A nasty experience of generalised insecurity in Nigeria has provoked a debate about how best police and policing Nigeria might be organised. There are those who feel that what the insecurity has made clear is the inappropriateness of a federally controlled police and policing. They argue that organisation and control of the police by state governments will work better. Protagonists of state police stress how mastery of local language and good knowledge of the local geography of crime and criminality in every state will guarantee proficiency.
But there are antagonists of the assumption that the state police option will work better. They argue it could actually worsen the insecurity crisis. The biggest fear is what a politically embattled governor in Nigeria today would do if he has control over operatives of law and order. A key refrain is whether there is a way state police can be insulated from being hijacked and turned into an instrument of vendetta politics.
A contentious conversation is thus going on between protagonists and antagonists, an interim synthesis of which this piece attempts. Keeping an eye on the debate is important in a country such as Nigeria where issues appear and disappear at the same speed from the public sphere. A debate on how best to police Nigeria is too key to be allowed to suffer that fate.
A former military Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, has spoken in favour of the idea. Dr Goodluck Jonathan, another ex-president, stands together with Abdulsalami, making two, the number of persons in the club moving in that direction. Both spoke at the April 23, 2024, National Dialogue on State Policing organised by the House of Representatives where Dr Jonathan made an empirically rich case for state police even as he ended up problematising his empiricism. He did so with the information that the military ended up disbanding all experimentations with security outfits that would have grown into state police by now because of fear of abuse of such experimentations since 1999.
Still, the position of the twosome coincides with that of General Babangida who said in June 2017 that "the fear of state governors using state police to run amok was not as strong as the greater benefit that creating state police would do for the nation". Should Chief Olusegun Obasanjo join those who have spoken so far, a consensus in that club can be inferred. Obasanjo has yet to speak. As the head of state with the longest exposure to all manner of security reports, his position would be of interest to both protagonists and antagonists.
While waiting for Obasanjo and other elders, one cannot but be struck by the wide gap between the ex-presidents who have spoken so far and the position of Alhaji Gambo Jimeta, a notable former Inspector-General of Police. In a memorable interview in Weekly Trust in 2010, he wondered if Nigeria would still have a national Police Force in another 50 years. He locates his fear in how Nigeria has ended up with "a large number of policemen, ill funded, badly motivated and drained of their self-esteem", landing him in the conclusion that "the 50 years we are talking about has seen the police force regress from a very efficient and confident police force to what we have today." And on what did he put the blame if not "The kind of neglect and irresponsibility shown by previous governments."
As he put it, Nigeria could be among the best in the world in terms of policing if the country took what he called appropriate steps. So, for him, the problem is with neglect of the police, not the incompetence or inappropriateness of the existing police establishment. The entire interview is reducible to this core.
What is interesting is the correspondence between Jimeta and the incumbent Inspector-General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun. At the dialogue already mentioned, he took the position that Nigeria is not ripe for the idea. It can be said that the civil society is with him if we take the position of Prof. Jibrin Ibrahim who wrote a column attacking the idea of state police much, much earlier.
To have or not to have State Police in Nigeria now is not a debate exclusive to Nigerians. Outsiders are also frontline participants. Not only were the United Kingdom's Department of International Development (DFID) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) involved in the National Dialogue on Policing Nigeria on April 23, 2024, Richard Montgomery, the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, for instance, has said they are watching the debate with interest. How might we decode that if it is not a diplomat's way of indicating preference for something new and different from what exists?
But all the contending views will end up in the National Assembly, (NASS). However, there is nothing categorical from the NASS yet beyond the reported endorsement of the principle of State Police by all speakers of the 36 legislative houses in the country as well as the presence of the leaders of the NASS at the April dialogue. But the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Police Affairs, Senator Ahmed Mallammadori, has spoken twice on the issue. He spoke at a closed session and at an open forum attended by NGO activists. His views alone will not be decisive without consensus involving the various caucuses within the NASS, NASS leaders, the Presidency and the party in power. Nevertheless, his views can give a hint of what to expect. If his views are conservative, the NASS has its share of conservatives to push them. If radical, the NASS also has its own share of radicals, activists, mature elements, quiet nationalists and elders who can act as a force.
Obviously drawing on his eight year-long experience as an ambassador in an EU country (Turkey) but also his many years of practical involvement with Nigerian politics at the grassroots, Mallammadori's is not even canvassing a rigid or fluid position yet. He seems more concerned with drawing attention to the contemporary security and policing universe.
The universe is, for him, one in which the nation-state is not the measure of all things in the world anymore. Far from suggesting that the nation-state is gone, his point is that it is battered by numerous other actors, some of them having as much resources and even coercive capacity as the state. He cites transnational terrorist organisations launching attacks on military facilities, citizens or the homeland of even a great power; international NGOs issuing reports that have damaging impacts on one particular nation state or a group of them; the power of credit rating agencies over national economies; the phenomenon of nation states hiring out conduct of wars and other campaigns against insecurity to private military and security companies.
Senator Mallammadori illustrated his point by citing President George W. Bush telling the world in 2003 that he got more reports about unfolding events quicker from the CNN than from the official channels like the CIA, Pentagon, Dept of State and its diplomats.
What he seeks to illustrate is the diminished power of states by the day and also the capacity of state institutions such as the police all over the world. This, he says, is why most security taskforces nowadays come as a mixed grill of conventional police, secret police, the military and para-military agencies.
The security climate is worsened by the looseness that globalisation has brought along such as more fluid borders and the way these have defined crime, criminality and criminals. "Crime bearers can move more easily across more fluid borders, either as victims of wars, famine, climate change, outbreak of diseases or ethno-cultural violence", he says.
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The third context in the security universe he drew attention to is the change in security challenges that no longer allows us to single out the police as the first line of attack in insecurity crisis. The diversity of threats has expanded from the original concept of crime/criminality to terrorism, banditry, electronic mail fraud, secession, cultism, rustling, kidnapping, oil theft, ethnic violence, corruption and human/drugs/currency trafficking. Subsequently, the security architecture has been so fragmented that it makes little sense to know which security outfit deserves to be singled out and blamed for insecurity. In other words, the notion of security and crime control that made the police the first line of resort is dead.
His last point is how it seems to him that Nigerians want an efficient police without also asking about the state of the police. He thinks Nigerians expect a functional police without officers and ranks given the sophisticated training to match contemporary complexity of society. In other words, he maintains that it is not in order to recruit a secondary school product, give him or her just six months of training at the poorly equipped Police College and then think that he can cope against criminals of different expertise and exposure. The mismatch is too great and no miracle will happen with state police. Miracle will only happen if the Police can take quality professional training along with the most modern technology in crime detection and control for granted, he says, warning against escapism.
With this synthesis, we can say that all the different positions are in. What policing regime becomes the reality now depends on which side gains the articulatory high ground. It would be interesting to see which side wins for now.
Onoja is at the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, UK
