It is hope-filling that the Northern Establishment has thrown its weight behind the establishment of state police to tackle the disturbing waves of insecurity that have bedevilled the land for more than a decade now. The piece of news must be a thing of joy to all men of goodwill who have been sensitive to the plight of fellow compatriots gripped by fear of their safety whether in or out of their homes in the pursuit of their various rounds of duty and enterprises.
Last week, the Northern Governors and the traditional rulers unanimously endorsed the establishment of state police. It is so novel, so elating. The governors succeeded in carrying the traditional rulers with them.
It is a giant stride in the search for solutions to the seemingly intractable insecurity problem in the country. This is even besides consideration of the fact that the existence of state police is a major feature of federalism in the true sense and practice of it. With their call for this tier which will translate into the abolition of one-single centralised police structure, it can be said that the nation has now reached a consensus on this most important instrument of national security.
What remains is for the National Assembly to put an end to their foot-dragging, move fast and do the needful.
Practically, every day, someone, somewhere, is being shot. Gunmen, marauders, bandits, kidnappers, cultists and sundry criminals are on the loose, laying siege on the country. In towns and villages, most Nigerians go to bed with their eyes half-closed. People travel with baited breath, feeling relieved only when they reach their destination. In some motor parks, prayers are said before vehicles take off. Some luxury buses on a long haul have their own covert armed security outfit.
The statistics are staggering. Last year 614, 937 persons were killed between May 2023 and April 2024, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. In the first quarter of this year 1, 420 were killed in 475 incidents across the country, although down from 2,336.
The figures encompassed all the six zones; and 537 kidnapped. Borno has returned as the epicentre of terrorism; it is the most threatened axis with 38,000 deaths. That was as of September last year, and the situation has gone worse in that theatre within the last month and the governor, Professor Zulum has cried out seeking help as 299 communities have been overrun by Boko Harram and ISWAP who are seeking to make our security personnel their targets laying in ambush for them. But our gallant men are repelling them.
As of April, last year, the population of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), totalled 1,302,443 in 219, 445 households across the North East, North Central and North West. As of December, it rose to 2,225, 595 identified in 465, 669 households. The set of figures came down from 3.1million IDPs as of 2022 and 3,228, 000 in 2021. Different agencies push out different figures, but there is no data that is not sufficiently troubling.
With the national consensus now reached, the coast is irrefutably clear for President Bola Tinubu to step forward confidently and mount pressure on the National Assembly to do the needful. It is urgent; it is the Number One priority; everything else can wait. The pristine purpose of government is security of lives and property.
Without security, nothing else works or moves; there must be stagnation in the economy, there will be no investment whether by foreigners or by the nationals as no one will put his capital in turbulent climes. As is widely witnessed already, citizens cannot unfold their productive capabilities on the farms or in industries. Our psyche is assailed by the menace of herder-farmer clashes with consequent signals of famine flashing in the horizon. There will be unfreedom in movement and much more where there are storms. The arms of the government to drive the primary purpose of government are the security forces: for internal security, police and in modern times, in collaboration with associated agencies; but for the external safety cover, the military—the Army, Air Force and Navy. The closest of them all to the citizenry is the police. It is also the face of the government you encounter. You see the police and there is the confident feeling of an assurance that all is well, that you are secure. It is not for nothing, therefore, that the police authorities themselves have it as their sing-song: The police is your friend.
The constitution says the governor is the chief security officer of his state. What this says to us is that there is a nexus between the police and the governor whose face the policeman symbolizes and in whose name he swears. As things are today, as the governors themselves say, it is only on paper.
There was a time during what might be called travel advice on when vehicles could safely ply certain roads could be heard. Over-booked train services then became a welcome alternative to the joy of commuters. Not a few threw up their hands in resignation that we have never had the security situation that bad. The most incurable optimists were confused.
The security services threw themselves into the battle, stretching themselves and facilities thin in the face of all odds. It was against the backdrop of the troubling milieu that the news broke that a Presidential panel set up in 2019 by the then President, Buhari, came up with a report recommending among other issues, the establishment of state police. The panel was on Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) Reform. Predictably, there was a sense of relief that, at last, there appeared to be light at the end of the long tunnel.
There was rekindling of hope. The hope was raised higher still when the House of Representatives had on top of their legislative thinking the issue of the security and the concomitant imperative of the establishment of state police. But what has become of these hopes since 2018 and January last year? And this is now where President Bola Tinubu should come in to turn the hope into deeds with the Northern Establishment backing which unarguably must go a long way to strengthen his hands on a matter so manifestly crucial and commonsensical and over which former national leaders and prominent citizens have made pronouncements. Governors have long been roaring to go. Former governors were fully for it.
Former President Ibrahim Babangida was unequivocal on the issue. Wading into the subject of restructuring, he had said: ‘Added to this desire, that is of restructuring is the need to commence the process of having state police across the states of the Federation, the initial fears of state governors misusing the officers and men of the state police have become increasingly eliminated with renewed vigour in citizen’s participation in and confidence to interrogate power. We cannot be detained by those fears and allow civilization to leave us behind.
We must as a people with one destiny and common agenda take decisions for the sake of posterity in our shared commitment to launch our country on the path of development and growth. Policing has become sophisticated that we cannot continue to operate our old methods and expect different results’.
On another occasion he had said the claim of misuse of state police by the governors was unfounded and exaggerated.
Also, former Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo speaking at a security summit organized by the Senate in 2018 had said: ‘The nature of our security challenge is complex. Securing Nigeria’s over 923, 768 square kilometres and its 180 million people requires continual re-engineering of our security architecture and strategies’.
He went on to say that it had become difficult for the Federal Government to provide security for the country from Abuja in view of the fact that Nigeria had failed the United Nations requirement of a policeman to 400 people. Former Governor of Bayelsa State and now Senator, Henry Dickson corroborating the position of Professor Osinbajo, undoubtedly speaking from experience, argued that the prevailing security situation and the need for an effective response to the challenge had made the establishment of state police mandatory. His conviction on the imperative and effectiveness of state police is borne out of the fact that the personnel would be drawn from the localities that make up the state. Such personnel would be able to access valuable information required to track crime and criminals. He also believed that the current federally controlled police had become overstretched owing to the wide ratio of the police to the rapid increase in population.
Jonah Jang, also a former governor said to Sun newspaper at the time of the heated debated in the land: “We cannot be calling ourselves a Federation and be running a unitary system of government.
The two won’t work together. If we want to run a federal system of government we should run it properly. It is unfortunate that during the military of which I was a part we believed in a unitary system and any time we were in power we ran a unitary system and when we were trying to give the nation a constitution we ended up giving the nation a unitary constitution to be operated to be operated in a federal system of government; that is why nothing is working. So, if we really want to progress as a country we must restructure the country’.
Former President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Joseph Daodu put it in all simplicity: ‘State police is for law and order.” We learn from the revealed knowledge, In the Light of Truth, the Grail Message, that in simplicity lies greatness.
Since the return of the country to a democratic order in 1999, state governors believing there are other ways of skinning a cow, have resorted to clever security engineering to stem the challenges in their respective states with Lagos as a classical example. It took the lead by floating Security Trust Fund. Before Lagos, let’s take Anambra. As I did report in 2018, through Anambra State Vigilance Service Act No. 9 of 2000, signed into law on 06 December 2006, Anambra became the first in the country to arm vigilance group officially who are publicly funded and paid salaries. Abia followed with its own called Abia Vigilance Service. Imo and Ebonyi followed suit. In 2017, the then Governor Ambode Akinwumi of Lagos State recruited 5, 700 youths under his Administration’s Neighbourhood Safety Corps Initiative.
The move, he said, was another step towards enhancing security at the grassroots level. They were to provide intelligence for crime prevention and to facilitate the arrest of perpetrators of crime. The security Trust Fund was a creation of Babatunde Fashola when he was in the saddle to see to the welfare of the police posted to the state. In August 2016, barely two months into Ambode’s Administration, N1billion was raised in donations at a dinner organized by the Fund and corporate organizations. So successful was the clever engineering in Lagos that it elicited interest as its waves reverberated across the country. Kano State in particular took active interest in how Lagos had achieved the feat; its commissioner of police had to come to understudy Lagos’ ingenuity. The Fund gave the Lagos Police Command two helicopters, 300 patrol vehicles, and 60 patrol motorcycles. Also provided to the police by the Lagos State government were two million rounds of ammunition, five fibre boats fitted with double 75 HP Outbound engines, 30 armoured personnel carriers (APCs) and 1,000 AK-47.
The Lagos model started by Babatunde Fashola was endorsed by the United Nations Congress on Prevention and Criminal Justice. The Kano State Police Commissioner at the time, Ibrahim Idris said: ‘We had to travel to Lagos to understudy the Security Trust Fund. It has served as a model for the states in the Federation. Ambode went all out to arrange what he called ‘proper care of welfare of police officers who are assigned to the state.’ Femi Okunnu, former Minister and a prominent Lagos City father, was so impressed by the Lagos model that he said it was how to spend security votes.
Our legislators must have seen how policing is arranged in other lands. In the Western world, not only are there local council police, but also city police and metropolitan police. Police are on horse backs, on motorcycles, on bicycles and on foot patrolling neighbourhoods. A university with a student population of 5, 000 is expected to have its own police in the United States. We have two scholars who have done extensive studies in policing. They are Professor Kemi Rotimi of Obafemi Awolowo University and Dr. V.O.S. Okeke of the Faculty of Social Science, Nnamdi Azikiwe University. There is a lot to pick from their invaluable works. Setting up another tier of policing will not amount to re-inventing the wheel.
Two Regions in the First Republic had regional police. Indeed, the Western Region had three tier policing system, namely Native Authority Police (Akoda), the Regional and the Federal, called Olopa Eko. The East did not have Regional Police. It was content with the Federal Police. The equivalent of the Native Authority Police in the North was known as Dogarai. Egba United Government had its police as far back as 1905, the first formal police formation in the Western Region to ensure tight security in Egbaland, followed by Ibadan in 1906 and Oyo the following year. All of that was abolished when Aguiyi-Ironsi came to power in 1966. The first step he took was to place the NA/LGPF under the operational control of the Nigeria Police. He then empanelled the Yusuf Gobir Committee to do a study of police and prison services. The committee report submitted in August 1967 to General Yakubu Gowon recommended the establishment of one single police force for the entire country, consistent with the command posture of a military administration.
Agitation for a return to the plurality in the policing system began as soon as the country returned to democratic order waving federalism emblem since 1999. The drive for national consensus was kick-started by the National Governors’ Forum chaired by Governor Abdullaziz Yari of Zamfara State. Irked by the siege on his state by bandits, he threw up his hands in resignation. He washed off his hands being decorated as the chief security officer of his state, a position he saw as a joke.
The ball is now in President Bola Tinubu’s court. And all the Senate has to do is to exhume its decision of 2018 passing a Bill on the establishment of State Police and dust it up to make easy the joint sitting of the two hallowed chambers with the House of Representatives now seemingly ready to take the much-expected next step on the matter. Every part of the country is on the same page now upon realising that it will be a delusion to think that the country can make the desired progress without a rethinking of our policing architecture. It makes it now easy for President Tinubu to cajole, to kick or to push the National Assembly for what is at stake are the lives, more of ordinary Nigerians as well as peaceful, harmonious and meaningful living by all.
