On State Police

From my first blog post till date, I have consistently advocated a 7-state, 84-district (and 4-mini-territories) structure for Nigeria.

Philosophically, ideologically I also support the concept, idea and principle of State Police, provided there is a (separate) Federal police to handle special (i.e. extreme) crimes as well as to take the lead on investigations that cross state boundaries (of which there will be many, as Nigeria, nearly 100 years after colonial amalgamation, is far more integrated than extremists and secessionists acknowledge). The federal republic I dream of will have 7 states, 84 districts (and 4 mini-territories) .... and nine police forces, one in each of seven states, one shared by the four territories, and one central federal force to handle those major investigations that should be handled federally (where we can share resources, and do not have to worry about jurisdictional boundaries).

Having said that, and as much as I support federalism in our police structure as a theoretical concept, if anyone tried to do introduce state police in Nigeria as it is today in 2009, I would fiercely oppose that person or group.

Does that sound contradictory?

It really isn't.

Yam does not become maize just because you cut it into. The issues and problems we must overcome are systemic and pervasive. Nothing is untouched by this rot. We have to secure and enforce constitutional protections, enshrine separation of powers, or create and safeguard the independence of institutions like the police, the public broadcasters, the Independent National Electoral Commission, or anything else.

"State Police" today would replicate all of the problems of the Nigerian Police Force, while adding new problems to the list.

State-level politicians are good at directing public anger away from themselves and onto resident non-indigenes; this has been a characteristic of our politics since 1950. Non-indigenes in each state suffer discrimination already, and are not really safe in spite of living ostensibly under the protection of a federal police force that is required to have a minimum percentage of non-indigenes in each of its state commands.

State governors are like absolute monarchs, more dictatorial within their domains than any Nigerian president can be over the federal republic. It was that way with the Regions in the 1950s and 1960s, but is even more so now that states have been atomized. Handing them a force of tens of thousands of armed men to command is asking for trouble.

Even worse than that is the risk that such state forces fall under the control of one or more of the shadowy "godfathers". Men like Chris Uba and the late Lamidi Adedibu have already exercised unconstitutional control of the state commands of what is supposed to be an Abuja-run police force. While our current federal force imperfectly helps to rig elections, the replacement state forces will be better able to recreate the efficient bully-boy tactics of First Republic politics.

In the last ten years, since the restoration of civilian-led government, quite a few state governors have established what are basically state-run pseudo-police. Some of the state forces are new bureaucracies created to collect taxes, enforce state government decrees dressed, or control traffic. Others began life as militia (OPC, Bakassi Boys, Niger-Delta "militants", etc.) before a state governor opened up the treasury and took them under his wing. Some are political party thugs of the governor's party, given uniforms, a state-funded salary, and a name like "Mission Against Indolence" and then sent out to harass the indolent. A few have been given the role of enforcing sociocultural norms on indigenes and non-indigenes alike.

These state-run pseudo-police are not all the same, but have so far mostly been a bad advert for State Police. Even the better ones operate in an unconstitutional grey zone that allows the State pseudo-police the maximum amount of action against the citizenry, while giving the citizenry the minimum amount of democratic control over the State pseudo-police.

And then there is the threat of civil war.

Liberia was "bad" during its century-and-a-half of "stability" as a republic set up by African-American returnees to Africa. And the ex-Zaire was also "bad" during its decades of "stability" under Mobutu. Both these countries became unbelievably WORSE when civil war shattered the "stability" of prior years.

The blunt fact is in Nigeria, politicians gain relevance by using divide-and-rule to create barganing chips, by violently fighting each other locally to determine who controls each chip, and by promising to "deliver" the support of the bargaining chip to the federal government of the day (civilian-led or soldier-led) in exchange for political and economic benefits. Our political and social discourse consists of powerful men stirring up fear and distrust of people from other communities, regions, religions and ethnicities. We use each other as scapegoats, telling our indigenes that non-indigenes are taking their jobs, their university places, their land, their future, and then sacking non-indigenes from state civil service jobs and looking the other way when mobs of angry, hungry youths violently extract the property of the non-indigenes.

Indeed, state governors have been suspected or implicated in communal violence in places like Jos. Politicians and retired officers have been implicated in violence elsewhere. And even those not directly implicated (at the federal and state levels alike) are guilty of being interested in communal violence only when it is their own ethno-regional and religious communities bearing the brunt of it.

And into this mix, we are supposed to introduce civil armies of tens of thousands to be commanded by these same local political bosses?

I am sorry, but I do not trust these men to govern our states WITHOUT personal armies, so why the heck would I trust them to govern our states WITH personal armies. As insecure as we are now, at least it is not as bad as it would be if we allow them to start a full-fledged civil war again.

The solution to our insecurity lies in reforming, restructuring, and transforming our shared land. Then, and only then we can amicably set about the process of creating nine police forces, one for each of seven states, one for the four federal mini-territories, and one to tackle major investigations that should be handled at the federal level.