The Danger Is Not State Police, It Is The Center That Failed, By Oludare Ogunlana

The single greatest structural enabler of the human intelligence Nigeria lacks is policing rooted in the community that bears the cost of failure.

In an article published in The Punch online on June 14, 2026, Sonala Olumhense argues that state police will make Nigeria more insecure. The argument rests on a comfortable assumption: that the security architecture we have is a baseline worth defending. It is not. Nigeria runs one of the most centralized policing systems in the democratic world, and that system has presided over the kidnapping economy, the collapse of rural safety, and the ransom industry that drained more than two trillion naira from citizens in a single year. The honest question is not whether devolution carries risk. Every reform does. The question is whether one more decade of the status quo, dressed up as prudence, is the safer bet. It is not.

I do not arrive at this position in reaction to a single newspaper column. I have argued it on the record for years. In "Policing Nigeria in the Era of COVID-19" in 2020, I made the case for a service and leadership-oriented model of community policing over the colonial, legalistic one. In Premium Times on December 7, 2025, in "The Hidden War Within Nigeria's Military," I argued that security must be localized through properly structured state policing, forest guards, and community-based intelligence networks. In Sahara Reporters on December 22, 2025, in "Nigeria's Security Crisis Is A Governance Failure And The Solutions Are Within Reach," I stated plainly that centralized policing in a country of more than two hundred million has proven inadequate, that security must be local to be effective, and that state police is a call for realism, not fragmentation. When the House of Representatives passed the Sixth Alteration Bill on June 11, 2026, with two hundred and eighty-nine votes, it vindicated an argument I have been making in print across two republics' worth of governments. The reform is not a reckless leap. It is the overdue correction of a structural error.