The renewed debate on state police has produced familiar arguments about insecurity, constitutional restructuring and the distribution of policing powers between the Federal Government and the states. These arguments are important, but they often begin from the assumption that creating state police is merely a constitutional exercise, as though changing the location of police powers will automatically produce a different kind of policing. That assumption overlooks the more fundamental question about the character of the police institution itself. 

Before deciding where police powers should reside, it is necessary to understand what sort of police force Nigeria inherited, what purpose it was originally designed to serve, and how that design has survived long after the end of colonial rule. The history of policing in Nigeria did not begin with the idea of protecting citizens through public service. It began with the demands of conquest and colonial administration. 

The earliest police formations established by the British were not organised as civilian institutions that derived their authority from the consent of the communities they served. They were organised as armed bodies that accompanied imperial expansion into territories that had not accepted British rule, enforced colonial authority where it was resisted and maintained political order in the interest of the colonial state. Their primary loyalty, therefore, was not to the people among whom they operated but to the government that deployed them.

This understanding of colonial policing has been developed in the scholarship of British historians such as David Anderson and David Killingray. In different but complementary ways, both scholars argue that colonial police forces across the British Empire were fundamentally expeditionary institutions. They were established to secure colonial rule, suppress resistance and protect the authority of the imperial state rather than to provide the kind of civilian policing associated with democratic states. 

In ‘Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940’, edited by David Killingray and David Anderson, the contributors demonstrate that colonial police institutions were structured along military lines, trained to confront subject populations, and expected to preserve political order whenever imperial authority was challenged. Anderson’s own work on colonial Kenya shows how the police became central instruments of emergency rule during the Mau Mau conflict, while Killingray’s broader studies of colonial Africa explain that the police were conceived as coercive agencies whose principal task was to extend and defend imperial power.

That history matters today because Nigeria did not dismantle the colonial model at independence. The constitutional transfer of authority from Britain to Nigerian political leaders did not transform the institutional character of the police. The same Force, the same command philosophy and much of the same understanding of public order simply passed from colonial administrators to post-colonial rulers. Political power changed hands, but the police remained largely what they had always been: a force organised to project the authority of the state into society rather than to derive its legitimacy from society itself; or, more pointedly, a Force established as the violent face of the state—to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci. 

This historical inheritance also explains why the regional police of the First Republic became vulnerable to political manipulation. Many accounts of that period focus on partisan abuse, electoral intimidation, and the use of police forces by regional governments against political opponents. Those abuses certainly occurred and contributed to the eventual abolition of regional policing after the military intervention of 1966. The deeper problem, however, was that the regional police inherited the same expeditionary character as the colonial police from which they emerged. Constitutional restructuring redistributed control over the institution without altering the institution’s underlying philosophy. A Force created to enforce authority rather than to serve the people could easily become an instrument of political domination, regardless of whether it was controlled from Lagos or from Ibadan, Kaduna and Benin City.

This point deserves greater attention in the current debate because proposals for state police often assume that decentralisation alone will solve Nigeria’s policing problem. Decentralisation may improve responsiveness and local knowledge, but it cannot, by itself, change the institutional culture of an institution whose operational logic remains rooted in command, coercion, and distance from the communities it polices. 

A different constitutional arrangement may therefore produce different centres of control without producing a different conception of policing. Professor Chidi Odinkalu recently made a similar point during an interview on Arise Television, arguing that any serious proposal for state police must first confront the legal and justice dimensions of policing rather than treating the issue as a simple question of constitutional design. 

His argument deserves careful consideration because policing is one part of a much larger system that includes investigation, prosecution, the courts and the administration of justice. Altering the location of police authority without addressing the wider structure within which the police exercise their powers risks reproducing existing problems under a different constitutional arrangement.

Professor Odinkalu’s observation also returns the debate to the central question that has remained largely unanswered since independence. Nigeria’s Police Force continues to operate within a post-colonial structure that retains many of the assumptions of its colonial predecessor. The Force is still organised primarily to secure the authority of the state, while the legal and institutional arrangements that should place the citizen at the centre of policing remain comparatively weak. Any movement towards state police that ignores this inherited structure may succeed in changing who controls the police without changing what the police fundamentally are.

The conversation about state police should therefore begin with the institution itself before turning to the Constitution. A country that inherits an expeditionary police force cannot expect constitutional redistribution alone to produce democratic policing. Institutional reform must come before institutional relocation. Nigeria may simply reproduce at the state level the same problems that have accompanied centralised policing for decades. 

The second part of this column, to be published next week, takes up that institutional question. It examines the character of the police institution Nigeria inherited and, drawing on the experiences of Australia, India and the United States, explains why its colonial foundations continue to shape policing today and why meaningful institutional reform must precede any constitutional reallocation of policing powers.

Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette