By Anthony Akinwale

“All politics is local,” says a famous dictum in American politics whose earliest documented use is traced to a1932 article authored by Louis Ludlow in The Washington Post.

In other words, the dictum was already in use before it was popularised by Thomas O’Neill, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1987.

O’Neill’s father gave him this dictum as a piece of advice in 1935 after the young O’Neill lost his bid for a seat on the Cambridge Massachusetts City Council. His father told him that he lost because his campaign was deficient in engaging the people on the streets of his neighbourhood.

Thomas learnt from his father that success or failure of a politician rests on the quality and effectiveness of his engagement with voters in his locality, and of his intervention regarding issues that concern them. The politician is successful if he or she effectively engages and addresses matters of local concern. It is a way of saying if each person would make a little positive difference in his own little corner, that would make a big difference.

In these days of globalisation, that local security issues are of national or even international concernis not to be debated. Insecurity in one corner of the globe might have originated from another corner, and might have serious devastating consequences in many other countries. Nonetheless, how local concerns affect the immediate constituency of the politician is best attended to locally. What concerns us here, by way of illustration, is the issue of policing Nigeria. The dictum, “All politics is local” means all policing is local.

O’Neill became Speaker two years before the 1979 Nigerian Constitution was decreed into law by the Nigerian military on the eve of their first departure from politics, and twenty-two years before the 1999 Constitution was decreed into existence by the same military on the eve of their second, and hopefully final departure. One would therefore be in order if one were to submit that either final red actors of the strikingly identical “federal” Constitutions never heard him utter this wise saying, or, they thought they were wiser, and thus chose to ignore him.

Whatever the case may be, it may be asserted without fear of any cogent contradiction that one of the numerous fundamental errors in the 1999 Constitution, which is itself a copy of the 1979 Constitution, is the inclusion of security on the exclusive legislative list.

Another is the inclusion of mineral resources on the same exclusive legislative list. The former effectively undermined security.

The latter effectively deprived and impoverished the people. The two are not exhaustive but illustrative of provisions in the Nigerian constitution that are thoroughly out of sync with federalism properly understood. For, to be governed by a Constitution with an inordinately long exclusive legislative list, as is the case with the current Constitution, is to live not in a federation but in an empire. Its lengthy exclusive legislative list promotes a hegemony of the government at the centre, and makes the task of securing a vast and diverse country such as Nigeria a mission impossible.

My appreciation of the practical wisdom in the saying often attributed to O’Neill comes from an understanding of politics itself. Politics is to be understood, not primarily as canvassing for votes, but as a venture whose intent is the common good of an intelligently regulated polity. The quest for the common good in politics, like charity, begins at home.

To say all politics is local is to say that the intelligently regulated task of seeking the common good begins in one’s locality. But it does not stop there. It has wider implications and repercussions. Failure or refusal to recognise the fundamentally local character of politics bears the potential of disintegration of a country. Such was the case in history of empires of western Sudan, namely, ancient Ghana, ancient Mali and Sohghai.

Each of these empires began as a strong city, grew into an empire, then fell, because it could no longer police peoples of cultural and linguistic diversity living in the peripheries.

Recent passage of the Bill on state police by the Nigerian National Assembly is a step in the right direction. It has taken a long time to come. But it comes with justified apprehension in some quarters. There are fears that state governors may exploit state police to implement their electoral agenda, haunt and hunt down their opponents.

It is perfectly in order to have state police, and even local police. A case study in contradiction is the fact that the Nigerian Constitution provides for a three-tier government—federal, state and local—gives them capacity to legislate, but denies them capacity to enforce their legislations. Passage of the state police bill would seem to be the beginning of removing constitutional provisions that are inconsistent with federalism.

By passing the bill, the National Assembly was not doing Nigeria and Nigerians any favour.

Any government with legislative capacity must not be denied law-enforcement capacity as the Nigerian Constitution strangely does.

But fears of those who are not in favour of state police must not be ignored. While establishment of state police would be perfectly in order, what would be utterly out of order would be use of the police in the implementation of Machiavellian tactics. It would be an embarrassment to use them for tasks that do not pertain to the police.

What is at stake, therefore, is our notion of “police”, in the first instance. Whether we are talking of federal or state or local police, we must be able to articulate what we mean by “police”. What is the nature of policing in a democratic polity? And, in the second instance, what are the corresponding terms of engagement between government and the citizen, manifest in the terms of engagement between the police and the people in the polis?

One would hope that the bill in question, discussed almost clandestinely, is specific on how the police is to secure the land, its people, and their rights. The police—federal, state or local—must not be used as instrument of violation of rights of citizens, and agents of the selfish intent of public office holders.

There is still a lot of work to be done, still a long way to trek to a truly federal polity. For astart, the task at hand is shortening the exclusive legislative list. One would want to believe that, with the passage of the bill, the exclusive legislative is at least shortened, and the movement has begun from an empire dressed in the robes of a federation to a federation in name and indeed.

There is another story from Massachusetts. It is the story of how, some years ago, at the time William Weld was Governor of the State of Massachusetts, he was stopped by a Massachusetts State Trooper. The Governor had been driving above the speed limit. Asked by the policeman to produce his driver’s licence, the Governor did, without introducing himself. Upon seeing that it was the Governor he had stopped for driving above the speed limit, the policeman, without any hesitation, gave the Governor his ticket. The Governor was made to pay a fine for driving above the speed limit by a policeman on the payroll of the government he led.

Will a state police officer do such a thing to a state Governor in Nigeria? Will public office holders in Nigeria be subject to the same laws that govern all of us in Nigeria?
Father Akinwale is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Augustine University, Ilara-Epe, Lagos State.