Nigeria stands at a constitutional turning point. With the Senate having passed the State Police Bill, the long debate over the decentralisation of policing is at last, close to law. This article by Dr Eyimofe Atake, SAN, examines the history of policing in the Nigerian federation, the law as it stands and the amendments required, the arguments for and against State Police, the necessity of the reform, the command relationship between the Federal and State Police,, whether the new structure is true to the Federal principle, the vexed question of the President’s power to assume control of a State Police in a crisis, and the lessons of genuine federations abroad. It concludes that State Police is not merely desirable, but necessary
Historical Background
To understand the present controversy, one must begin with the fact that a single, centralised Police Force is not the natural or original condition of Nigeria. It is a comparatively recent inheritance, and it is in large part, the product of military rule. The national Force itself is a colonial construction, its lineage running from the consular guard of thirty men raised in Lagos in 1861, through the armed Hausa Constabulary of 1879, to the amalgamation of the separate Northern and Southern colonial forces into a single Nigeria Police Force (NPF) on 1 April 1930. Even then, policing remained substantially plural. Alongside that national Force, the regions and the local authorities maintained their own constabularies, established from 1916 onwards under the control of the traditional rulers, the Native Authority Police in the Northern Region and the Local Government Police in the West among them. Internal security was, to a significant degree, a regional and local affair.
The reputation those local Forces acquired, is the taproot of the opposition to State Police to this day. In the bitter politics of the First Republic, and above all in the Western Region crisis of 1962 to 1966, the regional and local Police were notoriously deployed by the parties in power, as instruments against their opponents. The paradigm is the Western Region itself: the constitutional crisis that produced the declaration of a state of emergency on 29 May 1962, and, still more, the regional election of October 1965, so massively rigged in favour of the government of Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, that it ignited the wave of arson and killing remembered as ‘Operation Wetie’, which in turn, helped to precipitate the first military coup of January 1966. Throughout that period, the local Police, controlled by the ruling regional party, harassed the opposition, were turned to partisan ends at election time, and came to be seen by many as the private armies of the ruling parties, rather than as servants of the public peace. That this was no mere partisan grievance, is confirmed by the official record: the Federal Government’s own Working Party, set up in 1966, whose 1967 report recommended the abolition of the local Forces, found them to be badly trained and corrupt, and to have been used by the ruling parties in both the Northern and Western Regions for partisan ends, including the repression of political opponents. That memory, of local Police weaponised for political advantage, is the single most powerful argument that the opponents of State Police still deploy, and it cannot be dismissed, for it is grounded in real and painful history.
After the collapse of the First Republic and the civil war that followed, the military governments swept this structure away. The Native Authority and Local Government Police were disbanded and absorbed into the single national Force, a process that began in October 1966 and was complete by the end of 1972, so that policing was centralised entirely in the hands of the Federal Government. That centralisation was then written into the fundamental law, surviving into the 1979 Constitution, and from there into the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, which vests policing exclusively in the Federation and forbids the establishment of any other police force. The unitary Police of today is therefore, a legacy of military centralisation and a reaction against the abuses of the past. The question now before the
nation is whether that reaction, however understandable, has outlived its usefulness in the face of a security emergency the centralised model has proved unable to contain.
The Law as It Stands and the Necessary Amendments
The barrier to State Police is constitutional, and this is the first point that must be grasped. It is not enough to pass an Act of the National Assembly, nor a law of a State House of Assembly, because the Constitution itself, which is supreme, presently forbids any police force other than the Nigeria Police Force. Section 214(1) of the 1999 Constitution provides that there shall be a Police Force for Nigeria, to be known as the Nigeria Police Force, and that, subject to the provisions of the section, no other police force shall be established for the Federation or any part thereof. The prohibition could hardly be plainer.
Reinforcing that prohibition, the subject of Police and policing is placed on the Exclusive Legislative List in the Second Schedule to the Constitution, which means that only the National Assembly, and not the States, may legislate upon it. Sections 215 and 216 then provide for the command of the Force, for the appointment of the Inspector-General of Police, and for the structure of control. The combined effect of these provisions is a single, centralised, federally controlled constabulary, constitutionally entrenched.
It follows that, State Police cannot be introduced by ordinary legislation. It requires an alteration of the Constitution itself, and a careful one. At a minimum the necessary amendments are these. First, Section 214 must be amended to permit the establishment of State Police Services alongside the Federal Police. Second, the subject of Police must be moved from the Exclusive Legislative List to the Concurrent Legislative List, so that the States may lawfully legislate to establish and regulate their own forces. Third, Sections 215 and 216, together with the relevant provisions of the Third Schedule that govern the Police Councils and Commissions, must be amended to provide for the command, appointment, funding and oversight of the new State Forces and to define the relationship between the two tiers.
An alteration of this kind is governed by the stringent procedure in Section 9 of the Constitution. It requires the support of not less than two-thirds majority of all the members of each House of the National Assembly, the bill must be passed by both chambers in identical terms, and it must then be ratified by the Houses of Assembly of not less than 24 of the 36 States of the Federation, before it receives the assent of the President. This is the path the current reform must travel, and it is already well advanced upon it. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (Alteration) (State Police) Bill, 2026, the Sixth Alteration Bill, an executive bill transmitted by the President, has now been passed by both chambers of the National Assembly, by the House of Representatives on 11 June, 2026 and by the Senate on 24 June, 2026. It substitutes a new Section 214 that creates a Federal Police Service and, in each State, a State Police Service, the latter to commence operations only once established by a law of the State House of Assembly and certified by the National Assembly as meeting prescribed national minimum standards. Because the two chambers have passed differing versions, the differences must first be reconciled by a joint conference committee, expected to be constituted once the House of Representatives resumes from its current recess, before the harmonised bill is transmitted to the State Houses of Assembly for ratification.
The essential point of principle bears repeating here: because the defect is one of constitutional structure, only a constitutional amendment can cure it, for no statute can confer what the Constitution withholds. That the Constitution is supreme, and that any enactment inconsistent with it is void to the extent of the inconsistency, is placed beyond argument by Section 1(1) and Section 1(3) of the Constitution and by a consistent line of Supreme Court authority. In Abacha v Fawehinmi (2000) 6 NWLR (Pt. 660) 228 the Constitution was affirmed as the grundnorm, the supreme law from which every other law derives its validity. In Attorney-General of Abia State v Attorney-General of the Federation (2002) 6 NWLR (Pt. 763) 264 provisions of the Electoral Act 2001 that were inconsistent with the Constitution were struck down as void. And, in INEC v Musa (2003) 3 NWLR (Pt. 806) 72 the Supreme Court held that the National Assembly cannot go outside or beyond the Constitution, so that any enactment which adds to or derogates from what the Constitution has provided is null and void. It follows, inescapably, that what the Constitution presently forbids, a police force other than the Nigeria Police Force, can be brought into being only by altering the Constitution itself, precisely as the present Bill sets out to do.
The Arguments Against State Police
The case against State Police is serious, and it deserves to be stated in its strongest form rather than caricatured, for its proponents argue from real dangers and not imagined ones.
The foremost objection, is the fear of political weaponisation. Nigerian Governors already command formidable power, and the apprehension is that a Governor armed with his own police would turn it upon his opponents, intimidate voters and rig elections, harass his critics, and entrench himself in office, reviving the very abuses of the First Republic that discredited local policing in the first place. The historical memory of the partisan Regional Police is, as already noted, the bedrock of this objection.
The second objection, concerns funding and capture. A great many States cannot reliably pay salaries or function without Federal allocations, and a police force that is unpaid or underpaid is a danger, not a protection, for it will either prey upon the citizens it is meant to serve or be bought by whoever is willing to pay, whether a godfather, a wealthy interest, or the Governor himself. An impoverished and beholden Force, is a threat to liberty.
The third objection, is the risk to national cohesion. Critics fear that 36 separate armed Forces could deepen the ethnic and regional fault lines of an already fragile federation, that they could be used to harass citizens of other States resident within a State, and that, in the worst imagining, they could become the nucleus of regional militias in a country that has already endured one civil war and faces active agitation in some quarters. A fragmented command, on this view, threatens the unity of the nation.
The fourth objection, is the prospect of jurisdictional confusion and multiplied abuse. With Federal and State Forces operating side by side, questions of primacy and command arise, and there is a fear that the brutality, extortion and unlawful conduct for which the existing single Force is too often criticised, would simply be multiplied across a profusion of new ones.
The Arguments for State Police
The case in favour has been made urgent by the visible and lethal failure of the centralised model, and it is, on balance, the stronger case.
The first and most compelling argument is simply that, the unitary system has broken down. A single Force commanded from Abuja, cannot police a country of more than 200 million people spread across nearly a million square kilometres. The figures are stark: the Nigeria Police Force numbers a little over 370,000 officers for that vast population, a ratio of roughly one Police Officer to 600 citizens, against a United Nations benchmark of about one officer to 450, and the Inspector-General of Police has himself put on record that the Force needs a further 190,000 officers merely to reach that benchmark. It is no surprise, then, that vast rural areas have effectively no Police presence at all. Banditry in the North West, kidnapping for ransom on the highways, the insurgency in the North East, the killings between farmers and herders in the Middle Belt, violent agitation in the South East, and the daily epidemic of abductions across the country have all outrun the capacity of one centralised constabulary. When whole communities are sacked while the nearest Police are hundreds of kilometres away awaiting instruction from the centre, the claim that the present system protects anyone rings hollow.
The second argument, is that of local knowledge and proximity. Policing is, by its nature, local. An officer who speaks the language, knows the terrain, knows who belongs in a community and who does not, and who can respond in minutes rather than awaiting a distant chain of command, is the foundation of effective policing everywhere in the world. The individuals who understand the peculiar dynamics of a community, are best placed to detect criminal activity before it escalates. A centralised Force that posts officers far from home, ignorant of the locality, is structurally handicapped against criminals who know every path.
The third argument is one of principle: true federalism. Nigeria calls itself a federation, yet, it reserves to the centre the most basic instrument of internal order, which is anomalous for a genuine federation. Authentic federalism requires that the federating units bear responsibility for their own internal security, and the great federations of the world, as the comparative analysis below shows, all decentralise policing in some measure.
The fourth argument is that State policing is, in truth, already upon Nigeria, in an unregulated and constitutionally ungrounded form. Because the centre has failed, the States have improvised their own security outfits – the Amotekun Corps in the South West, and the various community guard and vigilante formations elsewhere among them. These are State Police in all but name and legal authority, operating in a grey zone without proper constitutional grounding, training or accountability. It is far better to regularise and regulate such Forces under a proper constitutional framework, than to leave them as unaccountable bodies. Reality has already overtaken the law.
Why State Police is Necessary and Must be Done
On weighing the two sides, State Police emerges as not merely desirable but necessary, and as something that must be done. The decisive consideration is that the status quo is not a safe baseline, against which the risks of reform are to be measured. It is itself a failing system, that costs Nigerian lives every single day. To treat the centralised model as the cautious option, is to mistake the nature of the choice. The real choice is not between a safe present and a risky reform; it is between a demonstrably failing centralisation, and a localisation whose worth depends upon how carefully it is designed.
There is, moreover, an argument from accountability that is too little discussed and that ranks among the most powerful of all. Under the present arrangement, a Governor is described as the Chief Security Officer of his State, yet, he commands not a single Policeman, for the Commissioner of Police within his State answers to Abuja and not to him. This is a structural mismatch of responsibility without power, and it is an open invitation to the shifting of blame. When the people of a State are slaughtered or abducted, the Governor may throw up his hands and say, with some justice, that security is the business of the Federal Government, because he holds the title, but not the instrument. State Police closes that gap, and aligns power with responsibility. Once a Governor commands his own Force and sets his own local security policy, the alibi evaporates, and the citizen knows precisely whose Police has failed him. The man who holds the instrument, must answer for the result. That realignment is itself a profound argument for the reform.
As for the objections, they are real, but they are design problems to be solved, not reasons for paralysis. Every one of them, the fear of political abuse, the danger of underfunding, the risk to cohesion, the prospect of confusion, can be met by appropriate safeguards: independent State Police Service Commissions to insulate the Force from the Governor’s personal whim, constitutional limits forbidding deployment against political activity, guaranteed and protected funding so that no Force is captured by whoever pays it, clear rules of primacy between the two tiers, uniform national standards of training and human rights, and robust civilian oversight. The funding objection in particular admits of a further and comparative answer, developed below: a State not yet able to field its own Force need not be compelled to do so, for it may contract the Federal Police to police it in the interim, as the provinces of Canada contract the national Force, ensuring that no State is forced to place an underfunded and dangerous body upon its streets. The opponents are right about the dangers; they are wrong, only if they treat those dangers as reasons to do nothing, when the dangers of doing nothing are now written daily in blood.
The Command Relationship Between the Federal and State Police
A reform of this kind raises a practical question of the first importance, upon which its very integrity depends: under the new law, what is the relationship between the Federal Police, commanded by the Inspector-General of Police, and the State Police, headed in each State by a Commissioner of Police? In plain terms, may the Inspector-General give orders to a State Commissioner? The answer the new framework returns, is the key to whether the reform is genuine or merely cosmetic. Under the law as it presently stands, the answer is plainly yes. Section 215(2) of the existing Constitution provides that the Nigeria Police Force is under the command of the Inspector-General, and that the contingent stationed in a State, though under the immediate command of the Commissioner of Police, is so commanded “subject to the authority of the Inspector-General of Police”. The Commissioner is, in short, the Inspector-General’s subordinate, because there is but one Force.
A word upon terminology is needed before going further, for the two chambers of the National Assembly have not yet settled upon a single name for the office. In the version passed by the House of Representatives, the head of a State Police Service is styled the Commissioner of Police, the familiar title carried over from the present structure. In the version passed by the Senate, that officer is instead styled the Commander, the Senate having retitled the governing section to speak of appointment, command, direction and tenure. The divergence awaits reconciliation in the conference committee that will harmonise the two versions before the Bill is transmitted to the States. Nothing of substance turns upon the word, for whether he is called Commissioner or Commander, the officer is one and the same, the operational head of the State Police Service, appointed by the Governor and answerable to the State. The two terms are accordingly, used interchangeably in what follows.
The amended Section 215 dismantles that subordination, and it must do so if State Police is to mean anything at all. Under the new architecture, the Federal Police Service is headed by an Inspector-General whom the President appoints, acting on the advice of the Nigeria Police Council and subject to confirmation by the National Assembly, while each State Police Service is headed by a Commissioner of Police, also styled the Commander, whom the Governor appoints, acting on the advice of that same Council and subject to confirmation by the State House of Assembly. The Council advises upon these appointments, but does not itself make them: the appointing power rests with the President in the one case and with the Governor in the other, and the power of confirmation with the National Assembly and the State House of Assembly respectively. The two are separate Forces, with separate commands. This State Commander does not hold office at the Inspector-General’s pleasure, and cannot be removed by him; he answers not to the Inspector-General, but to the State authorities, that is, to the Governor, who may issue lawful written directives of a general policy nature on public safety and order, but who is expressly forbidden to direct the arrest, detention, investigation or deployment of the Police against his critics or political opponents, and to the State Police Service Council that oversees the Force. The old formula subjecting the Commissioner to the authority of the Inspector-General, is gone.
It follows that, in the ordinary, day to day policing of a State’s domestic affairs, the Inspector-General may not give orders to a State Commissioner. This is not an oversight in the drafting; it is the very heart of the reform. If the Inspector-General could direct the State Commander at will, the State Police Service would be no more than the old centralised force under a new name, and the decentralisation would be an illusion. Genuine state police requires, by definition, that the Commissioner, or Commander, be the servant of the State and not the deputy of the Federal Inspector-General. The routine command of a State Police Service belongs to the State, exercised through that officer under the general policy direction of its Governor and the oversight of its Council.
This independence is not, however, absolute, nor should it be, and here the Federal authority returns by defined and limited gateways.
First, in the matters reserved exclusively to the Federation, namely national security, terrorism, cybercrime, crimes crossing State lines, arms trafficking, and the policing of the Federal Capital Territory, the Federal Police lead, and the State Police are required to cooperate within their own territory rather than to command.
Second, the Federal Police may intervene in a State’s internal security, and may assume temporary operational control of the State Police, in the defined emergencies considered below: a total breakdown of law and order, a request by the governor, the inability of the State force to function, or its abuse by the State authorities.
Third, every State Police Service must meet the national minimum standards prescribed by the National Assembly and must remain certified, and the abuse of a State Force is itself a ground upon which its certification may be withdrawn. Outside these defined gateways, the Inspector-General has no command over a State Commander; within them, Federal primacy or Federal assumption of command applies. The relationship is therefore, one of coordinate authority in the ordinary case and of Federal primacy in the exceptional one, and not one of standing subordination.
This dual structure carries an evident risk, which the framers and the implementing legislation must address with care, namely the danger of two captains in one theatre. In any State, and above all, in a city, Federal and State officers will operate side by side, and many an incident will straddle the line between the local and the national: a kidnapping that crosses a State boundary, a protest that shades into a threat to national security, a criminal network that is at once a local nuisance and an interstate syndicate. Without a clear demarcation of jurisdiction and a settled protocol for coordination, such overlaps invite confusion, duplication and, at worst, open conflict between the two Forces.
The Nigeria Police Council, upon which both the Federation and the States are represented, is the natural forum in which to settle questions of policy, primacy and coordination, and the enabling legislation should prescribe clear rules for who leads when jurisdictions overlap. The constitutional architecture supplies the skeleton; the protocols of coordination must supply the sinew, lest the very multiplicity that is the strength of the reform become, for want of demarcation, its weakness.
The Council’s Advisory Role and the Federal Principle
A serious objection to the scheme must here be confronted, for it goes to the very heart of the Federal claim. If a single national body, the Nigeria Police Council, tenders advice upon the appointment of both the Federal Inspector-General and the State Commissioner or Commander, can the arrangement truly be called federalism? Does the State’s control over its own Force not cease to be absolute, the moment a National Council has a hand in the choice of the State’s Police head? The objection is a real one, and it deserves an answer rather than a dismissal, for there is force in it.
The first answer lies in the distinction already drawn, and it is decisive. The Council advises; it neither appoints nor confirms. The two substantive acts of the appointment, the choice of the officer and the ratification of that choice, remain wholly within the State. The Governor selects the Commissioner or Commander, and the State House of Assembly confirms him. The Council’s advice is a filter upon the exercise of that power, not a transfer of it. Federalism is concerned with where the substantive power resides, and on the State side it resides with the Governor and the State legislature. A merely advisory national input, conditions the exercise of the appointing power; it does not remove it to the centre. So long as the State chooses and the State confirms, the State controls its Police, which is the substance of the Federal claim.
The second answer turns upon the character of the Council itself. If it retains the composition it has historically had, namely the President as Chairman together with the State Governors, the Chairman of the Police Service Commission and the Inspector-General, then it is no Federal organ imposing upon the States from above; it is an intergovernmental forum upon which the States themselves sit in a body. Advice tendered by a Council of which every Governor is a member, is the counsel of a cooperative assembly of the federating units, not a command from a superior. A caveat is in order, for the precise composition of the expanded Council under the new Bill is still to be settled and the reporting upon it is not uniform, so that the strength of this answer will depend upon the final composition. But, if the Governors remain members, the cooperative character of the body substantially meets the charge.
The third answer is the most important, and it is one of principle. True federalism does not require the hermetic separation of the tiers, each sealed off from the other, for no functioning federation operates in that manner. What is known as cooperative federalism, the sharing of institutions, the setting of national minimum standards, and the use of coordinating bodies that guide the units, is a recognised and respectable form of the federal idea and not a betrayal of it. The United States, Canada, Germany and India alike maintain national standards and intergovernmental machinery alongside genuine subnational autonomy. The presence of a national body that sets standards is therefore, not the antithesis of federalism, but may be a feature of it. And, the national input here serves a plain and legitimate purpose: because the Police wield coercive power over the liberty of the citizen, and policing carries implications for national security, a national filter that ensures the officer a State places in command of an armed Force is a fit and qualified serving professional, and not an unqualified political favourite, is a reasonable safeguard, of a piece with the entire scheme of national minimum standards and certification that the Bill establishes.
The comparative experience confirms that national involvement in the appointment of a subnational Police head, is neither unknown nor inherently hostile to federalism. In India, a federation in which Police is a subject reserved to the States, the Supreme Court in the celebrated case of Prakash Singh and Others v Union of India and Others (2006) 8 SCC 1 directed that the head of a State Police, the Director General of Police, be selected by the State Government from among the three most senior officers empanelled for that rank by the Union Public Service Commission, which is a national body, the object being to insulate the office from political manipulation. India thus, interposes a national institution into the State’s choice of its own Police Chief, and it did so precisely in order to professionalise the appointment and shield it from political abuse. The advisory role of the Nigerian Council is a gentler form of the same device, directed to the same end.
Candour nonetheless, requires the acknowledgement that all of this establishes the arrangement to be compatible with federalism, not that it is the purest conceivable expression of it. It is a hedged and cautious federalism, distinctively Nigerian, which retains a national check upon the State’s appointment precisely because of the historical fear that Governors will abuse their Police powers. A purist who sought the federal principle in its undiluted form would strip the Council of any role in the State appointment, and leave the choice and its confirmation entirely to the Governor and the State House, as a Governor in the United States appoints the head of a State Police with no national council in the room. The drafters have not taken that course; they have preferred coordination to pure separation. That is a legitimate choice, and arguably a prudent one in Nigerian conditions, but it is a choice, and the objection rightly identifies it as a qualification of the federal principle, rather than its perfect vindication. The arrangement remains federalism, because the State chooses and the State confirms while the Council only advises, and cooperative federalism of that character is a recognised form of the thing; but it is a coordinated and cautious federalism, and the national advisory role is the price the drafters have paid for guarding against the abuse that all concerned have reason to fear.
The Power of the President to Assume Control in a Crisis
This brings the discussion to the question that has most exercised the Senate, and rightly, because it is where a reform of this kind succeeds or fails. The Bill empowers the Federal Police Service, and through it, the President, to intervene in the internal security of a State and to assume temporary operational control, including command, of a State Police Service or any part of it, in defined emergencies. The triggering conditions are an actual or imminent breakdown of public order, the inability of a State Police Service to function effectively, a threat to national security, or evidence of serious human rights abuses, partisan intimidation or unlawful conduct by the State policing authorities themselves.
Is such a power necessary? It plainly is. It is the indispensable safeguard, against the very abuse that the opponents of State Police most fear. If a governor turns his police upon his opponents, that abuse becomes, under this provision, the constitutional trigger for federal intervention. Without such a power, a State Police could indeed, degenerate into a Governor’s private army; with it, the centre retains the means to restore order and to protect the citizen against a rogue or incapacitated State. The power to intervene is therefore, not a betrayal of federalism but a condition of its safety.
The harder question, and the one on which the design of the reform turns, is whether the exercise of that power should require the prior approval of the National Assembly. The reasoning must be careful, for the matter is finely balanced and the wrong choice would be dangerous in either direction.
The case for requiring the prior backing of the National Assembly, is obvious and respectable. It is a democratic check. It would prevent a President from arbitrarily seizing control of the Police of a State governed by his political opponents, dressing a partisan manoeuvre in the language of emergency. Senators have rightly insisted that there cannot be a situation in which the President simply looks at a State, and decides that he will take it over. The fear is real, and the impulse to subject so grave a power to legislative control, is sound in principle.
Yet, the political problems that would arise if prior legislative backing were made a precondition are severe, and they cut in two directions at once. On the one hand, if the President’s party commands the National Assembly, the requirement of prior approval would be no real check at all, for the legislature would simply ratify whatever the executive desired, and the safeguard would be a formality. On the other hand, and more dangerously, if the opposition controlled a chamber, the requirement could be used to obstruct a genuinely necessary intervention for partisan reasons, leaving a State to burn while the legislature played politics with a real emergency. A safeguard that is either a rubber stamp or an instrument of obstruction, is no safeguard at all. There is, further, the problem of telegraphing: to require a public legislative debate before the President may act, is to alert the very persons against whom the intervention is directed, whether a complicit Governor or the armed criminals themselves, giving them time to react and to frustrate the operation.
The difficulties become acute when one imagines a real emergency. The conditions that would justify a Federal takeover, an insurrection, a sudden collapse of public order, a State Police actively complicit in mass killing, are by their nature, fast moving and require a response in hours, not in the days or weeks that the convening, debate and approval of the National Assembly would consume. The National Assembly may well be in recess when the emergency strikes, and the reconvening of an emergency session is itself a slow business. To make immediate action wait upon prior legislative approval is, in a true emergency, to guarantee that the action comes too late to save lives. The cure would defeat its own purpose.
The resolution of this dilemma is not to choose between a dangerous unchecked power and a fatal requirement of prior approval, for that is a false choice. The Constitution already supplies the better model, in Section 305, which governs the declaration of a state of emergency. There the President may proclaim a state of emergency immediately, acting at once when the conditions demand it, but the proclamation must then be transmitted to the National Assembly and ceases to have effect unless it is approved by the legislature within a short and defined period, and by a substantial majority. Speed in the emergency is preserved; the democratic check is preserved; and the two are reconciled by sequencing them, action first and ratification swiftly after, rather than by placing the check before the action. This is, moreover, the path that mature federations in fact follow, as the comparative analysis below confirms, for in them the executive acts at once in the emergency and answers to the legislature afterwards, not before.
That is the model the Federal takeover power should follow. The President should be empowered to assume temporary control of a State Police immediately upon the defined conditions being met, without awaiting prior approval, so that no emergency goes unanswered for want of a legislative quorum. But, the takeover should lapse automatically, unless it is ratified by the National Assembly within a short fixed window, of days rather than weeks, so that an abuse of the power is swiftly exposed and reversed by the people’s representatives. In this way the reform secures both the speed that a real emergency demands, and the accountability that guards against a partisan seizure. To require prior approval is to court catastrophe in the emergency; to require none at all is to court abuse; to require swift subsequent ratification, is to avoid both.
The Comparative Experience of Genuine Federations
It is instructive, and reassuring, to observe that the great federations of the world, those that practise federalism in substance and not merely in name, all decentralise policing in some measure, and that the dangers the domestic critics fear have not destroyed them.
Consider first the United States of America. Its policing is among the most decentralised in the world, comprising some 18,000 separate law enforcement agencies arranged in tiers. At the federal level sit agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which handle federal crimes, matters crossing State lines, terrorism and organised crime. Beneath them are the State Police and Highway Patrols, then the County Sheriffs, who are very often elected by the people they serve, and finally the Municipal Police departments of the cities. This profusion of Forces has coexisted for generations without fragmenting the Union, which is the most direct possible answer to the fear that multiple Police Forces must imperil national unity.
The American experience is equally instructive on the question of federal intervention, which is the crux of the present debate. The instrument there is not the Police but the National Guard, the militia of each State, which is ordinarily under the command of the State Governor but which the President may, by law, call into federal service, taking it out of the Governor’s hands. The classic illustration is the Little Rock crisis of 1957, from which came the Supreme Court’s decision in Cooper v Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958). The Governor of Arkansas had deployed the State’s National Guard to obstruct the desegregation of a school, in defiance of a federal court order resting upon Brown v Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). President Eisenhower responded by federalising that very Guard, removing it from the Governor’s control, and deploying federal troops to enforce the law, and the Supreme Court, in a joint opinion of all nine Justices, held that no State legislature, Governor or other official might nullify or defy the federal constitutional order. The episode and the decision together are the paradigm of the federal centre overriding a State’s abuse of its own armed Force, and it is precisely the situation the Nigerian Bill contemplates when it makes a Governor’s abuse of his Police a trigger for Federal intervention. The further point, of the highest relevance to Nigeria, is that the American President acts in such cases upon his own authority, swiftly, under the federalising power and the Insurrection Act, and does not await the prior approval of Congress for each deployment. The American model is therefore, one of immediate executive action, exercised within a framework of law and subject to the courts, and not one of prior legislative permission. It vindicates the sequencing urged above.
Consider next Canada, whose model offers a different and, for the funding difficulty, an especially valuable lesson. Canadian policing has three tiers, but with a distinctive feature. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is the Federal Police, yet, it also serves as the Provincial Police in eight of the ten provinces, and in the territories, under contract to those provinces. Only the two largest provinces, Ontario with its Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and Quebec with its Sûreté du Québec (SQ), maintain their own dedicated Provincial Forces, alongside the Municipal Forces of the cities. The lesson for Nigeria is direct and practical. A province that lacks the capacity to field its own Force may contract the National Police to do its policing, under provincial direction, until it is ready to stand alone. A poorer Nigerian State need not be compelled to launch an underfunded and dangerous Force of its own; it could, on the Canadian model, contract the Federal Police Service to police it in the interim. And, Canada demonstrates, as the United States does, that federal and subnational Police have coexisted for well over a century without dissolving the bonds of the nation.
Other federations tell the same story. In India, which is in many respects the federation closest to Nigeria’s own circumstances, Police is a subject reserved to the States, each of which maintains its own Force, while the centre keeps specialised armed Forces for particular national duties and retains, under the provision for President’s Rule, an emergency power to assume control of a State’s administration, including its Police, where governance has broken down. Australia and Germany likewise, operate State or Provincial Police alongside a Federal Force.
The comparative lesson is unmistakable. Every serious federation decentralises policing; the apprehension that this must produce fragmentation or chaos has not been borne out in practice; and federal intervention, far from being an exotic danger, is a normal and accepted feature of such systems, exercised swiftly by the executive and disciplined by law and by the courts.
Conclusion
The history of policing in Nigeria explains the fear of State Police, but it does not justify a perpetual paralysis in the face of a present catastrophe. The abuses of the First Republic were real, but they are not a sentence of permanent centralisation upon a country whose centralised Police have manifestly failed to keep its people safe. The objections to State Police are serious, but every one of them is answerable by careful design rather than by inaction, and the dangers of inaction are now counted daily in the lives of the abducted and the slain.
The case for the reform is, in the end, overwhelming. The centralised model has broken down beyond repair under the weight of banditry, insurgency, kidnapping and mass killing. Policing is local by its nature, and only a localised Force can bring to bear the knowledge and the proximity that effective policing requires. A true federation must entrust the units of the federation with responsibility for their own internal order, and the great federations of the world, the United States, Canada, India and others, show that decentralised policing is not a danger to be feared but a system that works, and that the power of Federal intervention which guards against its abuse is a normal and manageable feature of it. The reform also restores accountability, ending the indefensible spectacle of Governors who bear the title of Chief Security Officer without commanding a single officer, and placing the responsibility for a State’s security squarely upon the shoulders of those with the power to provide it.
On the single question that has most divided opinion, the President’s power to assume control of a State Police in a crisis, the recommendation is clear. The power is necessary and must be retained, for it is the ultimate safeguard against a governor who would abuse his force. But it should be exercised on the model of Section 305 of the Constitution: immediate action by the President when the defined emergency conditions are met, followed by swift and mandatory ratification by the National Assembly within a short fixed period, failing which the takeover lapses. To require the prior approval of the National Assembly would be to invite either a rubber stamp or a partisan obstruction, and, in a genuine emergency, to ensure that help arrives too late. To require none at all would be to invite abuse. The sequencing of immediate action and prompt subsequent ratification reconciles the two imperatives of speed and accountability, and it is the course to be urged upon those who will settle the final text.
State police is, in conclusion and without hesitation, a constitutional and security imperative for Nigeria, and it must be done. It should be enacted, with the safeguards identified above and with the power of federal intervention structured as proposed. The reform is overdue. The lives it may save are too many, and the failure it would remedy too grave, for the nation to delay it any longer. Let it be done, and let it be done.
Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD (Cantab)