Ezekwesili Cautions Against Relying Solely on State Police to Tackle Insecurity

Former Minister of Education, Obiageli Ezekwesili, has penned an open letter to President Bola Tinubu, the National Assembly, the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, and the wider public, arguing that the push for state police alone is insufficient to resolve Nigeria’s insecurity and instability challenges. Ezekwesili shared the letter across her social media handles on Monday, emphasizing that comprehensive restructuring of the country remains the more sustainable path to addressing the underlying issues. The Tinubu administration’s renewed push for State Police, she noted, has reopened a major policy debate, with the proposal reflecting concerns over insecurity in the country. According to Ezekwesili, Nigeria’s security architecture is failing, as evidenced by the prevalence of terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, violent extremism, communal conflicts, and organized criminality, which have overwhelmed the capacity of a centrally controlled police force to secure lives and property across a country of over 230 million people. She cited recent Afrobarometer findings, which show that 79 percent of Nigerians consider kidnapping and abduction a serious national problem, while 33 percent personally know someone who has been kidnapped within the last five years, and 63 percent say they or a family member felt unsafe in their home or neighborhood during the previous year. Ezekwesili described these statistics as indicators of a profound crisis of state effectiveness and citizen confidence, rather than merely security statistics. On the proposal for State Police, she cautioned that while it may be necessary, it is not sufficient to address the country’s security crisis, which is a manifestation of a deeper constitutional, governance, and political economy crisis that has eroded state capacity, weakened accountability, and undermined the effectiveness of public institutions. The central question before Nigeria, she argued, should not be whether governors ought to control police forces, but rather whether the constitutional architecture governing the Nigerian federation remains fit for purpose. Ezekwesili also spoke on Nigeria’s constitutional structure, noting that the country’s constitutional order concentrates excessive authority, fiscal resources, and political power at the center, with the Constitution allocating powers among three categories – the Exclusive Legislative List, the Concurrent Legislative List, and residual powers reserved for the states. The Exclusive Legislative List contains sixty-eight items reserved solely for the Federal Government, while the Concurrent List contains only a limited number of shared subjects. This imbalance, she stated, matters because the State Police debate focuses on only one item among dozens, with police being merely one of sixty-eight subjects constitutionally monopolized by the Federal Government. The question, therefore, is not whether policing should be decentralized, but rather whether Nigeria is prepared to redesign a constitutional order that has concentrated too much power at the center. Ezekwesili concluded that the proper national conversation is not ‘State Police or no State Police,’ but rather whether Nigeria is prepared to redesign a constitutional order that has concentrated too much power at the center, and that State Police will be necessary, but necessity does not make it the solution to a dysfunctional Nigeria. She emphasized that Nigeria needs a comprehensive restructuring agenda anchored in a new constitutional settlement, and that restructuring the dysfunctional territory and system that the country has become is the bold conversation and action that Nigerians can no longer afford to postpone.