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Fear and hope of state police in Nigeria 06 Jul 2026

On Thursday, 25 June 2026, the Nigerian Senate passed a bill to establish state police, a couple of weeks after the House of Representatives passed the same bill. Under Nigeria’s constitutional framework, the bill will take effect once two-thirds of the nation’s 36 state legislatures pass it and the president assents to it. Observers of Nigeria’s politics have little doubt that the state police bill will clear the final constitutional hurdle. When that happens, Nigeria will have a two-tiered law enforcement system. How radical is this change?

This is a big deal. Since the early days of colonialism, Nigerian political leaders have debated whether a state police force was needed in the country. The history of law enforcement in Nigeria explains why the debate has been heated and interminable. First, the country is a colonial creation, with institutions whose logic is extraction and whose legitimacy is questionable. Therefore, a subnational police force would be contested by communities concerned about ethnic oppression. It does not help that the law enforcement institutions were used by the colonial government and its associated ethnic leaders to suppress minorities and other communities alienated from political power. 

As part of the challenge to the perceived dominance of major ethnic groups in the run-up to independence, minorities questioned how policing power would be managed in an independent Nigeria. Appointed by the colonial government to address ethnic minorities’ anxieties, the Willinks Commission recommended that a transition to regional police (Nigeria had regions then, not states) be gradual and preceded by appropriate protocols to ensure fairness, justice, and efficiency in police operations. Sixty-seven years after the recommendation, state police is almost a reality. But do those protective protocols exist? No. 

The National Assembly passed the State Police Bill amid praise and criticism. Those who praise the constitutional amendment establishing State Police regard it as an important step towards the desired restructuring of the Nigerian polity. The restructuring movement hinges on the argument that Nigeria’s recurrent crises of statehood stem from the dysfunction of its institutions. These institutions malfunction because they violate the federalist impulse at the heart of Nigeria’s federation. They concentrate power at the centre and deprive states and local governments of the incentives to be productive. To cure this pathology, power, responsibility and opportunities for entrepreneurial governance need to be shifted towards states and communities, where action is more effective and impactful. In light of the pressing crisis of insecurity, the reallocation of policing power to a lower level of government would result in effective control of violent crime and terrorism.

The problem is that governance failure in Nigeria and the capture of its institutions are more pervasive and chronic at the state level. We complain that the National Assembly is a rubber stamp that fails to check executive lawlessness and wanton violations of the Constitution. The situation is worse in the states. State legislators are not more powerful than the governors’ aides. There is neither intensity nor competition in state governments, unlike at the federal level, where political intrigues periodically prompt a captured legislature to show some signs of life. How will the policing power be exercised for the public good when the Governor, rather than the President, becomes the Chief Security Officer and appoints the Commissioner of Police?

We do not need to imagine what could happen. We have lessons from history. Under regional government, where regions exercised greater power over local affairs, including regional law enforcement, regional premiers used their policing powers to terrorise their political opponents and destroy competitive politics in their regions. This was the proximate cause of the failure of the First Republic. As W. Arthur Lewis observed in his classic, Politics in West Africa (1965), elections in West Africa had never been free and fair because local chiefs repeatedly used local police to brutalise the opposition and deny it the opportunity to compete in general elections. 

It is reasonable to argue that localising state institutions brings them closer to the people and enhances local accountability and impact. But if we do not change the nature of these institutions, they could lead to harmful outcomes, even compounding the pathologies. The key insight from Mahmood Mamdani’s thesis in Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996) is “decentralised despotism”: the idea that colonial efforts to bring government closer to the people, without transforming its authoritarian logic, led to greater deprivation of freedom.  

Handing over control of state police to state governors could be more damaging to fair policing and could increase the autocracy of elections in Nigeria than we have today. In current circumstances, the Nigerian Police has been very partisan, becoming the instrument of oppression of the ruling party at the centre. This could be worse if state governors with little legislative or judicial oversight take control of policing in their states. In the First and Second Republics, the police played a key role in the collapse of democracy, as incumbents used law enforcement to constrict liberty and undermine competitive elections. 

But things can be different this time around. To overcome the curse of decentralised despotism, the new policing scheme should be redefined in three ways. First, operational control of state policing should rest with police chiefs, not with governors. Governors should have the power to oversee the policing decisions of the police chief, who is appointed by the Governor with the consent of the state legislature. Second, there should be a clear, transparent, and reviewable process for accountability for unfair policing and violations of constitutional rights. Acts of unfair and unlawful policing should be administratively and judicially remediable. The process for remediation should be public, effective, and deterrent. Thirdly, the institution of state policing should reflect the formal and informal rules, norms, and cultures of each state, and be aligned with the framework of community law enforcement, especially in the Southeast, where there is an established community vigilante system.  

Hopefully, with these institutional safeguards, we can avoid the history of violence and impunity associated with regional policing in Nigeria's previous republics.   
 
Sam Amadi, PhD, a former Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, is the Director of Abuja School of Social and Political Thoughts.