Still On State Police Bill

The National Assembly’s official transmission of the Constitution (Sixth Alteration) Bill, singling out state policing as the sole constitutional alteration sent to the 36 State Houses of Assembly in this cycle, marks a decisive watershed in Nigeria’s long quest for effective national security.

By prioritising this single measure, federal lawmakers have formally acknowledged a reality that rural communities across Northern Nigeria have lived with for over a decade: our hyper-centralised, single-tier police architecture is structurally broken.

Nigeria’s state legislators are now preparing to vote on this landmark shift, and this newspaper is not ready to join the celebration without reservation. Decentralised policing answers a real operational need. But without firm, enforceable safeguards, it could just as easily hand governors a new tool for silencing rivals as it could protect the citizens it is meant to serve.

For the North, the case for localised policing is written in the daily trauma of its citizens. Under the existing centralised structure of policing, tactical agility is strangled by distant bureaucracy. Police commanders mostly have to wait for orders or clearance from Force Headquarters in Abuja while rural communities burn, banditry corridors expand, and rural livelihoods crumble.

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But true decentralised policing may offer an indispensable antidote with localised command structures, personnel recruited directly from host communities who understand the terrain, and rapid-response capabilities that do not require permission from a distant federal capital.

However, deep-seated public reservations cannot be dismissed as mere political obstructionism. The overriding fear remains the inevitable temptation of state governors to misuse local police forces. A good example one can cite is the tragic abuse of some State Independent Electoral Commissions (SIECs), which have been reduced to rubber-stamp organs routinely delivering 100 per cent election sweeps for ruling parties.

Thus, without strict constitutional guardrails, some unchecked state governors could turn state police units into private political militias used to crush opposition voices, silence dissenting media, and intimidate political rivals.

Furthermore, institutional readiness demands an honest appraisal of state finances. Most state governments are already struggling to pay the national minimum wage or settle backlogged pension liabilities. Establishing a modern police force requires immense capital for competitive salaries, forensic equipment, surveillance technology, and tactical armaments.

In our view, an underfunded, unpaid state police officer is a menace waiting to happen, a rogue agent likely to turn his uniform and weapon into tools for predatory extortion and state-sanctioned harassment.

Consequently, we call on the State Houses of Assembly to resist the urge to either blindly rubber-stamp or reflexively reject this bill. Instead, state lawmakers must approach their constitutional duty with rigorous, second-order thinking, insisting that the final legal framework incorporates non-negotiable operational and structural safeguards.

First, state assemblies must insist on clear, institutionalised funding formulas. State police allocations must be drawn directly from statutory federation transfers into independently managed State Security Trust Funds, completely insulating police budgets from the financial whims or political retaliations of sitting governors.

Second, federal legislation must establish strict inter-state operational protocols and clear jurisdictional boundaries between the Nigeria Police Force and state police units to prevent jurisdictional clashes across state borders when pursuing cross-boundary criminal networks.

Crucially, to ensure that state police forces operate freely, independently, and without fear or favour, the time has come to address the root cause of executive overreach: the absolute criminal immunity enjoyed by state governors under Section 308 of the Constitution.

This newspaper believes stripping governors of criminal immunity, and retaining only civil immunity, is the check Nigeria’s constitution has been missing. Immunity in its current form has functioned less as a shield for good governance than as cover for governors who behave like absolute emperors within their states. Remove the criminal immunity, and a governor who turns state security forces into an instrument of political persecution, or into a tool for personal enrichment, faces prosecution the moment the evidence exists, rather than four years later, if at all.

Decentralising police powers is an urgent national imperative whose time has come. But execution is everything. Nigeria cannot afford another poorly designed institutional experiment that trades federal inefficiency for local oppression. The State Houses of Assembly hold the key to this constitutional milestone; they must use it to build a professional, accountable security framework that genuinely protects human lives while safeguarding democratic freedoms.