State Police: Reform must phase out top-heavy colonial legacy

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Nigeria is facing daunting security problems. The Inspector General of Police Mohammed Abubakar acknowledged this fact in a recent address to top-ranking officers in Abuja. They include: deadly bomb blasts, extra-judicial killings, kidnapping, armed robbery, oil bunkering, vandalisation of oil pipelines and electric power installations, assassinations, piracy and incessant killing of policemen and other security agents. Abubakar’s prescription: It is the collective responsibility of the officers and men of Nigeria Police Force (NPF) to restore its integrity and image with proactive measures such as combat readiness and effective security strategies while community policing should always be the watchword. He added the blunt truth: “…we can only succeed in keeping our community safe by working with, for and through the community.”

In other words, community policing, which establishes good rapport with residents of a community for accurate, reliable and timely information exchange, helps best in preventing and combating crime. Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) last week agreed with the IGP and raised the bar to complete the missing link in the country’s security system. Since the Federal Government appears incapable of handling the security problems facing the states, NGF said, it must amend the Constitution to enable each of the 36 states and FCT to establish its own state police force.

In its latest communique signed by the Chairman and Rivers State Governor Chibuike Amaechi, the governors condemned strongly the current spate of bombings which are making the country drift towards anarchy. According to him, the state police structure is the answer to the security problems which the security agencies are proving powerless to solve.

This year, the Federal Government planned to spend N308.5 billion on the 12 Zonal Commands and Formations of NPF. The force has about 380,000 officers and men or N810,000 per capita. Each state government adds extra from its security vote to supplement it according to what it can afford to make the state safe.

At the prestigious top brass levels of the force, the experienced officers have earned their merit in detecting, arresting and prosecuting perpetrators of mega-million naira serious crimes. But despite the endemically high corruption in the country, such crimes are few compared to the multitudes who commit low end crimes with tort values between N1,000 and N100,000. Incidentally, these crimes are easily preventable by the mere presence of a respectable police officer in a community. Hence the need to recruit as many constables as affordable to live in communities. Informants lack the clout.

But the consequences of paying constables their current N18,000 monthly salary, which hardly lasts them one week, are obvious: illegal toll collections, brazen and subtle demands for bribe, among others. Similarly, the token funds allocated to the 5,515 stations, 1,115 divisions and 5,000 police posts leave them with no money to buy stationery to write statements. No doubt, the cheap bribe demands make the police force look like the corrupt face of the country with the ubiquitous malaise.

Police experts, Non-governmental organizations, among others are unanimous that community-based policing reform has many advantages. First, the policeman living in a community knows who are the respectable, law-abiding citizens and the dubious characters. Who earns legitimate income from genuine business or 419? Who are potential kidnappers, armed robbers, cocaine smugglers, bunkerers and PHCN vandals?

Secondly, no need for transfers to states where a policeman neither speaks the language nor understands the culture. Arrangements for accommodation can be made expeditiously and, best of all, barracks will become irrelevant. Consequently, policing will become efficient, effective and just, such that the current psychological distance between the police and the citizenry will be closed for accurate and reliable information flow between them to prevent or combat crime.

Needless to say, the highest ranking officer in any state will be the Commissioner of Police (CP). To minimise cost, he will be assisted by only one deputy to coordinate all the Divisional Police Officers (DPOs) in the state. Moreover, the approximately 120,000 policemen attached to political VIPs, business executives and other elites, carrying briefcases and opening car doors must be recalled and assigned to protecting the general public, including VIPs.

Finally, funds spent on building structures and servicing the Zonal and Federal headquarters will be saved to reward the officers and men doing the legwork in the communities. Indeed, their higher salaries would make the policemen have the temerity to arrest anyone who tries to bribe them – and not jump at bribes.

A Congress for Progressive Change top shot has recommended that the current Federal police must remain along with the state police. We disagree because it will be redundant, with jurisdictional conflicts erupting often. Rather, the State Security Service (SSS) must take over the investigation of crime suspects who escape across state borders, as a Federal criminal. But the SSS agents must be better trained to acquire the competence and investigative capacity. Ideally, all the CPs must have a secure crime communication network to exchange information. But Nigeria lacks both the technology and industrial capacity to maintain such a network. Simultaneously, we expect to see an all-graduates police force a decade from now.  Former IGP Tafa Balogun introduced the laudable community policing idea at the tail end of his tenure in Louis Edet House. It fizzled out with his exit from office because of lack of strategic planning and a feasible blueprint for his successor. Now that IGP Abubakar has dusted up the reform, we urge him to go the whole hog to see it through.

The Governors Forum is the moral suasion political group for good governance. It says state police at the apex of community policing is the idea whose time has come. Ironically, the Federal Government believes the state governors are too powerful demigods in their fiefs. As such, state police will add crude power, which they will abuse to intimidate, harass and molest political opponents. Critics readily point at the elections conducted by State Independent Electoral Commissions under the thumb of governors nationwide which never produce results to unseat any ruling party in any state as harbingers of state police control.

We disagree with this assertion as justification for opposition to the state police formation. The governors already wield all the power in the states as chief security officers. The CPs already take orders from them routinely. The latter disobey, rarely, only when the ruling party at the Federal level gets into conflict with an overzealous state government. So, forming the state police would only detract from the Federal Government’s power to control the otherwise autonomous states. It would add nothing extra to the powers of the governor.

Still, the same constitutional guarantees which protect the rights of the citizens from abuse by the Federal police will be extant when the central power devolves to the periphery.


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