SAN FRANCISCO, March 13, (THEWILL) – The clamour for the creation of state police in Nigeria has been increasing in recent times. This is not unexpected, given the divergent security challenges that the country has been facing.
While previous agitations had been sidelined, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo had set the ball rolling recently when he backed the creation of state police.
The 36 state governors later endorsed Osinbajo’s call at a meeting of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum. Its Chairman, Abdulaziz Yari, disclosed the position at the National Security Summit, which the Senate organised to tackle the security challenges currently facing the country.
“We cannot realistically police a country the size of Nigeria centrally from Abuja. State police and other community policing methods are clearly the way to go,” Yari said.
In the last 10 years, the country has had different security challenges, ranging from Boko Haram insurgency, Fulani herdsmen’s attacks, armed banditry, kidnapping, ritual killing, to militancy in the Niger Delta.
The inability of the central police to fight these crimes had snowballed in diverse threats, thus making security of lives and property a herculean task.
THEWILL believes that the number of police officers in the country is not enough to tackle these hydra-headed problems in a hugely populated country as Nigeria.
We support the agitation for the creation of state police as it would confront the numerous and peculiar safety challenges in the different parts of the country.
We believe that with state police, crime at the state and local government levels would be easily curtailed than with the inadequate central police.
One clear reason is that they understand the local terrain, and would be more efficient and effective in detecting, investigating and curbing crime in the states and local councils.
However, we wish to caution that in establishing the state police, conscious arrangements must be made to define associated complex challenges, such as the purchase of firearms, ammunition, explosives, fingerprinting and criminal records.
Others are forensic investigation, handwriting analysis, report writing, nepotism, voice analysis, cybercrime and other peculiarities in different states.
THEWILL advises that the Federal Government collaborates with the National Assembly and other key players to ensure that the revenue sharing formula is increased substantially to fund the emerging state police commands.
We enjoin all necessary legislative and Constitutional duties to be fulfilled, including granting power to the state Houses of Assembly to establish and administer the state police duties. This is necessary, if we must break away from the existing situation whereby only the National Assembly is empowered to legislate on police and criminal matters.
We however caution against manipulations of the state police by governors and politicians. THEWILL recalls that during the colonial era, Councils and Emirates police were used to commit various atrocities in some sections of the country.
For instance, in some states in the North, where Islamic Police, popularly called Hisbah, was in use, they had been accused of arbitrarily seizing alcohol, imposing unnecessary fines, flogging people and carrying out punishment against perceived enemies under the guise of acting in accordance with Islamic injunctions.
We therefore advise that, in perfecting the platform for establishing the state police, the propensity of governors and politicians using them to hunt their opponents must be checked.
It is only when professionalism is allowed to prevail in the emerging state police, that governors, as the chief security officers of their various states, would not use them to attack the opposition, as they have often done with political thugs.
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