State police will deepen Nigeria’s federalism, argues BASHIR ARE
Nigeria stands once again at a constitutional crossroads. Decades after independence, the country still governs itself through a federal structure that was never permitted to mature on its own terms. The debate this article addresses is not whether Nigeria should add more layers of government, but whether it will finally complete the unfinished project of true federalism, beginning with the devolution of policing, the area where the mismatch between constitutional responsibility and operational authority is most dangerous and most costly in human lives.
Nigeria does not need new constitutional bureaucracy. It needs a return to the fundamental principles of federalism upon which successful and diverse nations have built stable democracies: a federal government confined to genuinely national functions, States exercising real constitutional authority over the services that most directly affect their residents, and local governments guaranteed genuine autonomy at the grassroots.
Nigeria’s federalism problem is not a design flaw waiting to be discovered; it is an inheritance. The 1963 Republican Constitution governed a genuine federation of four regions—Northern, Eastern, Western, and Mid-Western—each with its own constitution, judiciary, civil service, and police, and with substantial constitutional control over its own natural and human resources. That federal architecture was not gradually eroded but deliberately dismantled by the military. General Aguiyi-Ironsi’s Unification Decree No. 34 of 1966 declared that Nigeria would cease to be a federation and become a unitary republic, abolishing the regions outright and merging the regional civil services into a single National Public Service.
