State Police Insufficient: Ezekwesili Urges Constitutional Reform

After evaluating the proposal to create state police forces, former Minister of Education Obiageli Ezekwesili addressed an open letter to President Bola Tinubu, the National Assembly, the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, and the public. She argued that establishing state police alone will not solve Nigeria’s insecurity and instability.

The letter, posted on Monday across her social media accounts, emphasized that a comprehensive restructuring of the country is, in her view, a more sustainable solution to the underlying problems.

Entitled “State Police Is Not the Answer. Restructuring Nigeria Is,” Ezekwesili wrote, “The Tinubu administration’s renewed push for State Police has reopened one of the most consequential public policy debates in Nigeria’s democratic history.”

She noted that the proposal reflects concerns over national insecurity.

“The country’s security architecture is failing. Terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, violent extremism, communal conflicts and organised criminality have overwhelmed the capacity of a centrally controlled police force to secure lives and property across a country of more than 230 million people. For many citizens, therefore, state police appear to be an obvious and long‑overdue solution,” she stated.

Using survey data, Ezekwesili cited recent Afrobarometer findings: 79 percent of Nigerians view kidnapping and abduction as a serious national problem; 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 neighbourhood during the previous year. “These are not merely security statistics. They are indicators of a profound crisis of state effectiveness and citizen confidence,” she added.

Regarding the state police proposal, she warned, “Yet the fact that state police is necessary does not mean it is sufficient. The danger confronting Nigeria today is that the country may once again mistake a symptom for the disease itself.”

She continued, “The security crisis is real, but it is not fundamentally a policing crisis. It is the manifestation of a deeper constitutional, governance and political‑economy crisis that has steadily eroded state capacity, weakened accountability and undermined the effectiveness of public institutions.”

The former minister said the central question before Nigeria should not be whether governors ought to control police forces. “The more important question is whether the constitutional architecture governing the Nigerian federation remains fit for purpose,” she stated.

Ezekwesili also discussed Nigeria’s constitutional structure, saying, “At the heart of the problem lies a constitutional order that concentrates excessive authority, fiscal resources and political power at the centre.”

“Although Nigeria describes itself as a federation, many of its institutional arrangements bear the characteristics of a highly centralised state. The Constitution allocates 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 matters because the State Police debate focuses on only one item among dozens. Police is merely one of sixty‑eight subjects constitutionally monopolised by the federal government.”

“The question therefore is not whether policing should be decentralised. It should be decentralised. This arrangement is neither accidental nor historically inevitable. What Nigerians often describe as federalism today is therefore, in many respects, a unitary system wearing federal clothing.”