Anayochukwu Agbo
From Austin Omokhuale
One of the most profound statements of the 1999 Constitution, though roundly trivialised and disregarded by some persons we erroneously repose with leadership in Nigeria, is the provision of Chapter II, Section 14 (b) that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government”.
For context of interpretation and application, the synonyms of “primary” include “basic”, “principal” and “fundamental”, and have the same meanings as “first”, “foremost”, and “overriding”. That “security and welfare” is “primary”, is unambiguous and intentional, because it was reasoned that whatever else a government might do, if this particular obligation was not fulfilled, first and foremost, then the people over whom governance is exercised might not be in a position to savour and enjoy, and will, therefore, have been circumscribed and defrauded. Why? Because people who are not secure cannot enjoy the infrastructure – roads, railways, schools, hospitals – for which the government might expect applause.
For example, many people are now afraid to travel on our roads due to the astronomic risk of being waylaid and kidnapped en route and, conscious of this, no notable Nigerian politician would do an hour’s journey on Nigerian roads, regardless of the quality of the roads. Similarly, with the litany of kidnappings and derailments that the railways have suffered in recent times, the rail-lines being developed are not any safer.
Some Governors are building or rehabilitating schools but wouldn’t send their children there, partly due to the frequent kidnapping of children of the common folks in these schools, and partly due to the loss of the photo ops with their children as they graduate from Eton College, Imperial College, or Oxford; we see the pictures in the press all the time.
For our healthcare, we have some “consulting clinics”, euphemistically called hospitals, but with the perennial dearth of equipment and supplies, and the frequent kidnapping of medical personnel, our best medical experts are fleeing from the physical and job insecurity. Therefore, citizens are frequently subjected to gratuitous neglect in these facilities that are often kept closed by the strikes of the few overworked, but under-rewarded personnel. By the way, the politicians who have no faith in these facilities do not patronise them as they can shamelessly utilise state resources to go treat headaches at Johns Hopkins.
Security, or lack of it, is empirically integral to all endeavours in this country today as nothing has been spared of attack by the marauders – education (kidnapping in schools); healthcare (kidnapping of personnel); agriculture (killings of farmers; rustling of cattle); transportation (one-chance; kidnapping on roads and rail-lines); oil production (attacks and illegal bunkering); artisanal mining (bandit attacks); Christianity (bombing and kidnapping in churches); and Islam (bombing and kidnapping in mosques).
If we were to compute the opportunity cost to date of the billions of US dollars that successive governments have allegedly expended on combating insecurity since the advent of Boko Haram and bandits/terrorists who entered the fray later, we would realise the level of economic growth and development we have forgone: many schools and universities we could have refurbished and equipped to advance our education; the street children not educated; thousands of kilometres of roads and rails not constructed; health facilities we could have developed and resourced with adequate personnel; the reconstruction of bandit-ravaged communities and facilities we could have avoided; the jobs that the economic sectors could have created; and the japa syndrome we could have prevented.
Our federal and state governments have been admitting to our face that the country lacks sufficient numbers of security personnel to adequately combat and eliminate insecurity. In addition, the security agencies are short on equipment, lacking in technology, and needful of training to tackle the better endowed bandits. However, with the recent revelation (Daily Trust, 20/4/26) of an abysmal seven percent budgetary release for the Army’s security equipment in the 2025 budget, this is alarmingly understandable!
It was therefore a welcome development when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, finally expressed the imperative and exigency of establishing State Police, after years of lip service to same by many political leaders, and manifest aversion to the issue by previous heads of security agencies. The proposal is propelled by the need to make good progress on the lingering insecurity, recognising that although he had recorded some achievements, the upsurge of attacks in many northern states is highly unsettling.
Many long-suffering Nigerians applauded his proposal, popping champagne, palm-wine or coke, depending on their kind of indulgence. They celebrated, I am sure, after going down memory lane to recall the decades, which look like centuries, that the spiked boot of insecurity has been on our national neck; and the distressing numbers of security incidents and gruesome deaths still being reported around the country, almost daily.
However, some spoilers among us have started coming up with all the wrong questions again, concerning State Police, ostensibly to justify the inadvisability and infeasibility of State Police and, therefore, need to maintain the status quo. I will respond to some of these questions, but not before I highlight some of the actions and inactions that got us where we are today and how traumatising it will be to remain there.
Insecurity and Inaction
Nigeria had had ethno-social and religious crises in the past, none of which ever reached chronic proportion. We had sporadic incidents, including the Igbo Massacre of 1966, the Maitatsine riots, Ife/Modakeke conflict, Aguleri-Umuleri-UmuobaAnam intra-ethnic conflict, and the Zangon-Kataf crisis. These incidents, sometimes repeated, were short-lived and never engulfed the entire country with mass killings and abductions before they were resolved through judicial and other established processes. There were also the Niger Delta agitators who were, justifiably, fed up with the unmitigated devastation of their environments by oil exploration – rendering them unfit for fishing, farming or even habitation – and neglect of the victim communities by the oil companies and, therefore, decided to draw attention to their demands by kidnapping expatriate oil workers and attacking oil infrastructure.
Their resort to the modus operandi arose from the lack of visible action, in spite of the agitations of the region’s leaders from the 1970s to the 1990s when some Ogonis eventually died for the cause of the Niger Delta environment, including Ken Saro-Wiwa and others executed by the Gen. Sani Abacha government. Most of the youths’ demands centred on remediation of the damage through proper cleanup; provision of training and jobs for people who could no longer fish or grow crops; and provision of social infrastructure and amenities to improve the health and quality of life of their people.
In fairness to them, they did not demand monetary ransoms, unlike now when hundreds of millions of naira in ransom are demanded by “professional” kidnappers. But, with the emergence of President Umaru YarÁdua and the implementation of his amnesty programme and other palliative measures, the violence in the Niger Delta abated.
As for the Boko Haram wildfire that has become entrenched in our country today, it was allegedly precipitated by the extra-judicial killing of Mohammed Yusuf, the leader of the religious movement whose ideology was opposition to western education. The killing, and the group’s consequent reprisal, in the absence of satisfactory redress of Yusuf’s death, started with suicide bomb attacks on locations of security agencies such as the police stations and military formations mainly in the Northeast. Their attacks subsequently extended to other public buildings, institutions, churches, mosques, etc.
Although the Boko Haram problem predated Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s presidency, having started in 2009, their attacks became more provocative under his government, especially when they bombed the Nigeria Police Headquarters, the United Nations Office and Nyanya Bus Terminal, all in Abuja.
Their activities and eventual kidnapping of Chibok schoolgirls was later seized upon by opposition parties to accuse the Dr. Jonathan government of cluelessness, during their campaign towards the 2015 elections. However, President Jonathan confounded all by taking a drastic action that completely turned the table against the Boko Haram menace. To rout the insurgents, he postponed the general elections by six weeks, during which he mobilised the armed forces, supported with mercenaries from South Africa and “a coalition of military forces from Chad, Cameroon and Niger” to “push Boko Haram out of all but three of the 20 districts the radical Islamists once held”. (Time, 2015).
In the onslaught, Boko Haram was defeated, not just “technically”, while virtually all the territories previously held by them were recaptured before the elections. The operation was so successful that the voter cards collected, and the votes eventually recorded in the peaceful election held in the Northeast, especially Borno State, won by Muhammadu Buhari, exceeded those of many southern states that were in relative peace.
The wholesale massacre and pillaging of farming communities, akin to Viking raids, being carried out by hundreds of bike-mounted herdsmen today, wasn’t there in President Jonathan’s time. Indeed, the peace that Jonathan restored in the country subsisted for a few years into Buhari’s presidency.
The herdsmen’s raids on Chief Olu Falae’s farm and farming communities in Benue, Plateau and Nassarawa states, started in Buhari’s administration. Even then, all the intercity roads that have become bandit enclaves today in both the northern and southern parts of the country were still relatively safe and traveller-friendly during the earlier years of Buhari’s government. However, the festering herdsmen raids on farms led to debates about prohibiting open grazing, which was implemented, eventually, by Governors Ayo Fayose and Samuel Ortom of Ekiti State and Benue State, respectively.
Banditry goes wilder
The banditry-on-steroids we have today acquired its rocket-boost during the COVID-19 lockdown. News started emerging of lorry loads of young men, with no identification or destination, being transported in cattle trucks from unidentified states and dropped in different parts of the country. Consequentially, there was outcry in many communities about the influx of strangers into neighbourhoods they were not previously known, and appeals to governors and security agencies to turn back lorries transporting such persons. During this period, a large number of odd-outfitted men on rugged-looking motorcycles rode into the Bwari area of Abuja, eliciting concerns and appeals to security agencies to turn them back. Considering that Abubakar K. Baraje, during his 70th birthday, “traced the origin of the current insecurity in the country to the influx of Fulani from neighbouring countries like Sierra Leone, Mali, Senegal, Niger and Chad brought into the country for election purposes in 2015” (Independent, 2021), one would wonder if it was these foreign Fulanis that were being dispersed throughout the country.
Whatsoever, after the lifting of the COVID-19 lockdown, forests and farmlands from the North to the South were found occupied by herdsmen, sometimes without “herds” but AK47s, and all hell broke loose: herdsmen attacking communities, killing and burning down their properties; bike-riding marauders kidnapping hundreds of persons and demanding ransoms in hundreds of millions of naira; kidnappers taking over interstate and intercity roads; herdsmen forcing farmers to pay them taxes before planting or harvesting their crops; etc.
As earlier reports and impassioned debates on the incidents attributed the activities to Fulani, Buhari’s government designated the perpetrators bandits and terrorists, which they are still known by today. However, many victims and citizens were riled by the incongruous appellation of armed herdsmen’s midnight invasion of farming communities and killing of unarmed farmers and their families, pillaging and burning down of their houses as “farmer-herder clashes”, especially by President Buhari who seemingly never showed genuine sympathy for the victims.
Mixed Messaging and Complacency
The devastating impact of insecurity on the economic and social lives of the people in communities most pummeled by the marauding bandits is only surpassed by the laissez-faire and hakuna matata attitude of the government in tackling insecurity. The initial mixed messaging of Buhari’s government caused a delay in taking more decisive actions against the herdsmen militia. In his interactions with other leaders in the USA and the UK, he attributed the herdsmen problem to Muammar Gadaffi of Libya, who allegedly trained and armed gunmen who, subsequent to his fall, escaped and came to be fighting alongside Boko Haram. But when he visited Benue State after the horrendous killing of scores of people, he told the mourning citizens, to their consternation and disillusionment, and in a manner lacking in sensitivity and empathy, to learn to live peacefully with their neighbours and that ”the relationship between farmers and herders will continue. God had put farmers, herdsmen and Nigerians together. It behooves us to keep encouraging ourselves to continue to live together peacefully.” (ThisDay, 2018).
The volte-face of initially perceiving the insurgents as Libyan emigres, and later as “neighbours”, seemed to underpin Buhari’s government’s lacklustre and perfunctory war on bandits, even though they were kidnapping, maiming and killing Nigerians in the thousands. Consequently, the country became host to a multi-billion-naira kidnapping industry and killing fields in Borno, Benue, Plateau, Kaduna, Zamfara, Katsina and many southern states.
It was believed that in President Buhari’s tepid war against insurgency, there was no urgency, no fervour, no encouragement for the security forces and, consequently, no ultimatums. The President’s only ultimatum-esque instruction for the military command and the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) to move to the frontlines of insurgency in Borno State and Benue State respectively, was obeyed fully by the military command, while the IGP spent a few hours in Benue before being seen in Nasarawa State later. Surprisingly, there was no sanction for this dereliction.
State Police – Matters Arising
State Police, Nothing New
In establishing a tiered police structure, incorporating Federal and State Police, Nigeria will be joining many countries, including England, Wales, Sweden and USA which, though not enmeshed in the existential threat Nigeria faces, operate regional or tiered policing structure. The USA, with a more complex policing structure, has 17,985 police agencies, including local police departments, county sheriff’s offices, state troopers, specialised police agencies, and federal law enforcement agencies (Wikipedia, 2026).
Though bearing differing nomenclature in different jurisdictions, all the local police formations have primary and, mostly independent, responsibility for law enforcement in their respective locations. There is delineation of the respective functions of the Federal and State/County police formations, whereby the Federal Police (FBI, for example) handles what are designated federal crimes.
Even when the police agencies at various levels have reasons to operate jointly, they all function harmoniously, with each agency knowing its jurisdictional limit and hierarchical relationship with the others. Therefore, if we have State Police in Nigeria, their personnel can work cooperatively with the federal police. The State Police will undoubtedly give the military and federal police room to breathe.
I will now respond to some concerns people have raised about State Police, strictly as a patriotic citizen with common sense, but without professional training in policing, as I believe that common sense would be helpful on this issue. I hope that we will all contribute our share of common sense to the discourse.
Can the States Fund State Police?
The fixation on this tired question whenever the issue of State Police surfaces is tedious. Evidently, many states of the Federation have been donating operational vehicles, building police stations and barracks, and providing funds and other logistic support to security agencies in their states for years, to encourage and bolster their operations. With the establishment of State Police, such equipment and funds can now be channeled towards equipping them.
Lest we forget, state governors have always received security votes, whose nebulous purpose is shrouded in mystery and many governors disburse, or misappropriate, according to their whims. The votes can now have a legitimate and identifiable purpose, and if insufficient, the governments can deploy inventive ways to boost the funding from their internally generated revenues, of which some states derive inflows that rival their statutory allocations from the Federation.
Additionally, states can levy “Security Tax”, or launch appeals for “State Police Fund”, and their citizens ensconced in Lagos and Abuja, afraid to travel to their villages, with their magnificent country homes unlawfully tenanted by rodents and reptiles, would generously donate to such funds. Even citizens in the Diaspora would rather contribute to these than pay princely ransoms when relatives are kidnapped. Besides, states vary in their resource endowment and intensity of bandit activities, and every state would, expectedly, recruit personnel according to its need and ability to train, kit, arm and remunerate, sufficiently, to motivate the force.
Won’t there be conflict between the Federal and State Police?
The government can establish a committee to study the tiered police structures in some countries and draw up policies and frameworks to ensure effective governance and control structures for the State Police, and jurisdictional relationship with the federal police. With this, potential areas of overlap and conflict can be addressed.
Besides, since we lack sufficient federal police personnel in the communities to repel attackers, even with advance warnings, I envisage that when State Police personnel are deployed evenly among the communities in each state, the federal police and other security personnel would form a backup or second layer of defence and reinforcement, when necessary. With rules of joint operations well defined and delineated, no conflict should arise.
Will our youths join? How will they be trained?
Nigeria has some of the most intelligent, resourceful, courageous, patriotic and resilient youths in the world. Apart from education and many professions where they lead the world wherever they go, many have risked their lives in the Libyan desert, across the Mediterranean Sea, and in the Russian-Ukraine war, and will readily join a State Police force with the prospects of excellent training, adequate equipment, and good compensation.
Regarding training, police and military training facilities abound in Nigeria and abroad, but only the best should be used. There are also military contractors with specialization in anti-insurgency training, but, with the peculiar circumstances necessitating the establishment of State Police, the training of the personnel should be military grade, or mobile-police grade, at worst. The comprehensive training should go beyond mere patrolling, weapons handling and checkpoint operation to include operations planning; intelligence; counter-intelligence; assembly, operation and maintenance of weapons and technology equipment such as drones and others; surveillance; infiltration; multi-terrain navigation; modelling and simulation; ambush and assault; etc.
Would We Fare Better with State Police?
Recently, news emerged of how the military in Taraba State undertook a combing of some bushes in the state to clear out bandit habitations. As most bandits are located in the farmlands and forests, where they live, plan their operations, and assemble their arsenal and operational vehicles for attacks, simultaneous mobilization of State Police personnel in contiguous states to flush out bandits from the bushes and forests of the states periodically, leaving no blind spot for them to migrate to, would enable farmers resume their farming business.
However, under the existing security arrangement, undue pressure has been mounted on our military forces for far too long, and the frequent loss of military personnel, including generals, through unwarranted exposure, is unhealthy. This problem arises from low numerical strength; lack of modern equipment, technology and intelligence support; and the personnel’s unfamiliarity with the terrains they are deployed to, resulting in their vulnerability to ambushes and inability to source intelligence from the locals.
It is even more painful and regrettable when dead personnel are sometimes not acknowledged and honoured appropriately as is done in other countries. Similarly, the federal police, much maligned and derided, despite their inadequate personnel, training and equipment to combat normal crimes, in addition to bandits, have also suffered massively.
State Police, whose personnel should be drawn from their localities, will lessen the burden on the military and the federal police and also leverage their knowledge of their communities and the cooperation of their relatives and friends, who would readily avail them intelligence reports on bandit movements. The federal police and the military will then form the bulwark and reinforcement supporting the State Police in serious operations.
Won’t State Police be Politicised?
Successive Federal governments have been accused of state capture, and politicization of the federal police – especially with the deployment of massive numbers of police and military personnel during elections – and weaponisation of other security agencies against their political enemies. Whether this is true or not, I do know that most Nigerians, whose business and social lives have been greatly hamstrung by security considerations for years now, would, given the chance, unhesitatingly back the establishment of State Police.
The security emergency we are embroiled in is more pertinent and compelling than the narrow political interest of the few politicians who have always had security personnel attached to them anyway. The probability of some governors victimizing opponents does not outweigh the plethora of benefits that State Police would engender for the majority of Nigerians. Besides, Governors who will harass enemies have multiple instruments at their disposal, State Police or not, but the law will always be there to protect all citizens, including politicians, from harassment.
Will States Endorse Constitutional Amendment to Enable State Police?
There is no Nigerian state that is completely insulated from the banditry that has acquired ubiquity in the last few years. Similarly, most Nigerians, both home and abroad, are victims of the all-pervading insecurity, directly or not, through assistance to victims. Even politicians feeling well protected by their security details are not impervious to the insidiousness of shame and guilt over their perceived complacency on the issue. Therefore, virtually all state assemblies will endorse the constitutional amendment to enable State Police, as doing otherwise would tantamount to working against the interest of their people.
Conclusion
President Tinubu has identified the silver bullet for the long-entrenched insurgency in Nigeria, and is deploying it. Nigerian citizens, whose patience has worn thin, will readily endorse and embrace State Police because, having been under-policed for so long, they understand the implication of the current predicament; the eradication of insurgency in the near future is not feasible under the present sub-per security arrangement. Therefore, no argument can obviate the necessity and urgency for State Police whose time has come.
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