By Assam Francis

The Nigerian Senate passed the State Police Bill on June 24, 2026. After decades of debate, false starts, and political theatre, the constitutional amendment that will reshape the country’s security architecture finally cleared the upper chamber. Governors will now be empowered to establish their own police services. The Federal Police Service will retain control of counterterrorism, interstate crime and national security. And the nation, predictably, is divided.

Some are calling it historic. Others are calling it a disaster waiting to happen. I think both camps are right, just about different things.

State policing is not a silver bullet. It is not even close to a complete solution. But when you look at the scale of what Nigerians are living through, the argument for doing nothing becomes harder to defend.

Nigeria recorded 12,954 violent deaths in 2025. That same year, 4,722 people were kidnapped across 997 violent incidents. In November alone, at least 402 people, most of them schoolchildren, were abducted across four northern states, surpassing even the horror of Chibok. These are not statistics from a country managing a security challenge. These are statistics from a country losing a war it refuses to fully acknowledge.

The centrepiece of that failure has always been structural. A single federal police force stretched across 36 states, 774 local government areas, and over 200 million people was never going to work. The result is exactly what you would expect: vast rural areas with almost no police presence, where militant groups operate without challenge. The bandits terrorizing Zamfara and Katsina, the kidnappers raiding schools in Borno, the gunmen who have turned northern highways into ambush corridors, they have all learnt to exploit the geography of federal neglect. A community eight hours from the nearest police division cannot call for help. It can only bury its dead.

This is the core logic behind state policing, and it is a compelling one. Local threats require local responses. A police force staffed by people who know the terrain, speak the language, and have a stake in the community’s survival will always be better positioned than a force receiving orders from Abuja. In a country this large and this diverse, that is not an abstract ideal. It is a basic common sense.

 Yet, the very thing that makes state policing necessary is the same thing that makes it dangerous.

Firstly, Nigeria’s governors are some of the most powerful political actors on the continent. They control vast budgets, command enormous patronage networks and in too many cases, operate with near-total impunity. Handing these men a police force is not a neutral act. Critics have rightly argued that state police could be exploited to harass political opponents, suppress dissent, and silence the press. This is not a hypothetical fear. It is a rational reading of Nigeria’s political history.

The bill includes safeguards-  a provision expressly prohibiting state police commissioners from arresting, detaining, investigating or deploying force against any person, political party or group merely for criticising the government. That is a good clause on paper. But we have seen enough Nigerian governance to know the distance between what is written in law and what happens on the ground. A governor who wants a critic silenced will find another pretext. The law will struggle to catch up.

Also, Nigeria is not a monolith. It is a federation of distinct peoples with long histories of tensions, and those tensions have not magically disappeared. A state police force in a state with a dominant ethnic group will reflect the prejudices of that group. Minority communities, people who have lived somewhere for three generations but are still called non-indigenes will be the most exposed to a security force shaped by the politics of belonging.

We have seen what community-aligned security can produce. The vigilante groups and ethnic militias that have emerged across the country carry that lesson. Some have done genuine good. Others have become instruments of communal vengeance. A state police force with constitutional backing could replicate either outcome depending almost entirely on who is running the state.

Even if we set the political risks aside, there is a third problem that gets far less attention: money. Recruiting, training, equipping, and paying a functional police force is expensive, and several Nigerian states are already struggling to pay civil servants. A poorly funded state police force will do one of two things: fail to function or survive by extorting the communities it is meant to protect. We have seen this movie with the Nigeria Police Force. We know how it ends.

State policing is one piece of a much larger puzzle. The insecurity crisis in Nigeria is not just a policing deficit; it is also an economic one. Banditry has become an economy in parts of the North-West, sustained by ransom payments and the desperation of young men with no visible alternative. You cannot police your way out of a problem with structural economic roots. Investment in rural infrastructure, education, and livelihoods must run parallel to any security reform. One without the other is a half-measure.

The Bottom Line

If this bill clears the House of Representatives and a majority of state Houses of Assembly, it will mark one of the most significant constitutional reforms since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999. That matters. After years of deadlock, something is finally moving.

But a structural reform is only as good as the political culture that implements it. State policing can work in Nigeria where governors are accountable, judicial institutions are independent, and communities trust the people in uniform. We are not fully there yet, and we should not pretend otherwise.

What we can say is this: the current arrangement has failed. The evidence is measured in thousands of bodies every year. Trying something different with vigilance and clear-eyed oversight is not recklessness. At this point, it is the only responsible choice.