By Olarinre Salako,
Published in the Systems and Society Column, Backpage of The Nigerian Tribune, Monday, June 22, 2026
The National Assembly has taken significant steps toward the creation of State Police. The House of Representatives has passed the constitutional amendment bill, while the Senate has advanced it through second reading and referred it for public hearings and further scrutiny. Governors, through the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, have also expressed support, arguing that security institutions should be closer to local communities.
Supporters view the proposal as a response to worsening insecurity, while critics warn about funding challenges, political abuse, and the need for broader constitutional restructuring.
Amid the debates over command structures, oversight mechanisms, funding arrangements, and safeguards against abuse, one question remains largely absent from the national conversation:
Where will the intelligence that makes policing effective come from?
Policing begins with information. The effectiveness of any security architecture depends as much on intelligence as on manpower.
The Oriire abduction illustrates the point. Weeks after the attack, attention remains focused on rescue efforts and the challenges posed by the forests surrounding the Old Oyo National Park. Yet the crisis raises a deeper question: how can armed groups operate across large territories without earlier warning signs reaching security authorities?
I have previously expressed reservations about State Police itself. In my essay of December 5, 2025, Regional Policing Anchored on Regional Development, I argued that Nigeria’s centralized security architecture had become detached from local realities and that the country would be better served by regionally coordinated policing structures linked to emerging regional development commissions.
Nigeria’s thirty-six states were not designed as self-sustaining federating units. Many remain heavily dependent on federal allocations and lack the institutional capacity associated with subnational governments in many global federal republics.
The security crisis creates pressure for urgent solutions, yet urgency should not be confused with sound constitutional design.
My preference remains a system of regional cooperative policing anchored on regional development structures. The Southwest’s Amotekun and the Northeast’s Civilian Joint Task Force already demonstrate its practicality.
The forests connecting Oyo, Kwara, Niger, Kogi, Kaduna, Kebbi, Zamfara, and other states illustrate the challenge. Terrorists, bandits, kidnappers, and arms traffickers do not stop at state borders.
Security architectures designed around isolated state jurisdictions may struggle against threats that are regional in character.
Nigeria should also learn from its constitutional history. The late Professor Ben Nwabueze spent much of his later life warning that excessive centralization had produced outcomes very different from those originally intended. He described aspects of the Nigerian constitutional arrangement as a contradiction of genuine federalism and cautioned against the pursuit of “absolute national unity” at the expense of functional federal institutions.
That caution remains relevant today. State Police may become part of the solution to insecurity, but there is also a risk that the country could rush into a structural arrangement whose unintended consequences only become apparent later.
In trying to solve one problem, Nigeria must be careful not to create another. If one of the principal architects of Nigeria’s constitutional order spent decades attempting to correct what he later regarded as a structural mistake, today’s leaders should exercise similar caution before embracing reforms that future generations may come to regret.
Whether Nigeria adopts State Police, Regional Police, or some combination of the two, a more fundamental issue remains. No policing model can succeed without effective intelligence networks rooted in local communities.
The Role of Traditional Institutions
In Oyo’s traditional system, information flows through structures linking the Alaafin, High chiefs, Chiefs, Baale (village head), Baales (family compound heads), hunters, and community leaders. The Yoruba saying “Eti Oba ni’le, eti Oba lo’ko, eeyan nii je be” (the king’s ears that are at home and in the farms are human beings) reflects the intelligence function of traditional institutions. Information travels through multiple layers of authority, allowing local developments to reach decision-makers long before they become formal security reports. Similar systems exist through emirates, district heads, village heads, clan authorities, and traditional councils across the country.
In many rural communities, these institutions are the first to detect unusual developments: unfamiliar arrivals, forest encampments, abandoned farms, extortion by armed groups, and suspicious movements along local routes.
Traditional rulers should not become police officers or exercise arrest powers. Their value lies in serving as intelligence nodes embedded within communities and connected through longstanding structures of trust, legitimacy, and local knowledge.
Should Local Governments perform this role? In theory, yes. In practice, decades of political and fiscal control by the state governors have eroded their autonomy and capacity, weakening the level of government closest to the people.
Traditional institutions, by contrast, remain embedded within communities. An Oba knows his Baales, and the Baales know their villages just as every compound head knows his people. These structures continue to function whether or not Local Government allocations arrive on time.
They are enduring institutions that colonial rule, independence, military governments, and successive constitutions have been unable to erase.
Nigeria should make constructive use of them now.
This reality also reinforces concerns about State Police. If some governors have undermined the autonomy of Local Governments, citizens are justified in asking whether similar pressures could be brought to bear on State Police institutions.
That is one reason I continue to favor regional cooperative policing over purely state-based policing. Under a regional framework, ownership and oversight are shared across multiple states rather than concentrated in a single governor’s office.
Regional police institutions would be accountable to a broader set of stakeholders, including participating state governments, under the oversight of state assemblies, and community-based intelligence partners rooted in traditional institutions.
Ironically, terrorists often understand the strategic importance of traditional institutions better than political elites do. Across parts of Nigeria, traditional rulers, village heads, and community leaders have been threatened, displaced, abducted, or killed by bandits and terrorists. This is more than a symbolic loss; it represents the gradual erosion of local governance and intelligence networks that connect communities to the wider republic.
My Renewed Proposal
My proposal remains substantially the same, with one important addition.
First, policing should be removed from the Exclusive Legislative List and placed on the Concurrent List in a manner consistent with genuine federal principles.
Second, Nigeria should move toward constitutionally recognized regional cooperative policing anchored on regional development commissions. Regional development and regional security should reinforce one another. The Southwest’s Amotekun and the Northeast’s Civilian Joint Task Force already demonstrate that regional security cooperation is both possible and practical.
For this framework to succeed, the constituent states within each region must become genuine stakeholders in the regional development commissions. State governments should domesticate the legislation establishing those commissions and participate directly in their governance. Development is ultimately territorial, and states are the primary custodians of the land, communities, and infrastructure that regional development seeks to improve. Security and development are inseparable. A regional security architecture is more likely to succeed when it is linked to a regional development strategy jointly owned by the participating states.
Third, traditional institutions should be formally incorporated into the intelligence architecture supporting those arrangements. Information should flow from villages through traditional institutions to regional security structures and law-enforcement agencies.
Nigeria’s security debate has focused on who should control the police. The more enduring question may be who knows the communities the police are expected to protect.
Until that question is answered, the country risks creating new security institutions while overlooking one of its oldest and most valuable intelligence assets. Regional cooperative policing offers a more prudent path forward.
Equally important, traditional institutions—whether headed by Obas, Emirs, Olus, Igwes, Obis, Shehus, Ochis, Olos, Tor, and other traditional authorities—should be formally integrated into community intelligence gathering.
After all, these traditional leaders receive public support, while political leaders routinely seek their legitimacy and blessings during elections. That unique characteristic of the Nigerian republic should reflect in our security architecture.
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