- By Tosin Osasona
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s establishment of an exploratory committee of state governors and representatives of the federal government on the modalities for the establishment of state police marks the policy high point of the two-decade-plus agitation for the decentralization and constitutional amendment for the operationalization of state-owned police service in Nigeria. While the president is yet at his set task of police reform, 23 states across Nigeria currently operate different policing outfits, highlighting the economic, political, and social complexity around the theme of policing in Nigeria.
Even at that, Nigerians must dispassionately answer the question: What specific policy problems is the country solving by constitutionally decentralizing the police? Is the problem one of efficiency? Or management and control? Is it resource optimization or concern over Nigeria’s layered and worsening security challenges? Or is it merely driven by political rhetoric?
Ostensibly, the reform of the Nigeria Police Force has consistently been a linchpin of security strategy for successive Nigerian presidents since 1999. President Olusegun Obasanjo, in 2002, established the Tekena Tamuno Presidential Panel on National Security. The same government, in 2006, set up the Muhammad Danmadami Presidential Committee on Police Reform. President Umaru Yar’Adua, in 2008, established the M.D Yusufu Presidential Committee on the Reform of the Nigeria Police Force. President Goodluck Jonathan, in 2012, set up the Parry Osayande Committee on police reform, and the government of President Buhari, in 2018, established the Presidential Panel on the Reform of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. All past administrations substantially failed to change the lot of the police in Nigeria, simply because of the complex interplay of politics and elite interest intertwined with Nigeria’s political economy of policing.
In spite of its many documented failings, the Nigeria Police remains the singular most important security agency for internal security in Nigeria for two primary reasons. The force institutionally bears the most extensive mandate for internal security in Nigeria, and secondly, the force is the largest security outfit in the country in terms of numbers and spread, with around 370,000 officers and a wide national spread of 1,212 police stations, 2020 police posts, and 328 village posts; no other security agency comes close. Factually, the Nigerian state cannot survive 48 hours without its rickety police force and not have a near-total descent into anomie across all urban centres. The Nigeria Police Force has failed in many respects, but its officers and men are the nation’s last thin blue line against the forces of chaos.
Now that the country is back at the perennial business of police reform, it is important to note that the most important starting point for reform should be the ideological and political foundations of policing Nigeria. The Nigeria Police Force was established and configured to serve colonial narrow extractive public order needs and has continued largely 44 years after independence in the same light, substituting colonial authority for the political elites. Naturally, therefore, the most apt starting point for police reform in this country is answering the question: what type of police and system of policing best serves the needs of the Nigerian people across our many culturally divergent communities?
Empirically, can we argue that police decentralization and the creation of state police will exponentially improve police performance across multiple indexes? The honest answer is – it depends! It depends on the particular policy problem the president and governors intend to address. For the associated problems of extreme centralization of the command system and the unwieldy influence of the president on the operational and administrative control of the force, the creation of state police will address this problem. But looking at Nigeria’s political culture, are we not going to substitute centralization with politicization and, albeit chaotic politicization, of the management structure of the force across the 36 newly constituted units?
Globally, policing is an expensive public good, and maintaining an effective and efficient police service requires a huge financial commitment. Will allowing states to operate their respective police services potentially help resolve the problem of under-resourcing of the police in Nigeria? The answer is obvious; more than a third of states in Nigeria are tagged unviable by viability reports in 2023, and 24 out of the 36 states of the federation cannot meet their respective fiscal obligations without federal allocations. These are states struggling to pay essential workers and maintain public services; burdening them with an additional layer of responsibilities will complicate an already bad situation. Perhaps the appropriate question is the issue of state viability as presently constituted and not the ability to fund police services.
The unbundling of the current centralized police structure will potentially improve service delivery and reverse the colonial policing ethos of ‘using strangers to police strangers’ and resolve the current institutional rigidity that makes adaptation to the local context difficult. In fact, there would be improved coherence and timeliness to police response to local incidences of crime; however, it is ambitious to assume that this will translate to improved quality personnel, leadership, and service delivery across all of the policing service portals.
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Nigeria’s current multiple security crises – banditry in the Northwest, fundamentalist Islamist insurgency in the Northeast, resource-driven conflict between farmers and pastoralists in the North-central, gangs and organized criminal groups in the Southwest and the Niger Delta, and secessionist agitation in the Southeast – are all crises preponderantly driven by socio-economic factors rather than security imperatives. Creating state police will not end overnight, conflicts driven by poverty, lack of economic opportunity, failure of justice institutions, climate change, drug abuse, urban sprawl, collapse of family units and weaponisation of ethnic differences among others. While there is a compelling urgency for the reform the policing system to save the Nigerian state from implosion, that alone will not solve Nigeria’s multiple security crises.
The ball of police reform is once again in the court of a newly elected president, one with a reputation for courageous public sector reform initiatives. How well he will handle this one remains to be seen. But we should be clear about this: Reform of the Nigeria Police Force does not necessarily need to take the path of state police to be effective, and constitutional amendment to incorporate state police would not necessarily positively change Nigeria’s policing outcomes. To effectively reform the police is to reform the fundamentals of our political system, and as things stand, one of the greatest losers in a functional policing system is the political class and it is being called on to superintend over a process that may curtail its influence. Will it happen? Only time will tell.
- Osasona is senior research associate at the Centre for Public Policy Alternatives, Lagos.
