POLICING AND NIGERIA’S CIRCLE OF VIOLENCE
The country is in dire need of state police, argues JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
Two hundred dead in Benue. Humans. Children. Men. Women. Dreams. Killed. We’ve been here before, if we do things how we did them, we will be here again. We have built a circle that ensures we always return to the exact same point of sorrow, tears and blood. Violence has become so much of our national trademark, we no longer even pause out of respect to the dead or to reflect on the way forward to protect the living. We move on knowing that we are treading on the same spot, only differentiated by motion, without movement. Same circle, breeding endless cycles of violence. Without pause. Something has to give.
On the best of days, Nigeria is a multinational country negotiating its nationhood as one sovereign entity. The amalgamation and eventual independence of the land area that is now Nigeria inherited the storms of conflicting groups and ethnic nationalities. Amidst the major ethnic rivalries that play out on the national front, there are smaller ones, even among people who speak the same language. The sort of bickering that, except you are from these ends, you’d not understand the nuances of their depth or difference. If you were posted from Abuja to police these simmering conflicts, you’d be at best a breathing mannequin with a gun, without understanding of the place, the people and their history.
State police will not end Nigeria’s complicated insecurity challenges, but it will mean that there will be 36 different bodies with varying capacities addressing specific security challenges in each state. That to me looks like an easy sell, compared to just one body that, were it to be inefficient and incompetent, the country is doomed and if it somehow is effective and competent, amidst the shortage of resources and the scale of the challenge, it’d still be limited by capacity. However you look at it, whether from the proven failings of the Nigerian Police or from the promise of state control over their own security, the arguments for state policing will always trump whatever shortcomings there could be. We should be discussing the “how?” of this matter at this point and not the “if”.
Nigeria stands no chance on national security without its state governments having the power and authority to meet security challenges directly. The future of Nigeria, on almost every front, is devolution. The less each state is dependent on Abuja, the better for our collective progress, more so on national security. Nigeria needed state policing 65 years ago. It needed same 26 years ago. It needed state policing yesterday. It needs state policing now. Communities should be protected and defended by people they know and who know them. Like politics, security is even more local.
Intelligence gets lost because of the physical and time disconnect between Abuja and other parts of the country. Let each state defend itself based on its peculiar challenges. There have been arguments against state police. Those positions aren’t invalid. However, the current design has failed us woefully, it continues to and there is nothing to suggest that will change. We cannot continue to work with the same strategy, get the same results and expect that someday the results will somehow change without changing the inputs. It is time to work out the legal and practical framework for state policing. We can put measures in place to ensure that some governors do not use it to advance their politics. We should define the rules of engagement in such a way that the mission of state policing is intended to address insecurity at the granular level.
Short of handing ammunition to each citizen to defend themselves, which, ideal as it sounds, comes with multiple order grave consequences, we need to ensure that those who police them know them, live with them and will give their all to defend them. It’s the closest thing to giving the people the power to defend themselves. Now, it is Abuja trying to do it and mostly failing. The Federal Police can and should exist to meet specific challenges. Because even now, we have needed the military to cover the gaps left by ineffective policing. That itself is because of multidimensional challenges borne out of scale. This is a major reform on national security that is due for execution.
In Canada, its provinces take responsibility for policing. The likes of Quebec, Ontario and Labrador have their own police force. In India, states recruit, train and design their own framework for meeting security challenges. The Union Government of India does not have any jurisdiction over these state police units. We already know about the multiple level policing in the United States. Indonesia has its National Police and its Municipal Police Units. Pakistan has at least three-level police units, the federal, the provincial and the territorial police units. Save for Canada, all these countries share something in common with Nigeria; they are amongst ten of the world’s most populous countries. By design, as already proven by Nigeria’s failings and the better examples elsewhere, even an efficient and better trained Nigerian Police cannot secure Nigeria’s hundreds of subnational governments alone.
This country is too big, too complex and, I am sorry to say, too problematic to be trusted with one level of policing. It just cannot work, it has not worked, and it will never work. Anyone still defending this status quo cannot do so based on anything other than their fear of what is not known. What we do know now is, as it is, our prayers will not be enough to save us. The name of the party or the president will not save us. The buck stops at the president’s table, like then opposition leader Bola Ahmed Tinubu tweeted about then President Goodluck Jonathan. Today, the buck is his. However much he wants to take responsibility for it, if he didn’t know then, he most certainly must know it now, something has to give. It’s too late to save the killed, but it is never too late to break from this circle.
Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing
