State Police Is Not The Answer, Restructuring Nigeria Is

By Obiageli “Oby” Ezekwesili

The Tinubu administration’s renewed push for State Police has reopened one of the most consequential public policy debates in Nigeria’s democratic history. The proposal has gained momentum because it speaks directly to a painful reality confronting millions of Nigerians. The country’s security architecture is failing. Terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, violent extremism, communal conflicts and organised criminality have overwhelmed the capacity of a centrally controlled police force to secure lives and property across a country of more than 230 million people. For many citizens, therefore, State Police appears to be an obvious and long overdue solution.

The attraction of the proposal is understandable. Recent Afrobarometer findings show that 79 percent of Nigerians consider kidnapping and abduction a serious national problem; 33 percent personally know someone who has been kidnapped within the last five years; and 63 percent say they or a family member felt unsafe in their home or neighbourhood during the previous year. These are not merely security statistics. They are indicators of a profound crisis of state effectiveness and citizen confidence.

Yet the fact that State Police is necessary does not mean it is sufficient. The danger confronting Nigeria today is that the country may once again mistake a symptom for the disease itself. The security crisis is real, but it is not fundamentally a policing crisis. It is the manifestation of a deeper constitutional, governance and political economy crisis that has steadily eroded state capacity, weakened accountability and undermined the effectiveness of public institutions.

The central question before Nigeria should not be whether governors ought to control police forces. The more important question is whether the constitutional architecture governing the Nigerian federation remains fit for purpose. It is this broader question that must frame the State Police debate. For the evidence increasingly suggests that Nigeria’s insecurity is inseparable from the country’s dysfunctional federal arrangement.

At the heart of the problem lies a constitutional order that concentrates excessive authority, fiscal resources and political power at the centre. Although Nigeria describes itself as a federation, many of its institutional arrangements bear the characteristics of a highly centralised state. The most visible expression of this over-centralisation is found in the legislative lists established by the 1999 Constitution.

The Constitution allocates powers among three categories – the Exclusive Legislative List, the Concurrent Legislative List and residual powers reserved for the states. In principle, such arrangements are common in federations. In practice, however, Nigeria’s distribution of powers is exceptionally skewed toward the federal government. The Exclusive Legislative List contains sixty-eight items reserved solely for the Federal Government, while the Concurrent List contains only a limited number of shared subjects. Constitutional scholars have long observed that this structure gives the federal government overwhelming dominance over governance and development functions.

This imbalance matters because the State Police debate focuses on only one item among dozens. Police is merely one of sixty-eight subjects constitutionally monopolised by the Federal Government. The same Exclusive List centralises authority over prisons, mines and minerals, railways, arms and ammunition, and numerous other strategic functions. Consequently, removing policing from the Exclusive List without addressing the wider constitutional architecture would amount to treating a symptom while leaving the underlying condition untouched.

The question therefore is not whether policing should be decentralised. It should. The deeper question is why policing alone should be decentralised while dozens of other functions remain trapped within a constitutional framework inherited from military command structures rather than democratic federal design. The State Police debate is ultimately a debate about symptoms. The Exclusive Legislative List is where the disease resides.

This arrangement is neither accidental nor historically inevitable. Scholars of Nigerian federalism have documented how the concentration of powers accelerated during decades of military rule. Functions that were previously exercised by regions or shared among different levels of government were progressively transferred to the centre. The 1999 Constitution largely preserved that military-era command structure. What Nigerians often describe as federalism today is therefore, in many respects, a unitary system wearing federal clothing.

The consequences of this constitutional distortion are evident across every major sector of national life. Insecurity is one manifestation. Economic underperformance is another. Weak public service delivery is yet another. The same constitutional structure that produces a distant and ineffective security architecture also generates fiscal dependency, weakens subnational initiative, discourages productivity and reduces institutional accountability. Nigeria’s security crisis and economic crisis are therefore not separate phenomena. They are products of the same constitutional dysfunction.

Obiageli “Oby” Ezekwesili