On state police, local knowledge, and the architecture that keeps failing us

Let me say it plainly at the start, because it is the only honest place to put it: there are no easy solutions to complex problems. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something — a manifesto, a slogan, a ministry brief that arrived at the right moment. Security in Nigeria is a genuinely hard problem with deep roots, competing interests, and a history of interventions that have each carried their own unintended consequences. I say this not to lower expectations, but to raise the quality of the conversation.

With that caveat firmly in place: I want to share what I know from following the money, and what it reveals about the structural inefficiency at the heart of how Nigeria polices itself. The architecture. Because the architecture is broken in ways that no amount of goodwill or additional recruitment will fix.[C1] 

All Crime Is Local

Imagine a senior officer posted from Enugu to Kano. He does not speak Hausa. He has no relationship with the mosques, the markets, the community elders, the informal networks through which information about crime actually moves. He is starting from zero. Within three years, before those roots have had a chance to take hold, he is transferred again. The intelligence clock resets. The relationships dissolve. A new officer arrives from somewhere else, knowing nothing, starting over. Multiply that across thirty six states time and time again and you understand the routine operation of a federal policing system built on transferability. [C2] 

And transferability — the career mechanism that moves officers away from communities at the moment their knowledge is becoming useful — is not merely an administrative inconvenience. It is the structural destruction of institutional local knowledge.

The officer who knows he will be transferred has no incentive to build the community relationships that generate information. Transferability is the structural destruction of local knowledge.

There is a principle in criminology so basic that it barely gets stated: all crime is local. A kidnapping in Zamfara is not solved from Abuja. A robbery in Osun does not yield its perpetrators to an officer with no relationship with the area. Add a reporting line that bypasses state and local government entirely, and you have a system structurally designed to underperform.

I recall when the then-Governor of Zamfara declared that he was no longer the Chief Security Officer of his state. Nigeria went for him. But what he was saying, inelegantly, was structurally correct. He was pointing out that the Commissioner of Police was not reporting to him or accountable to him. He was identifying, with the bluntness of someone at the end of his patience, a system that pays, promotes, and directs centrally while expecting it to solve local problems.

What IPPIS Revealed

The picture from the outside was troubling enough. What we found on the inside was worse.

When I served in Finance, one of the most difficult tasks my team faced was cleaning our payroll.  We inherited  the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System — IPPIS  project.  It was designed to bring discipline to exactly this kind of exercise; it required physical capture of bio data. What it revealed, once we deployed a BVN-based data matching exercise to support the capture process, was a system that had quietly organised itself around the absence of accountability.

Many, many officers were not where they had been posted. When, in the absence of capture, we removed them from the payroll, they began to resurface: the officer assigned to Yobe whose family was in Abuja and had stayed there; the married woman transferred to Osun with her children in Lagos. Informal arrangements — sometimes negotiated, sometimes simply tolerated — had freed paid officers to go wherever life had taken them, while their official postings existed only on paper.[C3] 

The system is not merely operationally inefficient. It feeds under-policing. The community in Yobe that was nominally being served by an officer living in Abuja was not receiving policing. It was receiving a line item in a federal budget. What the IPPIS exercise taught me about the depth of Nigeria’s security problem has stayed with me since.

Who Pays — and Who Decides

The knowledge problem and the money problem are the same problem, expressed through different ledgers. The federal government owns the payroll entirely: salaries, allowances, and overhead set and administered centrally, independent of where an officer actually serves or whether he serves at all. But the things those officers need to function on the ground — the patrol vehicles, the daily fuel, the body armour, the welfare support — are largely borne by state governments. States donate the cars the federal police drive. States pay the diesel that keeps them running. States supplement the equipment, the gadgets, even the bullets  that the federal  funding releases consistently fail to cover.

The result is curious on paper and damaging in practice. A state government that funds the operational capacity of a federal force has no formal say in how that force is deployed, who commands it, or what its priorities are. The money flows one way. The authority flows the other. When the force fails to perform — and it frequently does — neither tier has a clean line of accountability to answer for it. The federal government points to its payroll. The state government points to its vehicles. The community that was robbed, or kidnapped, or ignored, points at no one in particular, because no one in particular is responsible.

Where a government pays, it should govern. Where it does not govern, it should not be paying. The current arrangement violates both principles simultaneously.

Estimates suggest that Nigeria loses approximately fifteen billion dollars annually due to the combined drag of conflict, displacement, and lost agricultural productivity. Buried inside that number is the cost of intelligence never accumulated, networks never built, and informant relationships never developed — because the officer who might have built them was posted elsewhere, or was never there at all.

What the Rest of the World Knows

Britain published a Policing White Paper in January 2026, described as the most significant reform of policing in England and Wales for a generation. The central anxiety was not under-resourcing or corruption. It was the erosion of local accountability. A decade earlier, the Metropolitan Police had merged its 32 borough command units into 12 larger units in the name of efficiency. Baroness Casey’s subsequent review found the decision had damaged local knowledge and community trust. Britain tried centralising. It is now formally reversing course.

The United States never made that structural mistake. American policing is constitutionally and practically local — approximately 18,000 separate agencies, each accountable to the community it serves. A robbery in Memphis is a Memphis matter. The principle reflects a settled understanding that an officer who expects to remain in a community will invest in it differently from one who answers upward to a distant command and has no long-term stake in local outcomes.

The Accountability Gap

The objection I hear most often to state policing in Nigeria is not the efficiency argument but the political capture argument: that state police will become instruments of governors, used against opponents and inconvenient citizens. This concern is serious and must be taken seriously. It is not, however, an argument against state policing. It is an argument for the design of state policing — for the oversight structures, the independent complaints mechanisms, and the judicial checks that prevent political weaponisation. The federal police force has not been immune to political direction. The question is never whether abuse is possible, but whether the structures exist to constrain it.

Nigeria’s constitution has not yet been fully amended to permit state police. The proposal has gained significant political momentum, and a constitutional amendment process is under way. The framework now being debated is therefore not merely a legal technicality, but the foundation on which any future state-policing system will stand.

What remains is the harder work: designing an oversight architecture that is functional rather than merely formal, and building the political will to implement it in a way that serves communities rather than those who govern them.

This Has Got to Work

Nigeria’s fifteen-billion-dollar annual security cost is not simply the price of crime. It is partly the price of a policing architecture designed, at its structural foundation, to remain a stranger in every community it serves. The officer with no local language, no local relationships, and no long-term stake in local outcomes is not a failure of individual character. He is the predictable product of a system that was never designed to accumulate the thing that makes policing effective: roots.

The constitutional amendment process is now under way — the political argument has been won, and the Presidency has confirmed the framework will be completed before the next election cycle.

This has got to work. Not because the politics are easy — they are not. Not because the design is simple — it is not. But because the current arrangement is demonstrably failing, and the evidence of what works is available in every country that has tried to solve the same problem.

All crime is local. It is past time our policing response was too.

Kemi Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and former Commissioner for Finance of Ogun State. She is the founder of Nidacity.com and the Dash Me Foundation. She writes from Lagos.