AIT, one of the national news channels in Nigeria, ran a special report yesterday on whether decentralising the Nigerian Police Force would be a better way of combating the insecurity that has plagued all parts of the country.
While asking whether the current centralised framework of policing was to blame in the failure to deal with banditry, kidnapping, etc, the report, to their credit, looked at the pros and cons of both sides of the argument.
There was a clip of legal luminary Femi Falana reminding his audience that state governors should have powers over the police as members of the Nigerian Police Council – which consists of the president, inspector-general of police and all 36 governors. Apparently, the problem is that it appears this council doesn’t bother to meet and appointments to senior positions in the police are made by the president without regard to the council.
Another key point made was that state governors already fund existing police commands in their states, meaning this was a de facto state police service. This means that governors already have some form of control over the police in their states and this is seen with the amount of officers deployed for security around the governors and senior state officials including their relatives and cronies.
There is also the “small matter” of “security votes”. A 2018 report by Transparency International described “security votes” as “opaque corruption-prone security funding mechanisms widely used by Nigerian officials. A relic of military rule, these funds are provided to certain federal, state and local government officials to disburse at their discretion. In theory, they are reserved for covering unforeseen security needs. Transacted mostly in cash, security vote spending is not subject to legislative oversight or independent audit because of its ostensibly sensitive nature. Although officials often spend some of these funds on security, they also channel them into political activities or embezzle them outright.”
The report adds: “The sum total of Nigeria’s various security votes dwarfs the international security assistance it receives, and is comparable to budgeted spending on national defence and security institutions”. And goes on to say: “security vote spending exceeds 70 percent of the annual budget of the Nigeria Police Force, more than the Nigerian Army’s annual budget, and more
than the Nigerian Navy and Nigerian Air Force’s annual budget combined.” This was estimated at about $670m each year in 2018.
With so much money available ostensibly for security and so much insecurity in all parts of the country, there is scant evidence that state-controlled police forces would make any difference.
State police is more likely to go the way of state fire services in which attempts are made to put out fires on properties with packets of “pure water”. The states should also be running ambulance services, but victims of road traffic accidents have to rely on Good Samaritans to make it to hospital.
The most likely outcome of decentralised policing in Nigeria is the deployment of the officers in protecting VIPs, terrorising opponents of the governor, and rigging (s)elections – nothing but a rebadging of business as usual.
