President Bola Tinubu was Wednesday charged to urgently sponsor an executive bill at the National Assembly to enable the commencement of state police in Nigeria.
A former Chairman of the All Progressives Congress in Enugu State, Dr Ben Nwoye, made the call in Enugu while reacting to the recurring killings across the federation, including the ones that occurred in Benue State and Eha-Amufu in Isi-Uzo Local Government Area of Enugu State.
Dr Nwoye said any approach towards tackling the nation’s rising insecurity would amount to rhetoric “unless there is devolution of security operations to states through a constitutional amendment.”
He said, “How our security functions are embedded in our constitution. It doesn’t give the state the authorities to venture into the business of policing. Saying that governors are the chief security officers of their states is a lip-service because they have no control over security whatsoever.”
He blamed the reluctance to decentralise the country’s security architecture on some institutions that benefit from the lapses. According to him, “When you talk about decentralising security, those institutions that have enjoyed those powers for many years, especially the civil servants, directors, and permanent secretaries will begin to feel threatened that devolution will take something away from them.”
He regretted that Nigeria copied the federal system of government from the United States of America, but “deliberately removed the ingredients of the system in its operations”. He said in the US, “there are city police, county police and village police where sheriffs coordinate the security architecture”. He said vigilantes and local watch groups were not empowered to function optimally across the federation.
According to him, Nigeria is yet to get its system of federalism right: “The people who adopted a federal system for Nigeria didn’t study these things very well. A country of over two hundred million people, and we don’t even know our security strength! Nobody can tell you the actual number of policemen in Nigeria.”
Nwoye further stated that the recurring insecurity in Isi-Uzo LGA of Enugu State was becoming hopeless because of under-policing and the LGA’s huge landmass. He said Gov Peter Mbah had done well in procuring the state-of-the-art security gadgets, but added that the governor “is still not the commander of the operations of the police in the state.”
In his words, “The governor is doing what he can within his small powers. The Rapid Response Units that he adopted in Enugu State are on the roads. The governor is not their commander. What the governor has done is to fund them, give them the enabling environment, but he is not the person giving them orders. The deployment has been on some checkpoints and along the roads where they call flash points. We don’t have deployment in villages.
“Also, artificial intelligence-assisted cameras have limitations. They have a monitoring system. If crimes are committed in Isi-Uzo, do we have any cameras there? We are not talking about arresting the perpetrators and bringing them to the book. We are talking about crime prevention. We should move away from after-the-crime type of policing.”
He also blamed bad governance for the increasing insecurity in Nigeria. He opined that unemployment makes Nigerian youth vulnerable to crimes. Referring to North East and North West, Nwoye stated that, “There is a huge level of unemployment. Ordinary people will recruit their own men and run down any street. The police are doing their work, but they are under-manned, under-paid and under-employed. When you put all these things together, you have a constant and consistent breakdown of law and order. The killing in Benue continues not because security operatives are not taking steps, but because the number is not enough.”
He warned that without empowerment of state police through constitutional amendments in Nigeria, “state governors will keep equipping the police that they cannot give orders and monitor; they have no means of holding them accountable” because the orders are issued from Abuja.
He said state police would curtail Nigeria’s insecurity because locals would be in charge unlike the current system where “policemen are posted to areas that they lack the language and the knowledge about the terrain.”