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From Fred Itua, Abuja
The House of Representatives has passed the state police bill with near-unanimous force. Now comes the harder question; in a country where governors wield near-absolute power within their states and enjoy constitutional immunity while in office, can this reform deliver genuine security, or will it become the most dangerous political weapon handed to any tier of government since the return to democracy in 1999?
On Thursday, 11 June 2026, the House of Representatives made history. By an overwhelming vote of 289 to four, with Speaker Tajudeen Abbas himself choosing to abstain rather than vote against a proposal whose legislative momentum had become all but irresistible, the lower chamber passed a constitutional amendment bill formally titled ‘A Bill for an Act to Alter the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 to Provide for the Establishment of State Police and for Related Matters (Sixth Alteration) Bill, 2026.’
The bill, championed by the Deputy Speaker and Chairman of the House Committee on Constitution Review, Benjamin Kalu, moves policing from the Exclusive Legislative List to the Concurrent Legislative List, meaning that states will, for the first time in Nigeria’s constitutional history, be empowered to establish and operate their own police forces alongside the federal system.
The passage was not without its moments of discord. Kaduna lawmaker Bashir Zubairu of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), rose on a point of order to protest that the document prepared by the House Committee on Constitution Review had only been placed before members on the very day of the vote, leaving insufficient time for careful scrutiny. It was a procedural objection that, in its brevity, captured a deeper unease that a reform of this magnitude, one that will fundamentally restructure the architecture of law enforcement across 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, was being enacted with a speed that outpaced the deliberation it deserved. The objection was noted and the voting proceeded.
A similar bill is expected to be passed by the Senate next month, sent to the various State Houses of Assembly, get the needed 2/3, and then a final presidential assent before it becomes the supreme law of the land. The political appetite for passage at all three levels appears, for now, to be considerable.
The Senate Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, who led debate on the bill in the upper chamber, described the legislation as a transformative intervention in Nigeria’s security architecture, arguing that it was not designed to weaken the Nigeria Police Force but to strengthen security operations at every level of government simultaneously. He spoke with conviction about the bill’s capacity to improve intelligence gathering, noting that local officers rooted in communities, conversant in local languages and customs, and sensitive to local social dynamics would be qualitatively more effective than a distant federal force responding to threats it did not fully understand.
The context driving the bill is impossible to contest. Nigeria is in the grip of a security emergency of historic proportions. Banditry and mass kidnapping have turned major highways into corridors of terror. Insurgency in the North East, now in its second decade, has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions. Communal violence, armed attacks on farming communities, and a deepening separatist agitation in the South East have collectively overwhelmed a centralised Nigeria Police Force that is chronically understaffed, chronically underfunded, poorly equipped by any modern standard, and institutionally distant from the communities it is constitutionally mandated to protect.
The case for localised, community-rooted policing capable of responding to local threats in real time has never, in Nigeria’s post-independence history, been more compellingly argued or more urgently felt.
The bill, as passed by the House, seeks to establish a dual policing architecture comprising the Federal Police as successor to the Nigeria Police Force operating at the national level, and State Police forces operating under the authority of individual state governments. It provides that no state police formation shall commence operations unless it is established through legislation passed by the relevant State House of Assembly and certified as complying with national standards prescribed by the National Assembly.
Until a state’s police force becomes fully operational, the Federal Police will continue to exercise policing powers within that state. The bill further establishes State Police Service Commissions charged with the recruitment, training, and coordination of state policing activities. It provides for federal oversight through the Federal Police Service Commission, uniform national policing standards applicable to all state forces, legislative confirmation of senior appointments, and strengthened constitutional procedures governing the removal of state Commissioners of Police. It also provides for periodic certification and review of state police operations and for federal intervention powers in cases of documented failure or misconduct.
On paper, the architecture is sound. The architects of the bill have clearly studied the objections that have attended every previous iteration of this debate and have attempted to address them through institutional design. Bamidele acknowledged in the Senate that the possibility of abuse by state governments was the single most consistently raised concern and insisted that the bill’s safeguards were adequate to the challenge.
“This bill adequately addresses those concerns through several safeguards,” he told senators, listing the establishment of State Police Service Commissions, federal oversight through the Federal Police Service Commission, uniform national policing standards, and legislative confirmation of senior appointments as the primary protective mechanisms.
The problem is not what the bill says. The problem is what Nigeria’s political history suggests will happen when it meets the reality of executive power at the state level.
Nigeria’s 36 state governors are amongst the most powerful elected officials in any democratic system in the world. They control state party structures with an authority that approaches the absolute. They determine candidate selection for virtually every elective position within their states, from State House of Assembly members to local government chairmen. They command enormous financial resources through monthly Federation Account Allocation Committee disbursements that, in some states, run into tens of billions of naira.
They exercise near-total dominance over state institutions including the State House of Assembly, the State Independent Electoral Commission, and the entire local government apparatus. In practice, a Nigerian governor in office faces no meaningful institutional check from within the state. The State House of Assembly, whose members are elected on the same party platform and frequently owe their political existence to the governor’s endorsement, has in the overwhelming majority of cases across Nigeria’s 27 years of unbroken democratic governance served as an extension of executive will rather than as a legislative counterweight to it.
Into this environment, the state police bill proposes to vest command authority over a new armed institution in the hands of the same governors. The institutional safeguards written into the bill, the commissions, the oversight bodies, the certification processes, are structurally legitimate in their conception. The problem is that Nigerian political history is dense with examples of commissions and oversight bodies created to check executive power that were subsequently captured, hollowed out, or rendered inoperable by the very executive they were designed to constrain.
The State Independent Electoral Commissions, established with express constitutional backing to ensure independent management of state-level elections, have in most states functioned as instruments of the ruling party rather than as neutral electoral referees. There is no structural reason, derived from the evidence of how Nigerian state-level institutions have actually performed, to assume that State Police Service Commissions will be meaningfully different in practice.
Senator Sani Hanga, representing Kano Central Senatorial District and one of the bill’s most vocal and intellectually serious critics, issued a warning in December 2025 that has only grown in resonance since. Speaking at his constituency office in Kano, Hanga argued that state police would hand excessive and potentially catastrophic power to governors and endanger the foundations of Nigeria’s democracy at the subnational level. He grounded his argument not in abstraction but in immediate political experience.
Referencing the Emirship tussle in Kano State, one of the most politically charged succession disputes in recent Nigerian history, Hanga said: “If there is a state police, there would have been a civil war in Kano. I am telling you as a politician. There would have been a civil war.”
The remark was striking not for its hyperbole but for its restraint; a sitting senator describing, from direct political experience, the specific scenario in which a state police force would have been used not to maintain order but to prosecute a political conflict between factions of a ruling elite.
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Borno State Governor Babagana Zulum had previously expressed a related but distinct concern, warning that a decentralised policing system could be used by some governors to eliminate communities of different ethnic or tribal origins from within their states. His warning, issued in 2021 and never satisfactorily answered by the bill’s proponents, points to a dimension of the abuse risk that goes beyond partisan politics and into questions of ethnic security, minority rights, and the territorial integrity of communities in heterogeneous states.
Nigeria’s ethnic and religious map is extraordinarily complex. Many states contain significant minority populations whose security would, under a state police system, depend entirely on the goodwill of a state government that may be dominated by a different ethnic or religious constituency. The formal safeguards in the bill offer those minority communities a legal avenue of recourse. What they do not offer is protection in the immediate moment when a state police force, acting on instruction or informal direction, moves against them.
The political weaponisation risk is most acute during election periods, and it is here that the analysis of the bill’s implications must be most unflinching. Nigeria’s governorship elections have a long, well-documented, and largely unpunished history of electoral violence, voter intimidation, ballot snatching, result manipulation, and the deployment of security forces to suppress opposition turnout in rival strongholds. These practices have occurred under a federal policing system in which the Inspector-General of Police is nominally independent of state executives.
The historical record of federal police conduct during Nigerian elections is itself far from clean; there are numerous documented instances of federal security forces acting in ways that benefited ruling parties at the state and federal levels. The creation of a state police force whose operational loyalty runs directly to the state government, whose command structure is embedded in state institutions, and whose officers live and work within the communities they police, removes even the formal distance that has existed between a state governor and the police force deployed within the state.
A security expert who spoke to The Sun on condition of anonymity, given the political sensitivity of the subject, put the election risk in direct terms: “What you are potentially creating is a situation where an incumbent governor facing a difficult re-election contest or seeking to install a chosen successor has access to an armed institution that is institutionally his. The Federal Police, whatever its failings, has at least a chain of command that runs upward to Abuja. State police runs downward to the Government House. That is a fundamentally different political dynamic and it has significant consequences for electoral integrity.”
This concern intersects with a dimension of Nigerian constitutional law that has received insufficient attention in the public debate around the bill, the immunity clause. Section 308 of the 1999 Constitution as amended provides that no civil or criminal proceedings may be instituted or continued against a person holding the office of President, Vice President, Governor, or Deputy Governor during their period of office. The provision is absolute in its terms. It admits of no exception for acts committed in the course of official duties, no exception for the abuse of state institutions, no exception for the deployment of security forces against citizens.
A governor who directs a state police force to intimidate political opponents, suppress legitimate protests, or visit violence upon a community that voted against the ruling party cannot be prosecuted for those acts while still occupying Government House. The victim of such abuse retains a theoretical legal remedy, actionable only after the governor’s tenure ends, by which time the political purpose of the abuse will long since have been achieved and the evidentiary trail may have been considerably obscured. The immunity clause is not a minor technical detail in this debate. It is the provision that converts a theoretical risk into a structural guarantee of impunity.
Beyond the question of abuse lies a second challenge whose consequences are less dramatic but potentially more enduring. The question of fiscal capacity and institutional sustainability. A publication, based on globally referenced police-to-population benchmarks and current estimates for police training and operational equipment in Nigeria, suggests that a medium-sized state with a population of five million people could require close to N50 billion simply to recruit, train, and equip a police force.
That figure excludes the costs of physical infrastructure, recurring salary payments, vehicles and their maintenance, weapons, communications technology, forensic capacity, and the full apparatus of a modern policing service. Nigeria has 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, and their fiscal capacities exist on a spectrum of extraordinary breadth.
The gap between Lagos State, which generates hundreds of billions of naira annually from its own internal revenue base and whose institutional capacity is, by Nigerian standards, relatively well developed, and a state like Yobe or Zamfara, which is heavily dependent on federal allocations and whose internal revenue is minimal, is not merely a difference of degree.
It is a difference that will produce qualitatively different police services; a well-resourced, professionally trained, adequately equipped Lagos State Police on one side, and a chronically underfunded, poorly trained, inadequately equipped Kebbi State Police struggling to meet its basic operational requirements on the other.
The consequences of that inequality would be felt not as an abstract matter of institutional design but in the lived security experiences of Nigerian citizens whose protection would become, in large part, a function of the economic fortune of the state in which they happen to reside. The constitutional right to security is a uniform right. Its practical realisation would, under a state police system insufficiently supported by federal fiscal equalisation mechanisms, become deeply unequal.
This is a risk that the bill, as currently drafted, does not adequately address. The provisions for national policing standards and federal oversight do not resolve the fundamental problem that a state which lacks the financial resources to meet those standards cannot be compelled to do so without federal financial support that the bill does not guarantee.
There is also the spectre of institutional decay over time. The Nigeria Police Force was established as a centralised national institution with full constitutional backing and, at the moment of its creation, reasonable political support. What decades of underfunding, poor governance, political interference, and institutional neglect have produced is a police force that falls dramatically short of the United Nations recommended benchmark of one officer for every 400 citizens, that is associated in public perception more with harassment and extortion than with genuine public protection, and that has been unable to meet the security demands of a country of over 220 million people.
The institutional pathologies of the federal police were not inevitable. They were produced by specific governance failures, specific funding decisions, and specific patterns of political interference over decades. There is no structural guarantee that state police forces, created in states with weaker fiscal positions and weaker governance institutions, will not replicate those pathologies at a faster rate. The reform that was intended to escape the failures of centralised policing could, within a generation, reproduce those same failures across 36 separate jurisdictions simultaneously.
This analysis is not intended to suggest that the state police bill is wrong in its fundamental ambition. The case for community-rooted policing is legitimate, well-evidenced internationally, and responsive to a genuine and urgent security emergency. Countries with federal systems comparable in their complexity to Nigeria, including the United States, Germany, India, and Australia, operate state or sub-federal police forces alongside national law enforcement agencies.
In those systems, localised policing has, in many contexts, delivered more responsive, more accountable, and more community-connected security than a purely centralised model. The international evidence does not condemn the idea. It qualifies it, specifically by demonstrating that the effectiveness of decentralised policing depends critically on the strength of the democratic institutions, the quality of the rule of law, the independence of oversight bodies, and the fiscal capacity of the sub-national governments that operate those forces.
Nigeria’s challenge is to build those conditions with sufficient rigour before, or at minimum alongside, the creation of state police forces, rather than hoping that the forces themselves will somehow generate the institutional environment necessary to keep them in check.
The window that remains open, as the bill completes its journey through the Senate and the state Houses of Assembly, is the opportunity to strengthen the safeguards substantially. Independent analysts and constitutional lawyers who have reviewed the bill have identified several specific areas where the protective provisions could be hardened, making State Police Service Commissioners removable only through a supermajority of the State House of Assembly rather than at executive discretion; defining the conditions and procedure for federal intervention with greater specificity and speed; establishing clear criminal penalties, not merely administrative consequences, for the political misuse of state police by office-holders, penalties that would survive and become actionable after the conclusion of a governor’s tenure; creating accessible, adequately resourced, and genuinely independent complaint mechanisms through which citizens can report abuse; and establishing a federal co-funding mechanism that provides fiscal support to states below a defined capacity threshold, preventing the emergence of a two-tier policing system defined by economic inequality.
Whether the National Assembly will use the remaining legislative process to strengthen the bill in these ways, or whether the momentum of an overwhelmingly popular reform will carry it through to enactment largely in its current form, is the next question that this debate must answer. The political pressure to pass the bill quickly is considerable. The security emergency that has driven it is real and growing. But the history of constitutional reforms enacted in haste, at the cost of the deliberation necessary to get the details right, is in Nigeria a long and cautionary one.
A state police system that functions as designed would represent one of the most significant advances in Nigerian governance since 1999. A state police system that becomes what its critics fear, an armed instrument of gubernatorial dominance, electoral manipulation, and the suppression of political dissent, would represent something categorically different; a constitutional amendment that deepened the very insecurity it was created to resolve, and handed to the most powerful politicians in Nigeria’s subnational landscape a weapon that the immunity clause ensures they can wield without immediate legal consequence.
The bill has been passed. The work of ensuring that it delivers on its promise, rather than its peril, has only just begun.
