The President’s Police, By Lasisi Olagunju

(Monday Lines 2 published in the Nigerian Tribune on Monday, 29 June, 2026).

“The Federal Police Service shall temporarily intervene in the internal security affairs of a state and shall, to the extent necessary, assume specified operational responsibility, including temporary operational command of a State Police Service or any part thereof…” (Section 214(10).

“(12) An intervention… shall be authorised in writing by the President…”

Read those provisions of the passed state police bill again. Read slowly.

For decades, Nigerians have demanded state police. Governors complained that they were constitutionally designated as Chief Security Officers of their states without possessing effective authority over the police. Security experts argued that Abuja could neither understand nor effectively police the forests of Zamfara, the creeks of Bayelsa nor the farms of Oyo from a distant command headquarters. Victims of banditry, insurgency and kidnapping concluded that a centralised police force had become too overstretched to protect a country as vast and diverse as Nigeria.

Last week, the Senate answered that demand. It passed the president’s Constitution Alteration Bill establishing state police. The proposal now proceeds to the state Houses of Assembly where approval by at least twenty-four states will determine whether it becomes part of the Constitution.

That ought to have settled a decades-old constitutional controversy.

It has not.

Buried inside the bill is perhaps its most consequential provision. While creating state police, it simultaneously empowers the President, under specified circumstances, to assume operational command of a State Police Service.

I believe that changes everything.

Casually reading the bill, the grounds of a takeover appear reasonable enough: Federal intervention may occur where there is an actual or imminent breakdown of public order; where a governor requests assistance; where a state police service has become administratively or operationally incapable of functioning; where it is being deployed for systematic human rights abuses, electoral intimidation or ethnic persecution; or where national security itself is threatened. The intervention must be temporary. It must be authorised in writing by the President. The reasons must be stated. The National Assembly, the governor, the state House of Assembly and the National Police Council must all be notified. Judicial review remains available.

Those safeguards deserve acknowledgment and I acknowledge them. They were clearly designed to prevent governors from converting state police into private armies. But constitutions are not judged only by the safeguards they contain. They are judged by the powers they create.

The following constitutional question, therefore, is unavoidable: Are we escaping the possible abuse of state police by governors only to constitutionalise an even greater possibility of abuse by the President? What stops a rampaging President from using that provision to annul all the gains of this state police achievement? How federal is that provision?

We copied our presidential system from the United States but not its federal logic. The contrast is nowhere clearer than in policing. Both countries began with decentralised policing. America had its sheriffs, constables and municipal police; Nigeria had palace guards, hunters’ guilds, age grades, the Dogarai and later Native Authority police. Both countries also experienced partisan abuse of local police. America responded by professionalising local policing while retaining its decentralised structure. Nigeria abolished regional and Native Authority police after the 1966 military coup, replacing them with a single national force. Ironically, Nigeria’s First Republic was in this respect more faithful to federalism than the federation that followed. The current push for state police is therefore less a constitutional innovation than an attempt to restore an earlier federal arrangement. The challenge is not decentralisation itself but ensuring that neither governors nor the President can abuse it.

So, as we make the new law to rebirth state police, I ask again: Are we trading the risk of abuse by governors for the greater danger of presidential abuse?

That question becomes even more intriguing when one compares the present proposal with its immediate predecessor.
In 2022, the Nigeria Governors’ Forum produced its own draft constitutional amendment on state police. I have a copy. It contained no presidential takeover power. In the 2022 proposal, Federal Police could intervene in states only in carefully defined emergencies. These were: where law and order had completely broken down; where the governor requested assistance; or where the State Police had become incapable of functioning. Even then, presidential authorisation required the approval of the National Police Council—a body on which every state governor sits.

Read the passed bill again. It empowers the president to authorise the takeover of the police of a state. The 2022 proposal contemplated federal assistance, not federal assumption of command. Instead of giving the intervention power to the president, it gave it to the National Police Council.

Nigeria never ceases to be a conundrum. Somewhere between 2022 and 2026, something changed. The same Governors’ Forum that had spent years arguing that Nigeria’s security architecture was excessively centralised revised its own 2022 proposal. In 2026, it submitted a reviewed draft to the Senate. I have a copy. In that draft, the governors introduced the very clause empowering the President, through the Federal Police Service, to assume operational command of a State Police Service. The President’s own bill apparently agreed with it, and the Senate retained it.

One is tempted to ask a simple question: Who voluntarily weakens the constitutional autonomy he has spent decades demanding? Our governors may have answers to that. One possible explanation is that more than thirty of Nigeria’s thirty-six governors now sing President Tinubu’s song: “On Your Mandate We Shall Stand.” Whether that political reality influenced this constitutional retreat is for the governors themselves to explain.

Meanwhile, I showed that provision to my professor and told him that a good President might never use such a power. He smiled and reminded me that constitutions are never drafted on the assumption that office holders will always act in good faith. They are drafted on the assumption that power attracts abuse. He then pointed me to America’s James Madison, who argued that constitutional design must proceed on the assumption that those entrusted with power are not angels. “We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels” (William Shakespeare in Henry VIII).

“Constitutions,” my professor said, “are not written for good men. They are written to restrain bad ones.” The question, therefore, is not whether today’s President would misuse this authority. The question is whether tomorrow’s President could.

Nigeria’s political history offers sufficient reason for caution. Consider the turmoil in our political party system today and the immense influence (rascality) exercised by the Federal High Court in electoral and party disputes because the law concentrates jurisdiction over many such matters in that court. The lesson is obvious: once a constitution or statute mass power in a single institution or individual, everything depends on how that power is exercised. The same caution applies to policing. Federal security agencies have repeatedly been accused of selective deployment during elections and political disputes. Imagine a President and a governor belonging to rival political parties. Imagine an election approaching. Imagine the constitutional power to assume operational command of a state’s police. The issue is not whether such authority will be abused. The issue is whether the constitution should make such abuse possible.

Let us consider other issues. One question immediately arises: who provides security during elections—the Federal Police Service or the State Police Service?

I have read carefully the bill passed by the Senate. I have examined the powers assigned to both police services. If you do as I did, you should be surprised that the bill is completely silent on who bears operational responsibility for election security.

That silence is remarkable because elections involve two distinct but overlapping functions. The first is the enforcement of federal electoral laws. Since elections are conducted under the Constitution, the Electoral Act and regulations issued by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), one would ordinarily expect that responsibility to rest with the Federal Police Service. The second is the maintenance of public order within the states. Securing polling units, preventing violence, controlling crowds and preserving the peace are traditional policing functions which, under the proposed constitutional framework, would ordinarily fall to the State Police Service.

Yet the bill designates neither service as the lead agency. It establishes no joint command structure and provides no mechanism for resolving operational disputes where both federal and state police officers are deployed. Its only reference to elections appears in Section 214(10)(d), which permits federal intervention where a State Police Service is being used for “partisan or electoral intimidation, obstruction or violence.” That provision authorises federal takeover after abuse has occurred or is imminent; it does not answer the prior constitutional question of who secures elections in the first place.

The omission is troubling. Election day is the most politically sensitive day in the life of any democracy. It is precisely the day on which the Constitution should leave no room for ambiguity over who is in command. Instead, the bill creates two armed police services operating within the same constitutional space without clearly allocating responsibility for election security. The result is an avoidable constitutional vacuum that could invite overlapping claims of authority, conflicting operational decisions and, in the worst case, armed confrontation between agencies owing allegiance to different political authorities.

Constitutions are meant to prevent conflicts before they arise, not leave judges, politicians and police commanders to improvise solutions in the heat of an election. And no moment tests this federation more severely than election day.

Almost exactly one hundred years ago, the American political scientist Howard Lee McBain reviewed Raymond Fosdick’s studies of policing in Europe and America. He observed that while policing in Europe had become “a matter only of highly technical administration,” in America it had become “politics-ridden.” His warning remains timeless: “Politics will play with and upon the police function as long as it is possible for elected officers to apply varying policies in the matter of law enforcement.”
McBain’s point was profound and America has since fixed what he saw. The danger today in Nigeria lies not just in abused centralised or decentralised policing. It lies also in allowing political power to dominate law enforcement.

That is why the agenda (and debate) before the state Houses of Assembly must be deeper than whether Nigeria should have state police for the sake of having it. The real questions are constitutional: Who appoints police chiefs? Who dismisses them? Who disciplines them? Who investigates abuse? What happens during elections? Under what circumstances may federal intervention occur? Who decides that those circumstances exist? What independent institution stands between political power and police power?

These are not technical questions. They are the questions that determine whether the police protect liberty or threaten it.
Nigeria undoubtedly requires policing that is closer to the people, more responsive to local intelligence and quicker in confronting local threats. But the location of police headquarters is not what guarantees freedom; institutions are.

The challenge before the Houses of Assembly is therefore much greater than voting “yes” or “no” to state police. Their task is to ensure that neither governors nor the president can weaponise the police against political opponents.

Otherwise, history may conclude that Nigeria demanded state police but ended up constitutionally creating the president’s police.