Nigeria stands at a constitutional turning point. With the Senate having passed the State Police Bill, the long debate over the decentralisation of policing is at last, close to law. This article by Dr Eyimofe Atake, SAN, examines the history of policing in the Nigerian federation, the law as it stands and the amendments required, the arguments for and against State Police, the necessity of the reform, the command relationship between the Federal and State Police,, whether the new structure is true to the Federal principle, the vexed question of the President’s power to assume control of a State Police in a crisis, and the lessons of genuine federations abroad. It concludes that State Police is not merely desirable, but necessary
Historical Background
To understand the present controversy, one must begin with the fact that a single, centralised Police Force is not the natural or original condition of Nigeria. It is a comparatively recent inheritance, and it is in large part, the product of military rule. The national Force itself is a colonial construction, its lineage running from the consular guard of thirty men raised in Lagos in 1861, through the armed Hausa Constabulary of 1879, to the amalgamation of the separate Northern and Southern colonial forces into a single Nigeria Police Force (NPF) on 1 April 1930. Even then, policing remained substantially plural. Alongside that national Force, the regions and the local authorities maintained their own constabularies, established from 1916 onwards under the control of the traditional rulers, the Native Authority Police in the Northern Region and the Local Government Police in the West among them. Internal security was, to a significant degree, a regional and local affair.
