By Daniel Nduka Okonkwo
The country’s uncharted constitutional territory, a landmark reform, now devolves policing powers to all 36 states for the first time in the country’s history.
The move promises a more localised approach to security in a nation long plagued by insurgency, banditry, and communal violence. Yet it also raises fears, well-founded fears, of unchecked executive power at the state level, where weak institutions, political patronage, and a culture of impunity could rapidly transform law enforcement into a tool of repression.
Between the hope of safer communities and the risk of authoritarian abuse lies a fault line that may well determine the trajectory of Nigeria’s democracy.
For decades, the Nigerian Police Force operated as a monolith: one command, one headquarters in Abuja, and one chain of authority radiating outward across a country of over 240 million people spread across 923,768 square kilometres of extraordinarily diverse terrain, ethnicity, and security conditions.
From the oil-rich creeks of the Niger Delta to the conflict-ridden farmlands of the Middle Belt, from the insurgency theatres of the North-East to the kidnapping corridors of the North-West, a single federally controlled force was expected to serve them all. For decades, that arrangement failed them all.
Now, in the most consequential policing reform in Nigeria’s post-independence history, the Federal Government has passed enabling legislation granting each of the 36 states the authority to establish its own State Police Service. The law represents a structural break from the centralised model that has defined Nigerian law enforcement since 1930. It is, by any measure, a seismic shift.
But a law on paper is not the same as security on the ground. And in a country where institutions have historically bent to the will of powerful individuals, the question that demands serious scrutiny is not merely whether state police can work. It is whether, in the hands of Nigeria’s political class, they will be weaponised before they can be tested.
Understanding what has changed requires first understanding what the law does, and does not, do. A widespread misconception following the passage of the federal enabling legislation is that Nigeria automatically became a country of 36 state police forces overnight. That is not accurate, and the misconception itself is revealing. It suggests that the public debate around this reform has moved faster than the institutional reality, a dangerous gap in any democracy.
The federal law does not create state police forces. It creates the legal framework within which each state may choose to establish one. For a State Police Service to come into existence, the House of Assembly of that state must independently pass its own enabling law. The state must then satisfy national benchmarks established by the National Police Council and receive formal certification before it may operationalise its force.
This distinction matters enormously, and it is where the first major loophole reveals itself. The law gives states the option to establish a police force. It does not compel them to do so. There is no deadline. There is no penalty for inaction. A governor who privately prefers to maintain his influence over a federally commanded police force has no legal obligation to disrupt that arrangement. He can simply do nothing, and his citizens will have no legal recourse.
The Federal Police Service is not abolished. It continues to operate nationwide, retaining primary jurisdiction over national security threats including terrorism, interstate organised crime, and border security. The architecture is one of concurrence, not replacement: two tiers of policing, operating in parallel, with defined but overlapping jurisdictions. The word “overlapping” should concern every Nigerian who has watched two government agencies dispute jurisdiction while a crime goes uninvestigated and a victim goes unserved.
Each State Police Service, where established, will be responsible for maintaining law and order within the state, preventing and detecting crime, protecting lives and property, gathering local intelligence, enforcing state laws, and promoting community-level policing. A State Police Service Commission, independent of executive control in theory, will handle recruitment, appointment, promotion, and discipline of officers. Operational leadership will vest in a State Commissioner of Police. In theory. That phrase carries more weight in Nigeria than in almost any other democracy on earth.
To understand why this reform happened, one must understand the full scale of the failure it is designed to correct. Nigeria’s centralised policing model has been criticised on structural grounds for generations, not merely by academics and civil society advocates, but by ordinary citizens who have watched their communities burn while federal police awaited instructions from Abuja.
Banditry in Zamfara. Mass kidnapping in Kaduna. Armed herdsman-farmer conflicts in Benue and Plateau. Urban gang violence in Lagos and Port Harcourt. Each of these crises carries its own geography, its own social drivers, its own networks of actors. Each demands local knowledge, community trust, and rapid response capacity that a command structure headquartered hundreds of kilometres away is architecturally incapable of providing.
The reform also addresses a long-standing and genuinely indefensible asymmetry. Governors were obligated to maintain security but denied command of the police. They could fund security infrastructure, provide operational vehicles, and issue directives, but they could not order an arrest, direct an investigation, or discipline an officer who abused a citizen in their state.
The establishment of Operation Amotekun in the South-West offered an early, imperfect preview of what regionally commanded security architecture could look like. When the Ondo State House of Assembly passed the Amotekun bill and Governor Rotimi Akeredolu inaugurated the State Security Network Agency in August 2020, it became the first state to formalise a parallel security structure. Oyo State followed in November of that year, when Governor Seyi Makinde signed the Oyo State Security Network Agency Bill into law. In Anambra State, the Agunechemba security architecture, backed by the Anambra State Homeland Security Law, enabled structured citizen participation and coordination across the state.
But here is what the champions of state police rarely say loudly enough: Amotekun and its sister outfits also demonstrated the risks. There were documented cases of harassment, extortion, and abuse committed by operatives of these structures operating with limited oversight and even less accountability. If the full state police model inherits those tendencies and scales them, Nigeria will not have solved its security problem. It will have multiplied it by 36.
The dual-tier structure creates jurisdictional tensions that the legislation addresses inadequately. Consider a practical scenario: a kidnapping gang operating across three states, based in one, conducting operations in another, and laundering ransoms through a third. Which force has primary jurisdiction? Who coordinates the response? The law provides general principles. It does not provide operational protocols. That gap is not an oversight. It is a vacancy that turf disputes, bureaucratic inertia, and political calculation will fill, to the detriment of victims. There is no automatic, legally mandated coordinator for multi-state syndicates. In practice, coordination defaults to whoever initiates the most robust intelligence-gathering operation.
The National Police Council is presented as a quality-control mechanism. But it is itself a political body. Its decisions will reflect political negotiations, not merely professional standards. A governor with strong federal alliances may find benchmarks applied generously to his state. A governor in political opposition to the federal executive may find the same benchmarks used as instruments of obstruction.
Federal intervention is permitted when there is a complete breakdown of law and order in a state. Who determines when a complete breakdown has occurred? The federal executive. This means a President whose party controls the federal government can, in theory, use this provision to justify intervention in an opposition-governed state, displacing the state police command under the cover of emergency. The provision’s authors presumably intended it as a safeguard. In the wrong hands, it is a loaded instrument of federal overreach.
The most foundational structural risk of this reform is financial, and the political class has addressed it with a level of vagueness that should alarm every Nigerian. State police are expensive. Officers must be recruited, trained, equipped, housed, and paid consistently. Vehicles, communications infrastructure, forensic capacity, and command facilities must be procured and maintained. None of this is achievable on political goodwill alone.
The gap between the fiscal capacity of Lagos State and states like Zamfara or Kebbi is not merely wide. It is civilisational. A policing model designed as though these states inhabit the same fiscal reality is a model designed to fail the poorest Nigerians most completely. Federal grants have been proposed to support fiscally constrained states. But the quantum of those grants, the conditions attached to them, the mechanism for disbursement, and the consequences for non-compliance remain entirely undefined in the legislation. This is not a minor technical detail. It is a structural gap at the heart of the reform.
When officers cannot survive on their wages, they do not simply resign. They survive through extortion. They sell their firearms. They accept bribes from the same criminal networks they are employed to dismantle. Nigeria has watched this degradation unfold at the federal level for six decades. There is no structural reason to believe it will not repeat itself at the state level unless funding adequacy is addressed with legal precision and enforced with genuine accountability.
The weaponisation of state police for political purposes is not a theoretical risk to be weighed against potential benefits. Given the documented behavioural patterns of Nigerian political executives, it is the single most predictable outcome of this reform if robust countermeasures are not implemented and ruthlessly enforced.
Governors already exercise substantial informal influence over federal police commissioners posted to their states. They provide vehicles. They fund logistics. They host commissioners at government functions. In return, they expect accommodation, and frequently receive it. The formalisation of state police command under gubernatorial authority does not introduce a new temptation. It legitimises and entrenches an existing one.
State police will be deployed against opposition politicians in the run-up to gubernatorial elections. They will be used to disrupt rallies, intimidate agents, and manufacture pretexts for the arrest of candidates and supporters. Labour union leaders who organise against state government policies will find themselves under surveillance. Journalists investigating state government corruption will discover that officers who previously harassed them under informal gubernatorial instruction now do so under the formal authority of a state police command.
Particular and urgent concern attaches to minority communities. In states with complex ethnic compositions, a governor who commands a police force recruited primarily from his own ethnic base does not merely hold a political advantage. He holds a communal weapon. The systematic discrimination and intimidation of minority communities using state police authority is not a distant possibility. It is a foreseeable outcome in multiple states.
The legislation is also silent on technology and data governance. Modern policing increasingly depends on surveillance technology, biometric databases, and communications interception capabilities. The legislation contains no framework governing how state police may acquire or deploy such capabilities, and no constraints on their use for political surveillance. This is not a minor technical omission. It is an open invitation for the construction of a state-level surveillance apparatus directed at political opponents.
Nigeria has arrived at historic institutional junctures before. The return to democracy in 1999 was a historic moment. The Freedom of Information Act in 2011 was a historic moment. What distinguished those moments from durable transformation was the answer to a single question: did the political class that created the institution subsequently respect its independence, or did it hollow the institution out from within?
The centralised model did not work. That verdict is beyond serious dispute. Whether the decentralised model will work is genuinely unknown. But the conditions under which it could work, transparent jurisdiction, adequate and guaranteed funding, structural insulation from political interference, robust and independent oversight, mandatory community accountability mechanisms, and enforceable penalties for abuse, are not embedded in the current legislation with the precision and force that the scale of the risk demands.
This reform is not a solution. It is an opportunity presented to a political class with a demonstrated capacity to waste opportunities. Whether it becomes one of Nigeria’s greatest institutional achievements or merely the most elaborate expansion of gubernatorial power in the country’s post-independence history will depend on choices that have not yet been made, by leaders who have not yet been tested, in institutions that do not yet exist.
The law has been written. The harder work, ensuring it means something beyond the enrichment of political power, begins now. And Nigerians, with eyes open to both the promise and the peril, must demand nothing less.
Daniel Nduka Okonkwo is an investigative journalist, human rights advocate, and policy analyst based in Abuja, Nigeria. He is the publisher of Profiles International Human Rights Advocate, a platform focused on accountability journalism, governance reporting, and the documentation of human rights issues across Africa. His work examines the intersection of political power, institutional accountability, systemic failure, and the human impact of corruption, with particular focus on Nigeria and the wider African continent.
Okonkwo’s reporting and analysis have been published in Sahara Reporters, African Defence Forum, Daily Trust, Vanguard, Daily Intel, Opinion Nigeria, African Angle, Local Newsbreak, and other international media outlets. His work is driven by a commitment to transparency, democratic governance, and justice. He also collaborates with Daniels Entertainment on human rights initiatives, extending his advocacy beyond traditional journalism into broader public engagement.
He is based in Abuja, Nigeria, and can be reached at dan.okonkwo.73@gmail.com.
