With state police coming, Nigeria must now get it right

By Nankpak Cirfat

The argument for and against the need for state police in Nigeria, I believe, is finally over. With recent actions by the House of Representatives and the Presidency, the case for state policing has moved from a fringe proposal to a near-consensus. Governors want it, security experts have long recommended it, and even skeptics now concede that a single, centrally controlled police force cannot secure a country of over 200 million people spread across 923,768 square kilometres.

I believe it’s about time we all stopped relitigating whether Nigeria needs state police, because It is coming. Rather, our focus should be the one that will determine whether this reform saves lives or simply relocates the abuse of power. How do we build it so that it protects citizens rather than entrenching a new class of political strongmen as against Strong Institutions?

Amidst all this, here is the uncomfortable truth: the greatest risk to state policing is not that it will fail to happen, but that it will happen badly. Nigeria has already run this experiment once on a smaller scale with local government administration. Local governments were designed as autonomous, third-tier structures. In practice, many became extensions of the governor’s office, with chairmen handpicked, funds diverted through joint state-local government accounts, and councils reduced to rubber stamps. Even with the Supreme Court ruling in favor of local government autonomy, it remains only on paper and has not survived contact with political incentives.

Now take a wide imagination with that same dynamic, but with armed men and the power of arrest. A governor who can hire, fire, deploy, and fund a police commissioner at will does not become a security reformer. He becomes a chief constable, able to harass opposition figures, intimidate journalists, break up rallies, and reward loyalists with badges. Is that decentralization, or is it simply moving the monopoly on violence from Abuja to thirty-six state capitals?

This is not a hypothetical. It is the default outcome unless we deliberately design against it. The fix is not complicated, but it is non-negotiable. At this point, state police must be built on two pillars: independence from the governor’s control, and accountability to the public. Get either one wrong, and the badge changes hands without the abuse ever stopping.

State police forces must be built with governance and financial independence baked in from day one. Recruitment, promotion, transfer, and discipline should sit with a commission insulated from the governor’s office, a body with fixed tenure, diverse composition, and constitutionally guaranteed independence, not appointees who serve at his pleasure. That independence means little, however, if the force still depends on a governor’s monthly generosity to function. A ring-fenced statutory allocation, protected in law the way the Consolidated Revenue Fund protects federal transfers, removes the single most effective lever of control: the power of the purse. Without both institutional insulation and financial independence, every other safeguard is decorative.

A police force is only as trustworthy as the process that builds it and the scrutiny that watches over it. Competitive, transparent entry processes, published criteria, independent examiners, verifiable scorecards must replace the patronage hiring that has hollowed out other state institutions, because a force built on political debts owes its loyalty to the person who created those debts, not to the public. That loyalty test continues after recruitment: ordinary citizens, civil society representatives, and community leaders must sit on civilian review boards empowered to receive complaints, investigate misconduct, and recommend binding sanctions, while budgets, deployment orders, arrest data, and disciplinary outcomes are published as a matter of routine rather than extracted through months-long Freedom of Information requests. A police force that only answers to itself, in the dark, will always find itself blameless.

Legislation alone will not enforce these safeguards. Civil society organisations, media houses, community and faith-based leaders have a direct role to play: running parallel monitoring of police conduct, tracking state security budgets line by line, and publishing public scorecards that rank states on compliance with these safeguards. Where oversight commissions are weak or captured, an informed and organised public becomes the backstop.

Other countries with functioning decentralized policing succeed largely because of the checks surrounding the officers, not because of the officers themselves. Independent oversight boards with real disciplinary teeth, statutory funding formulas immune to executive discretion, and a free press willing to investigate police conduct, these are the common threads. While the uniform changes from place to place, the principle does not. Because power that is not checked will eventually be abused.

Lawmakers, constitutional reviewers, and policy designers now carry the responsibility. Passing a state police bill is the easy part. Nigeria is good at passing laws; however, building the architecture that keeps thirty-six new police forces accountable to the people they serve, rather than to the governors who fund them, is the hard and unglamorous work that will determine whether this reform is remembered as a triumph or a cautionary tale.