October 24, (THEWILL) – 24 state assemblies have approved the state police alteration bill. Bayelsa, Gombe and Kaduna were among the latest to vote. The threshold set by Section 9(2), two-thirds of the 36 states, has now been met.
The pace has been striking. When the National Assembly’s 30-day window closed on 16 October, only five assemblies had passed it. A wave of votes on 20 and 21 October took the total to 17. The remaining approvals followed within days. No assembly has rejected the bill outright.
The speed settles a procedural question. It does not settle the substantive ones. Three of those will outlast the vote.
What the assemblies have ratified is a permission rather than a system. The bill moves policing onto the concurrent legislative list. The operational detail sits in the National Policing Bill and 29 related texts. These went to the Justice Ministry in the week of 19 October and are expected back by 30 October.
State assemblies have therefore approved a constitutional framework whose mechanics they have not yet read. That is not unusual in Nigerian amendment practice. It does mean the debate over what a state police force actually does is only now beginning.
The case for devolution
The argument for decentralisation rests on history and on capacity. Before 1930, four separate forces operated in the territory that became Nigeria. During the Aba Women’s War of 1929, constabulary men refused to fire on protesting women. Policemen were brought in from Lagos, and more than 50 women were shot dead.
The lesson the colonial administration drew was not that policing should be accountable to the policed. Instead, it was that a force recruited from the community it controls cannot be relied on to fire on that community, so the four forces merged in 1930, and officers were posted outside their regions of origin. The colonists built barracks to keep them apart from the people they policed.
The consequences are visible in the field. In Nteje, Anambra State, the divisional police officer never learned Igbo for years. In Itu, on the Akwa Ibom and Cross River boundary, Hausa-speaking officers deployed during a communal crisis never set foot in the communities they were meant to separate. A local committee had to introduce them.
The point is not ethnicity. It is information. Policing runs on local knowledge. An officer posted 600 kilometres from home has none of it.
Capacity compounds the problem. Nigeria has roughly 371,000 officers for a population above 200 million. That is a ratio of about one to 600, against the United Nations benchmark of one to 450. More than 100,000 of those officers protect politicians and other VIPs.
A single command in Abuja cannot police 36 states with different terrains, languages and threats. SBM Intelligence has argued for years that the centralised model slows emergency response. States have no direct control over forces operating in their territory.
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What the vote did not answer
The first unresolved question is whether the approvals are valid. Adamawa passed 24 of 26 clauses and rejected two. Ekiti approved subject to an amendment to Section 317A(5). Section 9(2) allows an assembly to accept or reject the text it receives, not to edit it. How the National Assembly treats these conditional approvals remains unsettled and could later be contested.
The second is money. Two Benue lawmakers asked how a state force would be financed when existing agencies already lack equipment. The bill leaves the answer to later federal legislation.
A state of five million people would need close to ₦50 billion to recruit, train and equip 15,000 officers to United Nations standards, before barracks, vehicles or armouries. The national reform committee puts the five-year cost above ₦5 trillion. States that attempt it will divert funds from education, health and infrastructure. States that cannot will produce underpaid officers who drift towards the extortion that already hollows out the federal force.
The third is capture. Governors already dominate the institutions meant to check them, and ruling parties routinely sweep local government elections. The bill’s safeguard allows a commissioner to refer unlawful directives to the Nigeria Police Council. That asks him to risk his career against the man who appointed him.
The timing sharpens the concern. The vote comes months before the January 2027 elections. A senator has asked publicly whether security reform or electoral advantage is the motive. The question has been asked. It has not been answered.
There is also the matter of command. The bill does not clearly define who answers to whom when an incident crosses jurisdictions. Hisbah in Kano and Amotekun in the Southwest already operate without constitutional clarity. Thirty-six more forces will produce competition as readily as coordination.
A procedural fact
The threshold has been met. That is a genuine achievement for a process that looked stalled a week ago. It is also a narrow one.
A better route would devolve policing to communities rather than governors. That means anchoring it in institutions that remain embedded locally. It means coordinating at state level without commanding from it. And it means reporting through ombudsmen to legislatures rather than executives.
As drafted, the bill devolves coercive power without devolving accountability. That combination has a record in Nigeria. It is not a reassuring one.
By Cheta Nwanze
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Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence
