The Imperative of State Police

Evidence of the near complete breakdown of law and order accumulates all over Nigeria-over forty students are killed, mostly by slitting their throats, probably by fundamentalist religious groups in Mubi, Adamawa State; four undergraduates are lynched by a community mob in Aluu, near Port Harcourt; in Kaduna more than twenty citizens are murdered early in the morning allegedly by armed bandits for having the effrontery to challenge their activities; in Jos killings of indigenous villagers by so-called Fulani herdsmen resumed with twenty killed last week-all these in the last two weeks only! The notion that a single national police force will successfully police all 910,770 square kilometres of this nation, more than four times the size of the United Kingdom, covering the activities of our 165 million people, double the population of Germany and Egypt is doomed to failure! It is the same way the concept of PHCN or NITEL failed simply because it is an inefficient way of organising delivery of service! Beyond its inevitable ineffectiveness, a federation in which you have state and federal legislatures, laws, courts and governments which has only a federal police is a major constitutional aberration! Even unitary Britain does not have a single unitary policing system!!! It devolves policing to the community level. Why do we think we can defy common sense and produce positive outcomes? The essence of the state’s law making power is the ability to enforce compliance with the law. A government which has constitutional power to make laws, but lacks a police force to enforce those laws is a constitutional toothless bulldog! The governors in the twelve Northern “Sharia” states understood this logic, which is why when they passed Sharia laws early in this republic, they created Sharia State Police (called Hisbah) to enforce it! It is one of the supreme ironies of Nigerian political sophistry that having created religious state police, the same Northern governors are the main opponents of other states establishing their own state policing systems!!! Globally, federal states have federal police (such as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)) as well as state, town, city, university and even borough police forces. As I mentioned earlier, even an otherwise unitary state like the United Kingdom recognised the need for an exception in terms of the devolved structure of policing simply because the alternative of a centralised UK police would neither be effective or efficient. Policing is a community-based activity-the police officers should have a thorough knowledge of the communities they police, its customs, neighbourhoods, roads and alleys etc. sending a stranger to police a community is simply a colonial approach to policing (which may have been tolerable from the colonialist’s point of view since he was more interested in intimidating the natives and suppressing dissent) which could never succeed in a modern democratic system. One of the silliest arguments being proffered against state police is that the state governors will abuse it! Is the federal government not abusing federal police? Has it not been used to rig elections? Do our federal police not engage in routine extra-judicial killings? Does it not often act as a service provider offering escort and protection services to anyone rich enough to afford it? As far as I can see, the propensity for a state police composed mostly of indigenes and long term residents of an area to abuse its own citizens is far less than that of a colonial, imported police alien to the culture and beliefs of its host community! And that is our daily, practical experience!!! In any event, I believe that state governors already have considerable scope to abuse their powers against opponents or non-indigenes if they were so inclined. They have powers over land, state judiciary, civil service, building and planning approvals, state universities, radio and TV stations, taxation etc. To their credit, I have not seen any significant incidences of systematic abuse of these powers by most state governors. More importantly we have the courts to check abuses of citizen’s rights by any government, state or federal. Fortunately the court charged with enforcement of fundamental human rights under our constitution is the federal high court!!! The other argument offered often is that states cannot afford to run a police force of their own! This of course flies in the face of the reality that across the country, any state that seeks minimal improvements in policing effectiveness has by-and-large taken over funding of their state police commands from the federal government! We know of the Lagos State Security Trust Fund (Ogun, Oyo and other South-West states have followed suit) and the significant spending by Rivers and other Niger-Delta states on the federal police. But then the substantive issue of devolving more powers and revenue to the states and local governments to better empower these tiers which are most relevant to our people’s lives remain a necessity. I also believe using the example of Lagos State that any serious state will include non-indigene, resident groups in the manning of any state police, simply from the standpoint of effectiveness. Lagos state has non-indigene teachers, civil servants, judges, commissioners and other political appointees. Why won’t they employ non-indigenes in their state police? There is a peculiarly Nigerian absurdity in which current and retired police officers are shouting loudest against state police. Given the non-effectiveness of the model they have presided over, why should we listen to them?