For the eight years that President Muhammadu Buhari was running Nigeria, an estimated 63, 111 Nigerians were killed by an assortment of criminals. This is the data provided from the Nigeria Security Tracker (NST), a project of the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Programme.

This diary of disaster may be an underestimation since a lot of people do get killed in farms and villages and their numbers may not be included in the records by researchers.

President Bola Tinubu is aware of the danger that the nation has faced and is facing in the area of security. When he was sworn into office on May 29, this year, he said: “We shall invest more in our security personnel and this means more than an increase in number. We shall provide better training, equipment, pay and fire power.” The promised improvement in the quality and quantity of the security personnel available for the task at hand is commendable because these improvements will contribute substantially to the achievements that can be recorded.

But it must be clear to President Tinubu that the level of insecurity that we have to deal with today still remains unacceptably high. We still have the Chibok school girls in captivity nine years since their abduction in April 2014. In the last few months, we have had new abductions. On August 17 this year, seven National Youth Service Corps members from Akwa Ibom State were abducted in Zamfara on their way to Sokoto where they were to serve in the NYSC programme.

The parents of the corps memberssaid that they have so far paid N13 million to the terrorists but their children have not been released. They claim that the terrorists are asking for an additional N200 million. They are wondering where that kind of money can come from when finding the N13 million that they paid was the equivalent of squeezing water out of stone.

There are also eight students out of 30 abducted from the Federal University of Gusau, Zamfara State, still in captivity since September 29. Last Wednesday, four female students of the Federal University Dutsinma, Katsina State, were also kidnapped and are still with their abductors. According to the Sunday Punch of October 8, 2023 insecurity has claimed 531 lives in the last four months in some states of the Federation.

Bandits have also reportedly taken over 14 Local Government Areas of Zamfara State. They have posed a great threat to farmers in the state, especially in the rural areas. Many farmers are now forced to flee from their communities for fear of being kidnapped for ransom. Because many of these fleeing villagers are farmers, there is the prospect of a looming food crisis as their farms are now lying fallow.

However, the security agencies are not resting on their oars. Last week, the Nigerian Army announced a massive offensive that is to be carried out in four zones namely: North Central, South East, South South and South West against terrorists, armed robbers, cultists, cattle rustlers, kidnappers etc.

At a media briefing in Abuja, Spokesman of the Nigerian Army, Brigadier General Onyema Nwachukwu, announced that there will be a special offensive from October to December this year in the four zones mentioned. The exercise in the South East will be codenamed Exercise Golden Dawn III while that of the North Central will be called Exercise Enduring Peace III.

The one in the South South and South West will be styled Exercise Still Waters III. The soldiers are expected to tackle peculiar security problems in these zones. This will be done in collaboration with sister security agencies such as the Nigeria Police, Department of State Security, National Security and Civil Defence Corps and the Nigeria Customs Service.

While this project is commendable, it is important to mention that there has been a shift in the targets that the criminals focus attention on today. The criminals are focusing attention more on soft targets: farmers in villages, school girls in remote areas, travellers on lonely roads. These are areas where there are neither armed policemen nor soldiers or other security operatives. That is where state police could easily fill the gap.

I have written a number of articles in the past on state police. The facts that recommend state police bear repetition because despite the best efforts of our governments, past and present, the level of high crime remains high. For a population of more than 215 million, the 400, 000 or so policemen that we have cannot do the job satisfactorily. This is far below the United Nations prescription of one policeman to 400 persons. That gap is evident. That is why soldiers are routinely drafted into doing duties that belong to policemen. And when these soldiers arrest civilians they hand them over to policemen since they know where their responsibility starts and stops.

It is important to remind President Tinubu that the party that he leads, APC, had actually assigned a group of APC leaders to find out from Nigerians what they wanted. This team was headed by the then Governor of Kaduna State,Nasir El Rufai. He and his team toured all the six geo-political zones in the country and came back to write a report with state police as one of the recommended items.
President Buhari bluntly refused to implement the report and no one within the party was able to convince him to do it. Before he became President, Tinubu had been an apostle of true federalism and many federalists expect him, now that he is President, to do the needful.

Accepting the concept of state police will help him to combat insecurity more ferociously than hitherto. Interestingly, some 23 state governments have already established their own “state police” eventhough they call them by other names. The states that have such security systems are Kaduna, Sokoto, Kano, Zamfara, Borno, Yobe, Rivers, Osun, Benue, Katsina, Cross River, Enugu, Taraba, Adamawa, Ondo, Anambra, Ebonyi, Edo, Nasarawa, Plateau, Niger, Bauchi and Abia. These security outfits exist today in all the above-mentioned states but they are largely inactive because they are not allowed to use the kind of sophisticated arms that can counter insecurity very effectively. The criminals, on the other hand, wield far more sophisticated arms than these amateur security men.

So, the question is: why are state governments not allowed to establish state police, which can significantly add to the fire power available to tackle the increasing crowd of criminals in our midst? I believe that President Tinubu should work with the National Assembly to amend the Constitution and make state police a reality.

The level of insecurity is too high and too sophisticated to be left to the number of available policemen today. In any case, we were told by a former Inspector General of police, Mr Mike Okiro that about 150, 000 policemen today are deployed to protect big men and big women and some wannabe VIPs. That means that the number of policemen available to serve the rest of the people has thinned down considerably.

The advantages of having state police are many. They would add a significant number to the quantity of policemen available for duty. They will increase the fire power. They will cover the villages, nooks and crannies of the country; they will understand the lay of the land because they serve in their states; they will speak the local language. They will understand the culture and traditions within which they will operate. The command and operational offices will be next door, so emergencies will be handled speedily. The governor will accept full responsibility, de jure and de facto as the Chief Security Officer of the state. The security vote of the state will be pointedly expended on security.

One of the reasons that Buhari gave for not pushing for the establishment of state police was that the states did not have money with which they could fund state police. My gut feeling is that if money was his major headache, the real reason may have been that with the establishment of state police, state governments would no longer fund the Nigeria Police. In that case, the Federal Government would have to pick up the bill hitherto handled by state governments. If money is a major hindrance to the establishment of state police the answer is that the states can raise funds through levies and donations in addition to money that they are spending today on the Nigeria Police. So, that excuse has collapsed like a pack of cards.

The other excuse has been that governors can abuse state police by using it to harass their political opponents. If that happens, those whose human rights are violated can go to court. If the victim does not have the resources with which to go to court, there are several civil society groups in the country that have been standing guard over people’s rights since the onset of democracy in 1999 they can render help.

Since 1999, too, public protest has been elevated to high art and a highly acceptable component of our democracy. No one can stop the public from wielding placards and marching through the streets in demonstration of their objection to whatever is objectionable. That is a function that democracy assigns to the Office of the Citizen.

I have said it before that no government can tackle insecurity in a huge country such as this successfully with only a single police force with the command headquarters based in Abuja. As things stand today, all the Commissioners of Police in the 36 states and Abuja report to the Inspector General of Police in Abuja. Eventhough there are zonal offices with Assistant Inspectors General of Police as the head, the Commissioners of Police are effectively the de facto bosses in these zonal offices.

If Tinubu wants to record more successes than we have had in the past in security matters, he must work on the establishment of state police, which in any case, already exists in an inferior form in some states. I can only say to the President: Please legalise it.