STATE POLICE: REPEATING THE STATE INDEPENDENT ELECTORAL COMMISSION AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT AUTONOMY FRAUD IN UNIFORM

By Alex Ter Adum, PhD

Nigeria’s political class has an extraordinary talent for refusing to learn from its own failures. Every structural disaster is treated not as a warning but as a blueprint for the next disaster. The latest example is the accelerated push for state police.

Its proponents present it as a bold federalist reform. In reality, it risks becoming another institutional weapon handed to governors who have consistently demonstrated contempt for accountability, democratic norms, and constitutional restraints.

Before coming to terms with state police, Nigerians should examine the performance of the institutions already entrusted to the states in the name of federalism.

Take the State Independent Electoral Commissions (SIECs), one of the flagship pillars of Nigeria’s federal structure. In theory, they were created to deepen grassroots democracy and strengthen federalism. In practice, they have become industrial-scale machinery for the desecration of the electoral process whole sale.

Across Nigeria, opposition parties scarcely win local government elections conducted by SIECs. Election results are often so absurd that ruling parties routinely secure 100 percent of chairmanship seats and virtually every councillorship position. The outcomes are frequently predetermined long before voters arrive at polling units.

The rare exceptions merely prove the rule. Such as the recent examples in states like Abia and Adamawa, where the governors have maintained dual political identities or strategic subterfuge across party lines by wearing different party uniforms at day time and another at night. So the opposition victories in these states in the recently conducted Local government elections emerged not because the process was independent but because special strategic political arrangements permitted them.

If states have failed so spectacularly to administer elections fairly, why should Nigerians trust them with armed police formations on the eve of a general election possessing powers of arrest, detention, intelligence gathering, and coercion?

Advocates of state police often invoke Local government autonomy as evidence that power should be devolved further. Yet Local government autonomy itself exposes the dangers of concentrating excessive power in governors’ hands.

Nearly two years after the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment on local government autonomy, what exists on the ground is not autonomy but an even more sophisticated architecture of control. State governors continue to dominate local councils through ministries of local government, state assemblies, patronage networks, and most importantly, through SIECs that manufacture compliant chairmen and councillors.

The result is that Local governments remain populated by political stooges selected by governors and merely ratified through sham elections. Federal allocations continue to be manipulated, priorities dictated from state capitals, and local councils reduced to administrative outposts of governors’ offices.

Those who imagine state that the rushed implementation of police would somehow escape this pattern are ignoring overwhelming evidence and the valuable lessons of history.

Nigeria’s political environment is characterised by extreme partisanship, entrenched nepotism, godfatherism, and the routine deployment of political thugs during elections. This is further compounded by a compromised judiciary, a weak human rights enforcement environment and poor institutional safeguards for civil rights protection and accountability. Within such an environment, state police would not emerge as neutral law enforcement institutions. They would almost certainly become special-purpose vehicles for partisan enforcement.

An opposition rally could be declared a security threat. This is already evident in States like Benue. Edo, Lagos, Katsina, Kebbi, Kaduna, etc.

Political opponents could be subjected to selective arrests.

Election-day intimidation could acquire legal cover.

Whistle-blowers and activists could face harassment under the guise of maintaining public order.

The danger is not hypothetical. It is entirely consistent with how political power is already exercised at the state level.

Even more troubling is the manner in which this constitutional amendment is being pursued. Rather than subjecting such a far-reaching proposal to rigorous legislative scrutiny, extensive public hearings, consultations with security experts, civil society organisations, traditional institutions, and political stakeholders, the Senate appears determined to rush through constitutional amendments at remarkable speed as it passed the bill at its first sitting yesterday.

Ironically, the same National Assembly that spent months debating critical reform agenda bills without progress but suddenly discovered urgency when confronted with a proposal that significantly expands executive power.

But I dare warn that, constitutional engineering conducted in haste usually serves narrow political interests rather than national interests.

Nigeria’s insecurity is real. But insecurity is not caused by federal command structures alone. It is driven by under-policing, poor intelligence coordination, weak prosecution, porous borders, poverty, unemployment, and inadequate welfare for security personnel.

The first step answer does not lay in swiftly hitting the gavel for an ill imagined state police as a one off solution to the problem, but in recruiting more officers, improved welfare, strengthened intelligence networks, modernise equipment, and ensuring that local citizens are adequately represented within federal security institutions. In essence, a rejig of the extant policing architecture with a more liberalised enlistment, operational control, deployment, equipment and fire power assets.

Creating thirty-six potentially partisan police commands under governors who already struggle to conduct credible local elections is not reform.

It is merely the local government autonomy fiasco wearing a police uniform.

Until Nigeria demonstrates that state governments can independently administer elections, respect judicial decisions, tolerate opposition, and manage local governments without converting them into personal estates, handing governors armed police forces would not strengthen democracy or security.

It would simply multiply existing abuses by thirty-six. And where such states are unable to adequately cater for the welfare of men and officers of the state police corps as it is most likely to happen in some states, it would only liberalise or democratise banditry across the federation and expose even deeper, the fault lines of a federation in complete turmoil.

Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of structures.

It suffers from a shortage of restraint, accountability, and constitutional discipline.

State police, under present conditions, would not solve that problem.

It would institutionalise it.

Alex Ter Adum, PhD

alexadum45@gmail.com