Tag: Police force

There is no way we can continue with the way we are going with policing now. . . For us to continue this old way of policing our country, I don’t think it can work and it is not working. We have to look at other parts of the world, how they are doing it-Vice President Yemi Osinbajo
Community policing which demands effective police-public partnership and trust in crime prevention is the best form of policing…. Even among police personnel themselves, a research carried out in 14 states discovered that if community police strategy is adopted, it could assist to eradicate most of the challenges attributed to the traditional reactive police culture…. There is no debate about the efficacy of community policing model of internal security management-Solomon Arase, former IGP.
You are all aware of the challenges we are currently facing in this country, particularly that of insecurity. There is no doubt that the security architecture of this country presently cannot meet the demands and challenges before it….One of the decisions we took today is to address the issue of state and community policing. In doing that, we gave our Constitution Amendment Committee two weeks to bring to the floor a Bill on State and Community Policing. The House of Representatives is also working along similar lines.—Senator Bukola Saraki

The police force in Nigeria is again under the radar. The National Assembly has vowed to create state and community police through amendment of the 1999 Constitution. The tendency to say “Déjà vu” must be high among the country’s federalists, but nobody can readily know what good outcome can come out of such promise at a time that election is virtually at the nation’s door. In furtherance of this column’s interest in re-federalisation of the country, it chooses today to err on the part of optimism by sharing with lawmakers its views on police reform.

One central police force to secure the entire country was decreed into existence in 1970 after the civil war. The thinking then and later by other military dictators and their folk theorists is that there is an umbilical cord between policing a multiethnic and multicultural federation and national unity. The decree promoted ever since the notion that the more Nigeria is centralised, the more united it can be. Not even the colonial master, the creator of Nigeria, discouraged multilevel policing. Other members of the school of thought that only central agencies can guarantee national unity and that is devoid of abuse of subnational police system have continued to support expansion of federal powers at the expense of states and local governments which provide homes for citizens and property. Many federal lawmakers have expressed support for over centralisation since the beginning of the fourth republic in 1999. It is, therefore, a pleasant surprise that the federal legislative body has come to the realisation that it is not wise to leave law enforcement in the hands of a central government that has no space of its own, apart from the FCT, federal roads, and land transferred to the central government for specific use.

For too long, the National Assembly has acted in favour of those who think that national unity is the main reason for establishing police systems, instead of the need to guarantee public order. When in 2012, the 36 members of Nigeria’s Governors’ Forum called for subnational police systems, the NASS looked away, when it could or should have supported such call with constitutional amendments. The legislative body has been looking away from such demands until now that herdsmen from within and outside the country have exposed the weakness in concentrating state security in the central government.

Realization by the National Assembly that one centralised police force is incapable of sustaining public order in 36 states in a federal system may be seen by many citizens as belated.  But acquiring such awareness is better late than never. What is concerning is the degree of guarantee that the same legislature may not sing another tune before the process of amendment commences. Since history is created daily, the National Assembly should be given its due; it appears today to be on the right side of history. Legislators who are pro-multilevel policing need all the suggestions fellow citizens can offer them as federal and state legislators embark on what can change the history of federalism in a country in which the federal government has monopolised (unsuccessfully) provision of security for 180 million people with over 250 languages and cultures spreading over 923,768 square kilometres.

It shouldn’t matter how long it had taken the Federal Legislature to realise that the military template for securing the country is now stale and outdated. What matters is that significant segments of the population have come to terms with the fact that the military template for governing Nigeria, if continued as it was passed to post-military politicians, is likely to endanger the unity the military designed the template to achieve. One irrefutable part of human behaviour is that many individuals get used to an existing practice and often become beholden to it, even when such practice hobbles them. Another abiding aspect of humanity is the capacity of every society to throw up leaders that can see better than those inured to an existing method. Such personalities also pluck the courage to throw away what in the existing system causes problems and pain for those that are needed for the system to survive.

The reasons for subnational policing are more than responding to the recent tragedy in many North-central states, as important as such response is. The recent killings are effects of age-old neglect of proper way of securing persons and property in a multiethnic state. Central policing has presented itself more like intimidators than protectors of citizens and property. The federal police have shown inadequate respect for diversity of the country it has been designed to secure. Under the central police system, security operatives are deployed to states whose language and culture they hardly understand. It is obvious that law enforcement officers who do not understand the simplest and most horizontal register of the language of the community of their beat are likely to be shut out of vertical and connotative language of such community: metaphors, idioms, and idiolects in which criminals communicate with each other. A central police force mocks federalism by running a security system in which governors and state lawmakers make laws they do not have the power to enforce.

Ideally, decentralising policing should be a part of a larger process: restructuring.  While speed may be essential for the National Assembly on this matter, the amendment ought to involve citizens as much as possible. This is an exercise that should not involve re-inventing the wheel. Best global methods and practices abound in countries with longer history of federalism: United States, Switzerland, Australia, India, Canada, Belgium, Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, to name a few. Even the United Kingdom, until recently a unitary state, and New Zealand, another unitary state, have multiple police systems to consider.

The obsession of military dictators with unity instead of with security and safety of citizens had produced a federal police force that is alienated from citizens. Continuing with one police force is likely to water down security of life and property, as it has done most graphically in the case of killings in Plateau, Benue, and other states. No federal system in the world puts the country’s security in one basket as Nigeria’s military dictators had done for decades. It is, therefore, uplifting that lawmakers who have for long seen one central police force in a multiethnic democracy as a norm rather than an anomaly have promised to provide leadership for a new security architecture.  This new vision is better late than never, but it should be more far-reaching than creation of state police. Lawmakers—federal and state—should think about full-scale de-militarisation of the polity, particularly the 1999 Constitution.