taken security is unmatched and has been a model to several states in terms of support to the Nigeria Police, signalling the beauty of competition we will witness when the State Police finally comes on stream. From the Administration of Babatunde Fashola, report on State Government Security Trust Fund he set up was given at a yearly Town Hall meeting which afforded members of the public opportunities to ask questions and make suggestions. As of 2017, the Fund had received a cash donation of N199million and N91million worth of equipment—cars and gadgets—from corporate organizations and individuals. The government itself put in N1billion to meet police running expenses. Femi Okunnu, so impressed by the posture of the state government, was to say: “…the manner the state government makes money available to the Fund is the proper way to spend security votes.”
Then Fashola speaking at the 2014 edition of the township meeting, said after five new area commands were approved for the state by Abuja, his Administration had to provide buildings and equipment for them. The then State police commissioner, Yakubu Alkali, corroborating the account by Fashola said Lagos Command received from the Fund two helicopters, 300 patrol vehicles, mobile workshop vehicles and 60 patrol motorcycles. The command additionally received two million ammunition, five fibre boats fitted with 75Hp outboard engines, 30 Armoured Personnel Carriers (APC) and 1000 AK-47. The Lagos State model was endorsed by the United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.
At the time some states asked for guidance on how to simulate the Lagos model. Principal among them was Kano. According to Idris Ibrahim the commissioner in Kano who later became the Inspector-General: “We had to travel to Lagos to understudy the Security Trust Fund. It has served as a model for other states in the Federation.” Barely two months of Ambode mounting the saddle in 2015, the private sector had contributed N4billion to the Fund and the government itself coming in, the Fund shot up to N8billion in the kitty.
Following the Lagos Model, Kano gave the police 25 patrol vehicles and it sought to set up a peace corps organization made up of 6,000 young men and women. It started with 2,000 and paid N80million for their training and N3million for application. Kaduna established what it called Vigilance Service Committee. Before the official vigilance committee there had existed many what El-Rufai called self-help groups.
I have gone this length to demonstrate nothing other than the yearning of Nigerians for another tier of police formation in the land. It also goes to show the transparency and accountability in policing funding, competition and states learning from one another. All the states are roaring to go. It is enough is enough. There has been consensus from among regional establishments, National Governors’ Forum, Zonal Governors’ Forum and stakeholders. Former President Ibrahim Babangida, throwing his weight behind calls for state police, went as far as allaying fears, saying the abuse to which present-day governors would put state police was being exaggerated. And in any case, Nigeria cannot be detained by its ugly past. The world has moved on and Nigeria cannot afford to be left behind, he said. Babangida should know.
Former Vice-President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo said at a security summit: “The nature of our security challenges is complex. Securing Nigeria’s over 923, 768 square kilometres and its 180 million people requires far more men and materials than we have at the moment. It is also a continual re-engineering of our security architecture and strategies…We cannot realistically police and a country the size of Nigeria centrally from Abuja. State Police and community policing methods are the way to go.”
This column has written no fewer than five times in these pages pressing for the establishment of state police, apart from short takes blasting the National Assembly for foot-dragging on an issue as crucial and urgent as the security of the citizens and our land, what has proven intractable now for more than 14 years. The last full-blown write-up on the subject was on 14 March, 2025 captioned: I want to repeat my arguments made at the time by reproducing some points to buttress the point that the creation of state police can come before any other legislative agenda. Captioned First thing, first. I did state on the occasion, blasting the National Assembly: “As the saying goes, Nero fiddles while Rome burns. This aptly captures the situation in the land today. Barely three months ago, the National Bureau of Statistics sent cold shivers down our spine with its revelation of the state of insecurity and the heavy toll it has taken on the nation. Predictably, the media, print and digital, gave the revelation generous coverage. No report, though, in my view has painted the picture the report seeks to convey more vividly than the British Broadcasting Service pidgin version. The BBC pidgin version reads:
“DiNigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Tuesday publish dia 2024 Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey.
“Di report show say approximately 2,2 trillion naira naim Nigerians pay to kidnappers as ransom money between May 2023 and April 2024. Dat na about 1.41 billion US dollars or £1.16 billion pound, and e pass di 1.64 trillion naira wey di goment budget for defence in 2024.
“According to di survey, Northwest rank highest both for di prevalence of kidnapping and di actual number of kidnap incidents. Out od di 2.2million kidnapping incidents wey happun for di Nigeria during the period of di survey, more dan half –1.42 million incidents –happun for di Northwest region.”
Newspapers and online publications reported the grim security situation between 17 and 23 December, 2024. Whether the reports by the media are couched in Queen’s English or in pidgin, the security situation is chilling. According to a report in one of the national newspapers for example, “The insecurity in Nigeria is getting more serious. Many families are paying hefty ransoms to free their kidnapped relatives. Would the increased budget change the rhetoric? We keep our fingers crossed.
“It is simply troubling that a nation that is not at war would be having such a staggering number of abductions in one year. Many Nigerians were flabbergasted when the latest Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey (CESPS) report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) became public.
The stage the country is now can be likened to the parable of chicken and egg: Which comes first. Without chicken there can be no egg. Chicken lays the egg, and without the egg there can be no chicken. The soul exists before the body to cloak it. It is a subject for another day.
State police will strengthen the capacity of the centrally-controlled police that are thinly spread at the moment. And when there is an emergency when the proposed National Conference is held, we will be able to count on supporting forces joining from neighbouring states for a rescue operation. We can, therefore, isolate the pressing issue of the establishment of state police to stem the tide of intractable insecurity sweeping through the entire country. Oby Ezekwesili’s prognostic thoughts are not to be thrown out of the window. Presented in her accustomed pungency, they are a wake-up call for the government to consider seriously the question of rijigging the constitution and restructuring the country and as a matter of urgency, too. What I am getting at is that in the meantime and in the face of the gale of insecurity sweeping through the country there must be a curbing instrument to serve as a stop-gap before the longed-for restructuring is in place. And that is state police. The two houses of National endorsing the Executive Bill to move forward bringing that tier of policing into being is a giant step forward. We cannot afford to pour cold waters on their spirit and that of state legislative Assemblies. The Conference of Speakers of the State Houses of Assembly have endorsed the creation of state police. We cannot say the various outcries were misplaced even though there was never a time we did not recognise we needed to restructure the country. We cannot, therefore say that now that we are nearly there that we would say the establishment of state police is no longer a priority, but restructuring flowing from a national conference and a referendum that can take another four years should supersede it.
Where will Nigeria be in the next four years, going by the statistics Oby Ezekwesili herself has provided? The figures exclude the Oyo State 39 school children and their teachers, seven of them, making 46 in all from Ogbomoso axis in captivity at the National Park since 15 May! Among the children are two-year, six-year-olds exposed to rain and the elements in the dungeon of National Park! More than the figure are also school children kidnapped about the same time in Borno. What height of cruelty! What height of callousness and the depth of unfeeling! To delay rollback the gains through the endorsement of the National Assembly and wait for a conference and referendum would amount to unfeeling and would represent one step forward and four steps backward.
As I wrote last week: True federalism which permits the federating units to move according to their own light and at their own pace and only common services are administered from the centre is the answer. There is already enough literature on this. Nigeria is, indeed, an unnatural union that will be subjected to the correcting blows of the Natural Laws if we dither. In the meantime, protection of the citizens, their lives, their dignity and property comes first above anything else. In the succinct words of Joseph Daodu, one-time National President of the Nigerian Bar Association, “State Police is for law and order.”
Of course, a more critical look should be taken at the guardrails. We cannot give state police to the states with one hand and return it to the President with another hand as the present guidelines would seem to suggest. Intervention of the President must be when a state is in the gravest emergency the police national commission cannot handle. State police, in any case, is not tantamount to the abolition of the Nigeria Police and other sister security institutions.
The Guardian
