The withdrawal of the Nigerian military from power has afforded the country a semblance of democracy. But this democracy is not yet people-oriented. It is essentially one, which like the Nigerian Police, is imposed from the top. In other climes, the police force grew as of necessity as societies made the transition from traditional to associational or modern entities. The police was then home-grown and localised, with clear and socially imbued responsibilities, and with its men and officers picked from the locale on the strict basis of observable and proven character traits. The state and national police institutions that came later more or less emerged from these local build-ups.
In comparison, the Nigerian Police Force was imposed on the nation as part of the sad history of Nigeria’s colonial creation. It was first established at the national level before being extended, willy-nilly, down to the regions, towns and villages. Indeed, the Nigeria Police, once an instrument of British colonial administrative control, remains today an instrument of authoritarian and dictatorial rule by a cabal of power-mongers and internal ‘colonialists’ who are determined to maintain their stranglehold on the nation, and to run the country according to their own whim, rubbishing, in the process, the collective will and wishes of majority of Nigerians. The role of the Nigeria Police in the ‘landslide electoral victories’ of 2003 is a case in point. It is difficult to see how Nigeria’s democracy can be meaningfully transformed into a popular, people-based democracy without a radical restructuring of Nigeria’s internal security system and the decentralization of police services from the centre.
Secondly, as long as we maintain a federal monopoly of police duties, the challenge of improving our internal security system and indeed of establishing effective policing at local community levels in the country will remain a mirage. Clearly, the Nigerian Police Force under the aegis of national control has become rather unwieldy, corrupt, indisciplined and unmanageable. The Force has failed. This is the reason why in every nook and cranny of the country, both within the metropolis and in the remote towns and villages, vigilante groups like the erstwhile Bakassi Boys, OPC and many other faceless small groups have sprouted.
These are actually illegal local and state police forces that are constituted and equipped by private, community and quasi-state outfits to take charge of local security needs. In many towns, villages and even marketplaces, township streets and neighbourhoods, detention centres are provided for these vigilante groups, and the vigilante actually do arrest and detain people, as well as pass judgments and impose punishments, including the death penalty, in defiance of the law. In this regard, calls for the creation of state/local police forces simply boil down to demands for the legalizing and reconstitution of the numerous illegal police forces and formations that are already on the ground.
Those who oppose the creation of state police premise their argument on the notion that state police forces may be misused by the state governors; that such forces could easily be turned into instruments of oppression against political opponents and non-indigenes. These are genuine fears that should not be brushed aside. But let us not forget that even the national police can equally be put to similar use by a capricious president, as indeed was witnessed under Abacha. (Some people might even point to the police handling of the recent Owu chieftaincy dispute involving Chief Obasanjo and his co-local Owu kingmakers, and posit that that was another case of abuse of the monopolistic federal police institution in Nigeria.)
We must also acknowledge the fact that just as the different tiers of government in the country represent different experiments in governance to which all can learn from, so could different tiers of police service provide avenues and experiments in the art and science of providing security in the country. Furthermore, the creation of state police forces and the abrogation of the existing Federal monopoly of police duties will help check abuse and misuse of the police because the set-up will provide alternative and different views, angles and insight to criminal or security matters. It will curb absolutism and high-handedness in the police sector.
In my book, Economic Agenda For Nigeria, 1992, where I first proposed the creation of state police forces in Nigeria, I alluded to the facelessness of member of the Nigerian Police Force and the demerits of recruiting and detailing policemen to operate in strange terrains. These are matters that cannot be examined in a newspaper article, but suffice it to say that the practice introduces a mercenary ambience in the carriage of our centralised police force – with dire consequences for both the citizenry and the Force. It should be appreciated that this drawback will not attend or mar the services of local or state police forces whose men and officers will predominantly come from both indigenes and established residents of the given state or locale.
However, while supporting the idea of regional or state police forces, I think that government must make provisions that should allay the genuine fears of possible misuse by state governments. I have made point-by-point suggestions as to what could be done in this regard in my book On National Reconciliation and Development, 2002. Again these suggestions cannot be reproduduced here. Suffice it to observe therefore that the state police forces should initially be constituted into auxiliary forces, with checks and balances to ensure that they are consistent and above board.
Finally, let me reiterate that every government must have the capacity to enforce its decisions, in its area of jurisdiction, via a police force of its own. The absence or denial of such leeway is a major handicap that stands to ridicule the idea of state and even local governments. This point hardly needs expatiation. There is no place in the civilized world where governments, even at state and local levels, are left without command of some kind of police force. Even chairmen at village meetings have to work with provosts who as quasi-policemen help the chairmen to maintain order at meetings.
In the USA for example, you would find county or city policemen, controlled by city mayors or county administrations, working side by side with state policemen, as well as the FBI, the renowned federal security outfit called the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To break from and sidetrack these traditional and time-tested systems and to rely on one single federally controlled police force is unfortunate and negative to our well-being and developmental needs; it tantamounts to stewing in an inanity that will continue to compound our problems as a nation. In a large federation like ours, the need to balance central, regional/state and local needs and therefore allow the authorities at the different tiers to handle and supervise definite areas of law enforcement and the security apparatus can never be wished away. We should therefore begin now to actualize this time-honoured federalist maxim by first creating the state police with a view to establishing their local equivalents after the system must have been consolidated at the state level.
