Governors are demanding constitutional guardrails before accepting state police powers, and that instinct alone changes everything about this conversation. JONATHAN NDA- ISAIAH writes
There has been considerable anxiety in many quarters about the prospect of state police in Nigeria. Critics and civil society voices have long warned that placing the police directly under the command of state governors, many of whom have not distinguished themselves as champions of civil liberties, was a recipe for political persecution, electoral violence, and the weaponisation of law enforcement against opposition figures and ordinary citizens. Those fears are not without historical basis.
That is why the latest communiqué from the Nigeria Governors’ Forum carries a significance that deserves more than passing acknowledgement.
Governors under the aegis of the NGF have renewed their push for state police, but with a notable emphasis: they are not simply asking for the power. They are asking for constitutional guardrails. Meeting at the Forum’s second gathering of 2026 on Wednesday night, the governors under the chairmanship of Kwara State Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq made clear that any state police arrangement must be constitutionally sound, consistent with the principles of federalism, and protective of citizens’ rights.
The Forum disclosed that a dedicated consultation had been held with state Attorneys-General to review proposed constitutional amendments and operational frameworks for state policing. The outcomes of those consultations, the governors said, would help strengthen the collective position of the states on the matter.
This is a genuinely heartwarming signal. The same class of officials who would wield this power are the ones insisting it be bound by law before it is handed over. That is not what abuse looks like. That is what institutional seriousness looks like, and it deserves to be said plainly.
It is worth pausing here to acknowledge what the critics have feared, because their concerns did not emerge from thin air. Nigeria’s political history is littered with examples of executive power being deployed against the very citizens it was designed to protect. The memory of state-level task forces terrorising market traders, of security apparatus being redirected to intimidate political opponents during election cycles, and of governors treating public institutions as personal instruments is not ancient history. It is recent enough that reasonable Nigerians approached the state police conversation with deep suspicion.
That suspicion shaped the public debate for years. Many argued that giving governors their own armed forces was simply too dangerous a proposition in a political environment where accountability is still fragile and where the rule of law competes daily with the rule of influence. The argument was not against state police in principle. It was against the state police without sufficient protection built into the design. That is precisely what makes the NGF’s current position so noteworthy.
The governors are not demanding the keys to a new security vehicle without first asking about the brakes. They have convened their Attorneys-General. They have reviewed proposed constitutional amendments. They have engaged the operational frameworks. And they have arrived at a collective position that prioritises legal soundness over administrative convenience. For a political class that has often been accused of prioritising power over process, this is a meaningful departure.
The governors do not stand alone in this momentum, and that matters too. President Bola Tinubu has been consistent and unwavering in his advocacy for state police, framing it as a necessary component of Nigeria’s restructured security architecture. His position has not shifted with the political winds. He has held this line through the resistance, through the debate, and through the legislative delays and that consistency has lent the initiative a credibility it might otherwise have lacked coming from a single source.
At the legislative level, Senate President Godswill Akpabio has signalled clearly that the National Assembly stands in support of the initiative. More concretely, the House of Representatives has already advanced the matter, passing a related bill for a second reading, a tangible legislative step that moves the proposal from the realm of policy conversation into the mechanics of lawmaking. That progression matters. Bills at second reading are being debated, scrutinised, and refined. The legislature is doing what it is supposed to do.
The convergence of the executive, the legislature, and now the governors around not just the idea but the legal architecture of state police represents a qualitative shift in Nigeria’s security governance debate. For years, this conversation moved in circles, raised, debated, stalled, and quietly shelved until the next security crisis forced it back onto the agenda. What is different now is the simultaneity of the commitment.
When the presidency, the National Assembly leadership, and the governors’ forum are all moving in the same direction at the same time, the institutional inertia that has historically defeated this reform becomes harder to sustain.
And the case for urgency is compelling. Nigeria’s insecurity crisis has metastasised well beyond what any centralised policing model was designed to contain.
Banditry in the Northwest has displaced hundreds of thousands and made farming a life-threatening occupation in states that were once Nigeria’s food basket. The Middle Belt continues to bleed from farmer-herder violence that has persisted across multiple administrations without resolution. Kidnapping on federal highways has normalised a level of criminal boldness that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. In the Northeast, the insurgency that Nigeria was told was technically defeated years ago has proven itself capable of regenerating. In the Southeast, a low-grade but persistent armed agitation continues to cost lives and economic activity.
A federal police force with its command structure in Abuja, its deployment decisions made by officers with no local knowledge, and its response times measured in hours rather than minutes, was simply not built for this reality. The intelligence deficits alone are staggering. Community-level security information, the kind that tells you which strangers arrived in a village last night and why, which farm roads have been compromised, which local figures are facilitating criminal networks, requires presence, language, and trust that only a locally embedded force can develop. The Nigeria Police Force, for all the dedication of its individual officers, cannot manufacture that local knowledge from federal headquarters.
State police, properly constituted and legally safeguarded, can begin to fill that gap. Not immediately, and not without difficulty. But the direction is correct, and the momentum behind it is real.
Political analysts contend that the governors deserve commendation for their stance, and that this commendation should be specific rather than generic. It would have been easier, and perhaps more politically advantageous in the short term, to simply advocate for state police as a transfer of power without attaching legal conditions. The fact that they have done the harder thing, that they have sat with their Attorneys-General and asked the structural questions before the power arrives, reflects a seriousness about governance that should be acknowledged.
That said, acknowledgement is not the same as naivety. The legal frameworks being developed will face pressure the moment they are in operation. Some governors will test limits. Some constitutional safeguards will prove insufficient in practice. There will be instances, almost certainly, where state police are deployed in ways that raise legitimate questions about political motivation. These are not hypothetical risks to be dismissed. They are predictable features of institutional adolescence in a democracy still building its muscles.
But this is how institutions are built. Not in a single, perfect act of design, but through construction, stress-testing, identification of failure points, and iterative correction. The American police system, for all its current controversies, was centuries in the making. India’s state police structures, which also operate under a federal constitutional arrangement, have been refined through decades of lived experience, court rulings, and legislative amendments. Nigeria will go through its own version of that process.
