By Olabode Opeseitan
Nigeria is living through a security reckoning. The signs are everywhere. Farmers abandon their fields. Students fear the road to school. Investors hesitate. Communities panic at the sound of distant gunfire. A nation of over 200 million people is being threatened by criminal networks that thrive in ungoverned spaces and exploit a policing system stretched far beyond its limits. Insecurity is not just a threat. It is the single greatest force dragging down the economy, inflating food prices, and suffocating opportunity.
For decades, Nigeria responded to this crisis with denial, repetition, and cosmetic fixes. Then the Tinubu administration broke with tradition. It looked squarely at the architecture of failure and said: enough. It began doing things differently from every government that came before it.
It confronted over one thousand ungoverned forests and created a solution: Forest Guards. By December 2025, President Tinubu had directed the National Security Adviser, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, to rapidly expand, train, and arm these guards nationwide. Over 7,000 recruits completed intensive training. States followed suit, with Kwara deploying 3,300 guards, Kaduna training 1,000, and Kebbi deploying 819. Spaces once surrendered to criminals are no longer entirely ungoverned.
It examined why border communities collapse so easily under pressure and strengthened the Border Communities Development Agency to deliver roads, clinics, schools, and water access across 21 states and 105 border local governments. Where the state ends, danger begins. Closing that gap became a priority.
It confronted the paralysis of local governments, hijacked for decades by governors who diverted grassroots resources into central pools they controlled at will. The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling of July 11, 2024 restored direct federal allocations to all 774 councils. By early 2026, the Federal Government was threatening executive orders to enforce compliance. Mr. Mohammed Shehu, Chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission, bluntly declared, “The crisis we are facing today is largely due to the non-functionality of local governments. Even under military rule, councils performed better than what we see today.” The resistance has collapsed. Resources are flowing where they belong. Councils are beginning to pay attention to security, and the results are starting to show.
A Nation of 200 Million With One Overstretched Police Force
Nigeria has fewer than 400,000 police personnel. Until recently, a significant portion guarded VIPs, leaving ordinary citizens dangerously exposed. The United States, with a comparable population, has over 18,000 policing agencies, including state and county police. Nigeria has only one: a federal force overwhelmed by sheer scale.
The Tinubu administration pushed aggressively for state police, breaking barriers that defeated every previous government. On June 10, 2026, the House of Representatives passed the constitutional amendment with 289 votes in favour and only one dissent. The Senate followed on June 24. The bill now awaits ratification by State Houses of Assembly.
You would expect a nation tormented by insecurity to welcome this development with relief. Many Nigerians did. Some did not.
The Opposition That Reveals More Than It Conceals
A chorus of voices rose against state police. Their reasons varied: fears of political misuse, concerns about cost, claims that Nigeria’s democracy is not mature enough. Yet none of them engaged the central question: how does Nigeria escape its insecurity nightmare without decentralising policing?
More revealing is the geography of the opposition. Banditry has hollowed out communities in Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Niger, and Kaduna. Farmers have fled ancestral lands. Mass abductions barely make headlines anymore. Yet some of the loudest voices against reform come from this same region.
Hakeem Baba‑Ahmed of the People’s Redemption Party dismissed the reform as suspicious and declared that this is “the worst possible time” to implement state police. The Northern Progressive Elders Group warned of political weaponisation. Honourable Bashir Usman of Kaduna was the lone dissenting vote in the House, even as his own state had already begun training 1,000 forest guards to confront the very crisis he claims state police will worsen.
But not all northern voices opposed the move. Senator Uba Sani the Governor of Kaduna State has repeatedly argued that the current centralized system is overwhelmed and cannot protect citizens across vast rural stretches. His conclusion was simple: the status quo is not sustainable.
Notice the pattern. Critics diagnose without prescribing. They identify risk without proposing remedy. They invoke procedure while people are dying.
The Safeguards That Critics Ignore
The National Assembly anticipated concerns about abuse and built strict guardrails into the Constitution Alteration (State Police) Bill, 2026. These protections are clear, enforceable, and designed to prevent governors from weaponising state police.
1. Commissioners Can Reject Unlawful Orders
A State Commissioner of Police is not bound to obey directives that are unlawful, unconstitutional, or violate human rights. Any dispute is escalated to the National Police Council, whose ruling is binding on both the governor and the state force.
2. Explicit Prohibitions Against Political Misuse
Governors are legally barred from deploying state police to harass opponents, suppress protests, stifle free speech, or advance ethnic or religious agendas.
3. Independent State Police Service Commissions
Recruitment, promotions, and discipline are handled by independent commissions. Governors cannot hire or fire officers at will. Appointing or removing a Commissioner requires National Police Council involvement and a supermajority vote in the State House of Assembly.
4. Federal Standards and Regulatory Oversight
States must follow national standards set by the National Assembly, covering recruitment criteria, permitted firearms, training manuals, and accountability systems.
5. Emergency Federal Intervention Clause
The Federal Government retains the power to assume control of a state’s police under defined triggers such as collapse of law and order, widespread human rights abuses, or threats to national security.
These safeguards dismantle the argument that state police equals unchecked gubernatorial power. The architecture is balanced, layered, and constitutionally protected.
The Real Question Nigeria Must Ask
The Northern Elders Forum captured the moment with clarity: state police is overdue, and Nigeria has exhausted every other option. Maintaining the current federal-only structure is not neutral. It is a choice with consequences measured in lives lost, communities destroyed, and an economy held hostage by fear.
The Tinubu administration is not claiming perfection. It is claiming direction. There is a difference between a government building solutions and an opposition tearing them down without offering alternatives.
Gradually, the identity of Nigeria’s real enemies is being exposed. They are not only the bandits in the forests or the kidnappers on the highways. Some wear agbada. Some hold press conferences. Some invoke the names of great men they have long since betrayed. Their greatest weapon is not a gun. It is the ability to make reform look dangerous, to make progress sound suspicious, and to make the people too afraid to demand better.
Nigeria is watching. And Nigeria is beginning to understand.
Opeseitan, a communication expert, is a fellow of World Press Institute and Poynter Institute in the United States
