NDC chieftain Buba Galadima has accused President Tinubu and state governors of pursuing state police as a political weapon to suppress opposition ahead of the 2027 elections, drawing chilling comparisons to the historic misuse of Northern Nigeria’s native authority police force.
Buba Galadima isn’t buying the state police narrative — and he’s pulling from history to explain why.
Speaking Tuesday on Arise Television’s Morning Show, as reported by Daily Post,the Nigeria Democratic Congress chieftain delivered a scathing critique of the newly passed state police framework, accusing President Bola Tinubu and state governors of a far darker motive than security reform.
“All that we know is that the President and governors are looking for state police before the election so that they use them as political thugs to attack the opposition, disarm the election, and kill democracy,” Galadima declared bluntly.
His scepticism started with basic logic.
“Nobody ever conceived the idea of state police to sort out our security challenge, if the Nigerian police, the Nigerian military can’t solve the security situation in the country, I wonder how the state police would be able to do that,” he said.
But it was his historical warning that carried the most weight, drawing directly from his own lived memory of Nigeria’s native authority police system.
“I was adult enough to see what happened during the native authority police. When elections approached, three months to election, the native authority police will gather all opposition elements in their territorial jurisdiction and look them up. Some of them will say you have abused the emir, judge or you are wearing shoes when your village head was seated on the chair, then they would send all of them into detention,” he recalled.
Galadima went further, linking the legacy of that system to demographic shifts across Nigeria and beyond.
“Most Hausa people that you see all over Nigeria and Africa where the spillover of the misuse of the native authority in Northern Nigeria and that is why they needed to run for their dear life and hide elsewhere,” he claimed.
His final warning centred on national cohesion itself.
“The state police can be used to destroy the unity of this country because there are certain states where only one tribe or religion would constitute the state police such that other people from the other parts of the country would have no liberty to do their business as enshrined by the constitution. The state police for me would create more problems and divisions,” he concluded.
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