Immediately the executive arm bill for the establishment of state police sailed through the National Assembly, some Nigerians, including longtime supporters of decentralized policing, started bellyaching. Everyone from news anchors to activists, not to mention opposition politicians, suddenly started trembling at the lips and appeared to be suffering from something akin to buyer’s remorse in their attempts to be politically correct. They spoke and are speaking from both sides of their mouths as the reality of decentralized policing dawns on them. They are demanding nationwide consultation as if that’s not what will happen when the bill gets to the states. They are looking for a way, an excuse, to say they warned should something go wrong when the plan takes off.
Nothing will go wrong once the scheme is carefully implemented. What is playing out is a case of analysis paralysis. Those nagging are overexamining the issue to the point of inaction. The debate for state police, as with the structural adjustment of Nigeria as a whole, has been on for decades. Should Nigerians decide to pursue it now, we can to some degree do it without fatally hurting the polity based on what we already know from the many years of debates and consultations on it. There is nothing ominous about it. It is simply placing policing on the concurrent list, like this administration already did with electricity generation. Many of those mouthing consultation are merely stalling. The same way they did when they claimed restructuring meant different things to different people the moment it came to acting on it. That was what they did in their attempt to block the tax reforms. Consultation can be done on the go, and the likes of Dr. Olisa Agbakoba and Dr. Charles Omole are doing their bit.
The bill to establish state police does not make it mandatory on states. It is simply proposed legislation to enable states interested in establishing one to do so without violating the constitution. Not all states will do so now or, perhaps, in the near future. But we are in a country where everything is reduced to a zero-sum game, a place where one man’s progress is immediately seen as a hindrance to another’s. Otherwise, why should, say, a Babagana Zulum, who periodically sets free people his government calls repentant terrorists, be bothered by or oppose the idea that some states, governors or regions want state police? For anyone to be worked up by such a development while they do not support it is to play the part of a dog in the manger.
It was in this spirit that the Muhammadu Buhari regime in 1984 stopped the establishment of a metro line system in Lagos even when Lagos was not looking to the federal government for funds. But presumably because Lagos would be doing what other states, especially states in the north, could not or were not interested in doing, a metro line project that had been on the drawing board before the military, with their one-way garrison mentality, intruded into power in 1983 had to be stopped. There have been times in the past when some Nigerians have argued that no part or state, no matter how progressive, should be allowed to outpace the others in development. Policies that are not considered beneficial or of importance to others are simply killed out of a perverse exercise of power.
The Donald Trump administration, working with the Nigerian military, only two days ago told the world it made its largest haul of electronic intelligence since the 9/11 attack from terrorists in Nigeria. That does not worry the old order of the northern political and religious elite opposed to state police. The America–Nigeria operation also eliminated 199 terrorists in one raid. One would think that is some progress being made. Despite this, all the likes of Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed of the PRP and so-called northern (Fulani?) intellectuals could do was come together and heap the blame for insecurity on one individual who happens to be the president because of what they call his lack of competence or capacity to rule. They play ostrich by choosing to be blind to the elephant in the room in the form of northern elite duplicity, incompetence and the wanton corruption that has immiserated the northern poor, denied them the right type of education and effectively shut them out of civilization.
The result of this criminal failure is the mass kidnappings, banditry and terrorism we witness daily. These are social maladies that have not only left most parts of the north prostrate, they are now also being exported to other communities in the south-west, the north-central and the south-east. These developments, I repeat, do not exercise northern spokespersons like Baba-Ahmed, who thinks the present administration’s record on security is worse than the orchestrated catastrophe that existed under the Muhammadu Buhari administration. What gets their goat is their loss of power, which they disguise as a demand for accountability. Baba-Ahmed says on Channels that the Tinubu administration wants state police at this time just to steal the next election. Otherwise, the administration ought to have moved for it three years ago because the debate for state police predated the administration.
In one breath Mr. Baba-Ahmed, in his last outing on Politics Today, excoriates Tinubu for being too hasty with the energy and economic reforms that have benchmarked the administration’s actions. In another breath, he criticizes him for not initiating the move for state police three years ago. Head or tail, Tinubu just cannot win with people like Mr. Baba-Ahmed. Yet he must know, as a former member of the APC, that state police had been on the APC agenda as far back as 2018 when the Nasir El-Rufai Committee on state police was inaugurated. What the disaffected section of the northern elite hate is the continued stay of Bola Tinubu in power. They are not opposed to a southern president per se. It’s Bola Tinubu whom they don’t like because he understands their game best.
It is why Hakeem Baba-Ahmed goes from one media station to another campaigning against Bola Tinubu and demanding his ouster from power. It is also why Prof. Usman Yusuf would, with baseless arrogance, threaten retribution against Tinubu and, without any sense of irony, accused the government of corruption while he speaks condescendingly about ‘the north’ punishing the president and the APC in 2027. He speaks as if he has more than a vote or even as an oracle appointed to speak on behalf of all northerners irrespective of their political, ethnic and religious affiliation. All of this bluster comes from a man who was himself booted out of office on allegations of corruption by President Muhammadu Buhari.