Nigeria Is Handing Governors Their Own Police and Praying They Behave

Here is a number that should keep every Nigerian awake tonight. Fewer than 400,000 police officers stand between more than 200 million of us and the men with rifles who roam our forests, highways, and school dormitories. That is roughly one officer for every 500 citizens, in a country where kidnap gangs can seize a busload of schoolchildren and vanish before the first patrol arrives. We have been living with that math for years. It is why we bury our dead, pay ransoms we cannot afford, and watch soldiers do policing work they were never trained for.

This week, 28 of our 36 state legislatures voted to change how that protection is delivered. Under the approved constitutional reform, each state can now build its own police force alongside the federal service. The President is expected to sign it. The rest of the process will be left to the states, and the states are where the trouble starts.

We need to be honest about why this reform exists. Nigeria's security crisis is real and it is ancient in its cruelty. Jihadist groups have spent more than a decade turning the northeast into a graveyard of villages. Bandits have made the northwest a country of ransom and fear. Armed groups across the nation have discovered that kidnapping pays better than most jobs. Against that, a single federal police command based in Abuja has been asked to police a nation of more than 200 million people, and it has failed, as we all know. Officers are underpaid, poorly equipped, and too few to be anywhere they are needed. Many of them cannot speak the languages of the communities they are sent to protect. A police officer who cannot understand a farmer in Zamfara cannot stop the man who is stealing his cattle, and he certainly cannot earn his trust.

So the case for local policing is strong. Officers who know their communities, speak their languages, and answer to people they see every day are more likely to prevent crime than strangers posted from the capital. Vigilante groups and community defence units already exist because citizens refused to wait for help that never came. Bringing those volunteers into a trained, paid, regulated structure is the right instinct. Some of the states that have already experimented with local security outfits show what is possible when local people are trusted with local protection.

But instinct is not a plan, and we have seen what happens when a good idea is handed to powerful men without guardrails.

Let us be clear about the danger. A state police force is, by design, an instrument of the governor. Under the amendment, governors will be barred from using these officers for partisan, ethnic, religious, or personal ends. They will not be permitted to order the arrest of opponents, obstruct investigations, or interfere in elections. Those are fine words. Every Nigerian who has watched a state government arrest a journalist on a Friday night, or who has seen opposition supporters beaten at a polling unit, knows how thin such words can be. The question is not whether the law forbids abuse. The question is who will stop it when a governor decides the law is an inconvenience.

The reform's answer is a system in which police commissioners who receive unlawful orders can refer them to a new National Police Council, whose decisions will be binding. On paper, that is a meaningful check. In practice, the Council will be staffed, funded, and appointed by the same political class whose conduct it is meant to police. We have heard that promise before about the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, the anti-graft agencies, and the oversight committees that now sleep through every budget hearing. We are entitled to ask whether this time will be different.

The warning from Nigerian policing experts is blunt, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The federal police suffer from corruption and weak oversight. Copy that model into 36 states without fixing it, and we do not get 36 improvements. We get 36 copies of the same disease, each with a governor who controls the budget, the barracks, and the boardroom. Rural police stations will become patronage vehicles. Checkpoints will become toll booths. Recruitment will become a reward for loyalty rather than a test of character.

Then there is the money question, which no governor can dodge. Several of our states are already struggling to pay civil servants on time. Some have accumulated salary arrears that stretch across months. Yet we are told to believe they will recruit, train, equip, pay, and house thousands of new officers and maintain their vehicles and weapons without collapsing their budgets or borrowing against the futures of their children. If a state cannot pay its teachers, what happens to its police when the money runs out? Officers who are not paid become officers who take bribes, and armed men who take bribes become predators.

So what must be done? Revvmark's answer begins with independence. Every state police service must be governed by a state police service commission that is insulated from the governor's office. Its members should be appointed through a transparent process involving the state judiciary, civil society, and the legislature, with fixed terms that outlast any single administration. Recruitment must be merit-based and publicly advertised, with background checks and psychological screening, and every state should publish its police budget, its recruitment numbers, and its complaints data every quarter. A police force that cannot be audited by its own citizens is not a police force. It is a militia with a logo.

The funding model must also be built to last. Federal revenue-sharing should be tied to verified police performance and transparency standards, and states that refuse to publish their accounts should lose access to the funds. Body cameras, digital case management, and public complaint portals should be mandatory from day one. Those tools are not expensive compared to the cost of a single kidnapping economy left unchecked.

We do not have to invent this from nothing. Botswana has long maintained a professional, relatively apolitical police service, backed by institutions that protect it from partisan capture. Mauritius has built a reputation for rule of law and accountable public administration, with strong independent oversight bodies. Closer to home, Senegal has demonstrated that democratic transitions can survive when courts, electoral bodies, and security forces are answerable to the constitution rather than to one man. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove that better policing is possible in Africa when the rules are clear and the enforcers can be held to account.

And what should Nigerians demand? We should demand that President Tinubu, before he signs, insist on the strongest possible safeguards, including an independent National Police Council with real enforcement power and public reporting obligations. We should demand that every state assembly publish the draft laws that will govern its police force before a single officer is recruited, so that citizens can read the rules and challenge them. We should demand that the National Assembly fund oversight bodies in the same budget that funds the new forces. And we should demand that civil society organisations, bar associations, journalists, and religious and traditional leaders be given formal roles in monitoring every state police command.

To the governors reading this: you are being handed a force that will bear your name and your politics. Use it to protect the people, not to protect yourselves. The first governor who uses a state police squad to jail a critic will not be a hero to the voters who elected him. He will be the reason the reform is repealed and the reason the next generation of Nigerians learns to fear the uniform.

To the citizens: the security of your community is too important to leave to the men who want power over it. Show up at the state assembly hearings. Ask who will command these officers, who will audit them, and where the money will come from. Demand that every answer be written into law.

We are a continent that has been ruled by men who promised us protection and delivered fear. We have seen coups dressed as order and emergency powers used to silence dissent. Nigeria has the chance to build something better, a police force that is close to the people it serves and accountable to the law that binds it. That chance will not survive silence. Stand up, read the bill, and make them answer for every word of it.

Based on reporting by RFI