The renewed clamour for state police in Nigeria, championed largely by state governors, is one of the most consequential debates in our democratic journey. It is framed as a solution to insecurity, banditry, terrorism, and rising crime. Yet, beneath the rhetoric lies a troubling contradiction: many of the same governors demanding control over armed police formations have failed to seize a far less contentious but far more transformative opportunity already placed in their hands, the decentralised power sector.
Electricity, not policing, is the most potent instrument for improving security, productivity, and social stability in modern societies. Power lights up factories, workshops, farms, classrooms, hospitals, and homes. It creates jobs, absorbs idle youth, expands economic opportunity, and raises what economists call the “feel-good index” of a society. A society that works is, by definition, a society that is safer.
Nigeria has taken a historic step by decentralising the power sector, allowing states to generate, transmit, and distribute electricity independently of the federal grid. This reform, one of the most critical since independence, provides governors with a constitutional and economic lever to reshape their states. Yet, barely any governor has treated this responsibility with the urgency and seriousness it deserves. Instead, many have chosen to focus their political energy on acquiring control of coercive force, the police.
This raises a fundamental question: why the obsession with policing when electricity offers a more sustainable path to security?
There is a dangerous tendency in Nigeria to seek force-based solutions to structural problems. Crime is rarely just a policing failure; it is often an economic and social one. Unemployed youth, idle graduates, artisans without workshops, factories running on diesel at unsustainable costs, and small businesses collapsing under energy poverty create fertile ground for crime. Decentralised power directly attacks these root causes. State police merely respond to the symptoms.
Those pushing for state policing argue that Nigeria’s security challenges are too diverse and localised to be handled by a centralised police force. In theory, this argument has merit. In practice, however, it collapses under the weight of Nigeria’s political reality. Power does not exist in a vacuum; it reflects the maturity of institutions and the character of those who wield it.
Sadly, most Nigerian governors have not conducted themselves with the decorum, restraint, and democratic responsibility required to justify entrusting them with armed police forces. Our recent electoral history is replete with examples of politicians deploying thugs, militias, and informal security outfits to intimidate opponents, rig elections, and suppress dissent. Imagine, then, what would happen if such actors had formal command over state police.
We do not need imagination; we need honesty. In a polity where political competition is often treated as warfare, state police risk becoming state militias. The line between law enforcement and political enforcement would blur dangerously. Opposition figures would be harassed, activists silenced, journalists intimidated, and elections militarised, not in defence of public order, but in service of incumbency.
Lord Acton’s timeless warning remains painfully relevant: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Adding police authority to governors already struggling with accountability would only deepen Nigeria’s democratic fragility.
Proponents of state police often cite history, arguing that policing was decentralised in colonial Nigeria and during the First Republic. This is true but also deeply misleading. Colonial-era policing operated under imperial supervision, with clear hierarchies and external restraint. The First Republic, while more autonomous, existed in a political culture that, though imperfect, still carried a measure of institutional discipline inherited from British administrative traditions.
Even then, the rancorous political atmosphere of the early 1960s, characterised by ethnic rivalry, regional power struggles, and electoral violence, overwhelmed those institutions. The result was the collapse of the First Republic and the entry of the military into politics. History’s lesson is not that decentralised policing guarantees stability, but that immature political institutions can weaponise any form of power.
The frequent comparison with the United States is even more problematic. Yes, the US operates federal, state, county, and city police forces. But this system is anchored in over two centuries of institutional evolution, deep judicial independence, strong local accountability, civic culture, and clear separation of powers. Governors in the US do not control police in the same personal or discretionary manner that many Nigerian governors already exercise over state institutions.
Nigeria’s political institutions are still consolidating. Party structures are weak, ideology is thin, internal democracy is fragile, and the rule of law is inconsistently applied. To import the architecture of American policing without the underpinning institutional culture is to confuse form with substance.
The irony is that while governors lobby loudly for state police, they have been remarkably quiet and inactive about decentralised electricity. Power reform demands vision, long-term planning, public-private partnerships, technical expertise, and transparent governance. It does not offer the immediate political theatre of uniforms, sirens, and command structures. But it delivers something far more powerful: prosperity.
A state that invests in power infrastructure, solar farms, gas-to-power plants, mini-grids, and industrial clusters creates jobs at scale. When young people are meaningfully employed, crime rates fall naturally. When small businesses thrive, communities become stakeholders in stability. When streets are lit, crime retreats. When factories hum, hope replaces desperation.
Security achieved through productivity is more durable than security enforced at gunpoint.
There is also a fiscal argument. Policing is recurrent expenditure-heavy: salaries, weapons, vehicles, logistics. Power infrastructure, though capital-intensive, generates economic returns that expand the tax base and reduce long-term dependence on federal allocations. Governors who truly desire autonomy should start with energy, not enforcement.
This is not an argument against reforming Nigeria’s policing architecture. The Nigeria Police Force needs deep reform: better training, AI technology adoption, community policing frameworks, improved welfare, and accountability mechanisms. But reform is different from fragmentation. Strengthening institutions should precede multiplying centres of coercion.
If Nigeria must eventually adopt state policing, it should do so gradually, with ironclad constitutional safeguards, independent oversight bodies, judicial controls, and clear limits on gubernatorial authority. Above all, it should be piloted only in states that demonstrate maturity in governance, respect for civil liberties, credible electoral conduct, and responsible use of existing powers.
Until then, the priority for governors should be clear. They already have a transformative mandate in their hands: decentralised electricity. Light up your states. Power your economies. Create jobs. Reduce crime by reducing desperation. Let productivity, not policing, become the foundation of security.
Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of force. It suffers from a shortage of functionality. Before asking for guns, our governors should first learn to switch on the lights.
