Oby Ezekwesili Advocates Restructuring Nigeria Over State Police

The proposal has gained momentum because it speaks directly to a painful reality confronting millions of Nigerians, Terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, violent extremism, communal conflicts, and organised criminality have overwhelmed the capacity of a centrally controlled police force to secure lives and property across a country of more than 230 million people. For many citizens, therefore, state police appears to be an obvious and long-overdue solution.

The attraction of the proposal is understandable. Recent Afro-barometer findings show that 79 percent of Nigerians consider kidnapping and abduction a serious national problem; 33 percent personally know someone who has been kidnapped within the last five years; and 63 percent say they or a family member felt unsafe in their home or neighborhoods during the previous year. These are not merely security statistics. They are indicators of a profound crisis of state effectiveness and citizen confidence.

Yet the fact that state police is necessary does not mean it is sufficient. The danger confronting Nigeria today is that the country may once again mistake a symptom for the disease itself. The security crisis is real, but it is not fundamentally a policing crisis. It is the manifestation of a deeper constitutional, governance, and political-economy crisis that has steadily eroded state capacity, weakened accountability, and undermined the effectiveness of public institutions.

The central question before Nigeria should not be whether governors ought to control police forces. At the heart of the problem lies a constitutional order that concentrates excessive authority, fiscal resources, and political power at the centre. Although Nigeria describes itself as a federation, many of its institutional arrangements bear the characteristics of a highly centralised state. The most visible expression of this over centralisation is found in the legislative lists established by the 1999 Constitution.

The Constitution allocates powers among three categories  the Exclusive Legislative List, the Concurrent Legislative List, and residual powers reserved for the states. In principle, such arrangements are common in federations. In practice, however, Nigeria’s distribution of powers is exceptionally skewed toward the federal government. The Exclusive Legislative List contains sixty-eight items reserved solely for the federal government, while the Concurrent List contains only a limited number of shared subjects. Constitutional scholars have long observed that this structure gives the federal government overwhelming dominance over governance and development functions.

The same Exclusive List centralises authority over prisons, mines and minerals, railways, arms and ammunition, and numerous other strategic functions. Consequently, removing policing from the Exclusive List without addressing the wider constitutional architecture would amount to treating a symptom while leaving the underlying condition untouched.

The question therefore is not whether policing should be decentralised. It should. The deeper question is why policing alone should be decentralised while dozens of other functions remain trapped within a constitutional framework inherited from military command structures rather than democratic federal design. The state police debate is ultimately a debate about symptoms. The Exclusive Legislative List is where the disease resides.

The consequences of this constitutional distortion are evident across every major sector of national life. Insecurity is one manifestation. Economic underperformance is another. Weak public-service delivery is yet another. The same constitutional structure that produces a distant and ineffective security architecture also generates fiscal dependency, weakens sub-national initiative, discourages productivity, and reduces institutional accountability. Nigeria’s security crisis and economic crisis are therefore not separate phenomena. They are products of the same constitutional dysfunction. 

The geographical spread of insecurity further demonstrates this reality. What was once largely concentrated in the North-East and parts of the North-West has expanded across virtually every geopolitical zone. Recent incidents indicate that kidnapping networks have increasingly penetrated parts of the South-West, underscoring the national character of the crisis. The challenge facing Nigeria is therefore systemic, not regional.

For this reason, the proper national conversation is not “state police or no state police.” The proper conversation is whether Nigeria is prepared to redesign a constitutional order that has concentrated too much power at the centre, weakened sub-national initiative, undermined accountability, and constrained development.

State police will be necessary. But necessity does not make it the solution to a dysfunctional Nigeria.

Nigeria  needs a comprehensive restructuring agenda anchored in a new constitutional settlement — one that rebalances the Exclusive, Concurrent, and Residual Lists; devolves powers to the lowest effective level of government; strengthens fiscal federalism; guarantees equal citizenship; promotes productivity and competitiveness; and restores sovereignty to the Nigerian people through a citizens-led Sovereign National Conference and a referendum on a new constitution. That is the true restructuring agenda.

Restructuring the dysfunctional territory and system that our beloved country has become is the bold conversation and action that Nigerians can no longer afford to postpone. There are no other viable alternatives left for us at this point.