By Sylvester Odion Akhaine

Good morning, Mr President. Today, I address the issue of state police. I reckon that it has been a controversial issue all along, made so by those who have a penchant for domination and have since 1960 atomised the federal structure of the country.

In the heady days of the prodemocracy struggle, I was saddled with the task of designing a structure for convening of a sovereign national conference, which I presented at the Ibadan convention of the Campaign for Democracy in 1994, where I was elected the general secretary of the organisation. With the knowledge of the power dynamics of the country and the holding down of the development course of the Africa’s giant, not only sleeping, crippled, I added to the demand of the Campaign for Democracy the transformation of the Nigerian army to regional commands to ensure balance of terror with a general staff that would always meet to ensure the collective defence of the territorial integrity of  the country, thereby annulling the chokehold of a section of the country on the material force of the state.

Other demands included an end to military rule for all time; the convocation of a sovereign national conference; and the de-annulment of the June 12 Presidential election won by Chief MKO Abiola and the victor’s formation of a government of national unity  to implement the aforementioned core demands of the prodemocracy movement.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the sage, provided us the most compelling arguments on why Nigeria should remain a federation that I have ever read.  Rendered with scholarly acuity, Awolowo notes in his ‘Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution’ (1966) that “we should be reminded that of all the cultural equipment of a people, language is the most formidable, the most irrepressible, and the most resistant to diffusion, not to talk of fusion. It lies at the base of human divisions and divergences. And historical evidences of an irrefutable nature have shown firstly, that you can unite but can never succeed in unifying peoples whom language has set distinctly apart from one another; and secondly, that the more educated a linguistic group becomes, the stronger it waxes in its bid for political self-determination and autonomy, unless it happens to be the dominant group (emphasis in original).

In about 1798, General Napoleon Bonaparte, the renowned French general and leader, after conquering Switzerland, attempted to impose a unitary model on the country and failed. He then noted that Switzerland’s profound cultural differences affecting linguistic and religion were resistant to centralisation and then made his famous statement: “Switzerland does not resemble any other State, either in the events which have succeeded each other for several centuries, or in its geographical situation, or in its different languages, different religions, and that extreme difference of manners which exists between its different parts. Nature has made your State federative: to want to conquer it is not the act of a wise man.”

To run Nigeria as a unitary state, mainstreamed by those who controlled the material force of the state since the countercoup in 1966, is counterproductive to peace and development of our country. This is the reason why the idea of state police is welcomed. Past efforts at community policing were hobbled by its subjection to centralised control such that the personnel were not indigenous to the communities. The president is to be praised for this bold initiative, which has secured the concurrence of the two houses of the national assembly.

However, there have been apprehensions with the bold move to decentralise policing in the country. One is the possibility of its abuse by the governors of the Fourth Republic who have managed to turn themselves into emperors in their respective states by undermining the houses of assembly, which, as the guts of democracy, ought to call them to order and remove them from power based on impeachable offences. To put the state police under their control can lead to abuse, just as the native police were abused in the first republic by regional premiers.

The northern half of the country has met to take a decision on the new constitutional alteration to move policing to the current legislative list.  First in 2025 and recently on July 8, 2026. They acknowledged that the North is facing a security collapse that could spell doom for the region. In the second meeting at Ibrahim Kashim House,  Uba Sani,
Kaduna State Governor underscored the futility of policing Nigeria through a centralised policing structure, which he has noted is “obsolete for a nation of over 230 million people…We must resist politicising insecurity…”

Nevertheless, there are reports of the intrusion of elements of centralised control in ways that negate the whole essence of devolution of state policing to the federating units. This finds expression in the so-called the National Police Council that will have powers to recommend state police commissioners to be approved by the governors. This, Mr President, is a major discontent. It is a return to centralism through the back door, thereby defeating the essence of placing policing on the current list.

As the bill goes to state houses of assembly for concurrence, there is still a window to right the wrongs in the current engrossment. For now two quick recommendations. One is doctrinal orientation. It would mean substitution of what I have called the Glover Syndrome (the norm of security operatives seeing the people as the enemy, instead of protecting them against the rapacity of government functionaries) with humanism (a people first value).

The police must know that it is a force to protect the people, not the governors of states who are interim wielders of state power. Two, the democratisation of the State Police Council to include not only the governor, chairmen of local government in the state, chairman of the state Police Service Commission but representatives of the Council of Chiefs, the Nigerian Bar Association, and Council of women organisations, as originally engrossed in the private member bill proposed by Senator Surajudeen Bashiru in 2020. Its responsibility is to superintend over the state’s Police Service Commission.  Mr President, if you allowed the erosion of the federal essence of the State Police Bill, you have not altered the status quo. Next week, I shall address the xenophobia in South Africa.

Professor Akhaine lectures at the Lagos State University.