By Frederick I. Braimah THE current national discourse on establishing a dual policing system in Nigeria marks a pivotal moment in Nigeria’s efforts to confront decades of security challenges. Legislative progress toward constitutional change reflects a broad recognition that the over-centralised Nigeria Police Force has struggled to address the essentially local nature of contemporary threats, […] The post Rethinking security in a federal Nigeria appeared first on Tribune Online .
By Frederick I. Braimah
THE current national discourse on establishing a dual policing system in Nigeria marks a pivotal moment in Nigeria’s efforts to confront decades of security challenges. Legislative progress toward constitutional change reflects a broad recognition that the over-centralised Nigeria Police Force has struggled to address the essentially local nature of contemporary threats, including banditry, kidnapping, insurgency, and communal violence. Yet decentralisation alone will prove inadequate unless accompanied by a decisive shift from “policing the community” to genuine policing through the community, and unless traditional institutions are deliberately integrated into the emerging framework. Scholarly analysis has long distinguished reactive, externally imposed policing from collaborative models that prioritise inclusion, shared intelligence, and mutual accountability. International experience supplies instructive precedents.
Japan’s koban system embeds small teams of officers in neighbourhood police boxes, where regular foot patrols, household visits, and continuous dialogue foster cultural familiarity and reciprocal trust. This sustained local presence has underpinned Japan’s low crime rates and has been adapted, with measurable gains, in Singapore and parts of Latin America. In the United Kingdom, for example, neighbourhood policing teams, rooted in Peelian principles of consent, combine visible local officers with problem-solving partnerships. Evaluations consistently record reductions in perceived disorder, enhanced legitimacy, and improved public confidence when teams are properly resourced and focused on community-identified priorities. Comparable results appear in Canadian and Dutch arrangements that emphasise decentralised accountability and multi-agency collaboration. These successful frameworks share structural features that Nigeria can productively adapt: prolonged local deployment rather than frequent rotation, formal mechanisms for citizen participation, linguistic and cultural competence, and institutional safeguards against politicisation.
Within the Nigerian context, an additional indigenous resource should be seriously considered. Traditional rulers and their institutions retain considerable moral authority and intimate knowledge of their domains. Earlier research on electoral violence demonstrated that contemporary security measures and media advocacy have frequently failed precisely because they lack the mentoring capacity and social legitimacy that traditional institutions uniquely possess. The same logic applies to broader security governance. A reconstituted state-police architecture should therefore incorporate traditional rulers as integral partners rather than peripheral advisors. They can perform a mentoring function, sensitising subjects to the costs of violence and cultivating norms of peaceful conduct, while contributing to an “indirect homeland security system” that channels grassroots intelligence through established community channels. Their moral authority further enables them to withhold recognition and honours from perpetrators and sponsors of insecurity and other forms of violence in their domains and to call such actors publicly to order. Community Policing Forums at local-government level should therefore formally include traditional leaders alongside women’s groups, youth organisations, and religious figures, with a view to institutionalising the partnership that successful models elsewhere have found workable and indispensable.
Nigeria’s proposed dual policing system is not merely pragmatic; it is consistent with the logic of federalism. Federalism requires that powers and responsibilities be distributed among federating entities according to the scale at which problems arise and solutions can most effectively be delivered. Security challenges in Nigeria are predominantly local in origin and manifestation. Assigning primary responsibility for ordinary policing to the states, while embedding community and traditional institutions within that structure, aligns functional authority with territorial and cultural proximity. It completes the federal bargain by ensuring that the sphere closest to the citizen, both governmental and traditional, is empowered to protect life and property, subject to national standards and coordination on matters that genuinely transcend state boundaries.
In conclusion, the creation of a dual policing system in Nigeria offers a historic opportunity to correct the structural disconnection that has long undermined the country’s security architecture. This opportunity requires more than just constitutional devolution. It demands the embedding of community-oriented principles drawn from proven international practice and the deliberate harnessing of traditional institutions’ residual legitimacy and local knowledge. Only through such a synthesis can the security architecture being proposed acquire the link of trust, effectiveness, and sustainability.
•Dr Braimah is Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science, Elizade University, Ilara-Mokin, Ondo State, Nigeria.
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