House of Representatives has called for a comprehensive overhaul of Nigeria’s defence architecture, warning that existing security strategies have failed to adequately address the country’s evolving threats.

The Speaker of the House, Tajudeen Abbas, made the call yesterday at a public hearing on defence-related bills organised by the House Committee on Defence at the National Assembly Complex, Abuja.

The bills before the House of Representatives at the public hearing on defence-related legislation aim to broadly reform Nigeria’s military architecture, spanning operational efficiency, welfare, inclusiveness, and institutional restructuring.

Abbas said the 10th House was committed to strengthening the legal and institutional frameworks guiding the Armed Forces, noting that Nigeria’s current security realities required urgent reforms and “fresh thinking” in defence management.

“The old ways have not fully worked”, the Speaker said.

Stressing that the country had continued to grapple with insurgency in the North-East, banditry and kidnapping in the North-West, communal conflicts in the North-Central, the Speaker stated that they also included separatist agitations in the South-East, as well as emerging threats such as cybercrime and maritime piracy.

He explained that the bills under consideration, including reforms of the Armed Forces Act, veterans’ welfare legislation, gender inclusion in the military, and other institutional support frameworks, were aimed at modernising the defence sector.

SIMILARLY, a former Minister of Education, Obiageli Ezekwesili, has sent an open letter to President Bola Tinubu, the National Assembly, the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, and the wider public, arguing that the push for state police alone will not resolve Nigeria’s challenges of insecurity and instability.

In the letter, shared yesterday across her social media handles, she maintained that comprehensive restructuring of the country remained, in her view, the more sustainable path to addressing the underlying issues.

In the memorandum, titled “State Police is not the answer. Restructuring Nigeria is,” she said the Tinubu administration’s renewed push for state police had reopened a major policy debate.

She noted that the proposal reflected concerns over insecurity in the country.

“The country’s security architecture is failing. Terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, violent extremism, communal conflicts and organised criminality have overwhelmed the capacity of a centrally-controlled police force to secure lives and property across a country of more than 230 million people,” she stated.

According to her, recent Afrobarometer findings show that 79 per cent of Nigerians consider kidnapping and abduction a serious national problem; 33 per cent personally know someone who has been kidnapped within the last five years; and 63 per cent say they or a family member felt unsafe in their home or neighbourhood during the previous year.

She added: “These are not merely security statistics. They are indicators of a profound crisis of state effectiveness and citizen confidence.”

On the proposal for State Police, she wrote: “Yet the fact that State Police is necessary does not mean it is sufficient. The danger confronting Nigeria today is that the country may once again mistake a symptom for the disease itself.

“The security crisis is real, but it is not fundamentally a policing crisis. It is the manifestation of a deeper constitutional, governance and political economy crisis that has steadily eroded state capacity, weakened accountability and undermined the effectiveness of public institutions.”

She stated that the central question before Nigeria should not be whether governors ought to control police forces, but whether the constitutional architecture governing the Nigerian federation remains fit for purpose.

The ex-minister stressed that at the heart of the problem lay a constitutional order that concentrated excessive authority, fiscal resources and political power at the centre.

She said: “Although Nigeria describes itself as a federation, many of its institutional arrangements bear the characteristics of a highly centralised state.”

According to her, the imbalance matters because the State Police debate focuses on only one item among dozens, saying police is merely one of sixty-eight subjects constitutionally monopolised by the Federal Government.