The Urgency of State Police

 Uche Anichukwu

Finally, the chicken has come home to roost. That which we were forewarned about has come upon us. As the late Ghanaian poet and literary icon, Koofi Awoonor, says in “Songs of Sorrow,” “Death has made war upon our house.”

Kidnappers, terrorists, extremists, and all manner of criminal cartels, who dared not lift their heads to look in our faces in time past, have come out as men. Criminals, who rape our women, murder our citizens in cold blood, abduct our children (including nursery and primary school pupils), take us on ransoms as though they loaned money to us.

We are paying the price of the obstinate refusal of successive administrations since the fall of the First Republic to allow Nigeria to run like a federation. The introduction of the highly misplaced Decree 34 of 1966 by the General Aguiyi Ironsi Administration, which put Nigeria on the path of a unitary form of government as opposed to the federalism adopted after various painstaking conferences in Nigeria and London by our founding fathers set the state for our sorry state. The Ironsi Regime set up a body look at the desirability of unifying the Nigeria Police and Local Government Police. The irony is that the General Yakubu Gowon Regime, populated by those who overthrew Ironsi and made him pay the supreme price for his unitary tendencies , supposedly aimed to pocket the rest of the country, and quickly nullified the contentious Decree 34 of 1966, still went ahead to foist a unitary police system on the country. This is as opposed to a decentralised police system with various layers of police services that subsisted until the coming of the military.

That was not all. From 1966 till the last military regime quit in May 1999, a lot of harm was done to the federal structure that birthed Nigeria’s golden era. The result is the Nigeria we have today – a nation beset by security and economic woes. While the introduction of unitary police gradually made the nation vulnerable to insecurity, the destruction of fiscal federalism and subsequent introduction of what former Deputy President of the Senate, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, christened “Feeding Bottle Federalism,” destroyed the creativity, self-reliance, and competitive growth that gave rise to the economic successes recorded before the 1966 coups.

However, as far as I am concerned, the military is no longer to blame, as 26 unbroken years of democracy are more than enough to right the wrongs we felt the military had done to Nigeria. I recall that Ekweremadu pushed for the decentralisation of policing since the Sixth National Assembly until the Ninth National Assembly. When hapless Nigerians were massacred in Barkin Ladi, Plateau State, in 2018, an already frustrated Ekweremadu forewarned that the most painful part was not just that many hapless citizens were massacred, but also that more people would be killed and more villages overrun. In his words, “there is no way you will have a big federation like Nigeria with all the diversities, and continue to operate a centralised policing.” Sadly, people who should know were more interested politics and narrow interests.

Working closely with the Senate Committee on Constitution Review as Ekweremadu’s media aide afforded one the privilege of understanding the underpinning ethnic and regional politics as well as unfounded fears, claims and sentiments that have torpedoed every attempt to introduce state police over several Assemblies. But perhaps, the greatest enemy of state police, in my opinion, is the selfish belief by successive presidents that it is in their best interest to have a total control of all legitimate instruments of coercion in their firm grips – an assumption that have severally boomeranged in their faces. They only see the need for state police after leaving. This is where President bola Tinubu is different.

It is therefore heartwarming seeing the consensus that now flow in favour of state police – even from the unlikeliest quarters. Only a few days ago, the top echelon of the northern political leadership and intelligentsia – governors, top traditional rulers led by the revered Sultan Sa’ad Abubakar III, top security chiefs, among others – all gathered at the Kashim Iman House to unanimously endorse state police. As former Chairman of the Senate Committee on Rules and Business and one of the critics of Ekweremadu’s State Police Bill, Senator Ita Enang, once confessed on Channels TV’s “Politics Today,” “state police is an idea, which time has come.” It is an emergency and he was no longer interested in what the governors could do with it, so long as they protect the people.

Quite significantly – and also ironically – support for this paradigm shift has equally come from former President Goodluck Jonathan and former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar (Retd.). Of course, the recent meeting of the Southern Governors Forum and the Southern Nigerian Traditional Rulers Council in Ogun also came up with the same verdict.

However, beside the harsh realities in the form of a worrisome wave of insecurity, the credit to the momentum and consensus state police now enjoys should go to President Tinubu for body language, statements, and federalist dispositions, including the devolving of more powers to the states. The president also gave a new kick to the push for state police during his recent declaration of emergency on insecurity. The president declared that “Our administration will support state governments, which have set up security outfits to safeguard their people from the terrorists bent on disrupting our national peace.” He also asked the National Assembly to “begin reviewing our laws to allow states that require state police to establish them.”

Indeed, in the face of rising insecurity in recent times, the president has shown uncommon courage and the political will to navigate Nigeria away from doom. From changing the service chiefs across the military services to the appointment of former Chief of the General Staff, General Christopher Musa as new Minister of Defence, to the directive for the mass recruitment across the military services and the police as well as the recent approval by the National Economic Council, the sum of N100 billion proposed by the Governor Peter Mbah-led Committee for the Revamp of Police and other Security Training Institutions, President Tinubu has displayed a strong will to fix the nation’s security lapses.

However, of particular commendation is his recognition of the fact that security is local. Thus, he went ahead to not only show the political will to see state policing through, but also to support local security initiatives by governors. Talking about local initiatives, what Governor Mbah is doing with security in Enugu State clearly demonstrates how far a purposeful state government can go to secure a state. In less than three years as governor, he has changed the Enugu security story. He has invested heavily in the construction of a state-of-the-art Command and Control Centre matched with AI-enabled cameras mounted across Enugu State for full surveillance. He set up the Distress Response Squad, a special police unit powered by over 150 security vehicles fixed with AI-embedded cameras for effective patrol of the state to mitigate crimes and also ensure a quick response to crime situations. Just recently, he launched hitech equipment like high-impact drones and patrol vehicles to strengthen the war against insecurity in his state. 

We have also seen how he dusted up Enugu’s dormant law to demolish several properties used for kidnapping in the state to send a warning to the criminals that crime does not pay.

Now that the president has accorded the National Assembly the desired political support to amend our constitution to birth state police, the onus is now on the apex legislative body to get cracking. One of the legacies of the Ekweremadu leadership of the constitution review processes of the National Assembly is the introduction of an incremental approach. Unlike in previous Assemblies, where all the proposed amendments were lumped into one bill and the failure of one (such as the tenure elongation proposal) meant the failure of every other amendment, including popular ones, the Ekweremadu-led approach ensured that proposals were broken into different bills. That way, they succeed or fail independent of the rest.

The point here is that the Tenth National Assembly does not need to wait for the rest of the proposed amendments to be ready before proceeding with the amendment to create state police. That would be time-wasting. They should emulate the example of the Sixth National Assembly following the controversies and near constitutional crisis that arose over non-transmission of power to the then Vice President Goodluck Jonathan during the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s illness in 2010. Once the constitutional order was salvaged via the Doctrine of Necessity and Jonathan ascended the presidential seat, the Assembly quickly proposed and processed a single bill that led to the amendment of Sections 145 and 190 of the Constitution. Consequently, once the president or governor is absent for more than 21 days, the vice president or deputy governor automatically assumes office in acting capacity, letter or no letter.

Again, given the extensive work that went into Ekweremadu’s Bill for the Creation of State Police, the National Assembly has a brilliant document to dust up and work with. The special thing about the Ekweremadu bill is that it consciously and meticulously addresses the critical issues of structure, standardisation, control, armament, disciplining, co-existence with federal police, and, importantly, the fears of abuse by state governors. The bill benefits from best practices around the world, especially federal climes like the US, Canada, and Brazil.

Now, with national momentum and presidential willpower in favour of state police, plus a ready document to work with, the ball is now in the court of the National Assembly. Let the amendment begin.

Anichukwu writes from Enugu