By Adetokunbo Oguntuga PhD
I once stood gidigba on this same mountain of argument until the monster of insecurity metastasized beyond tolerable limits. At some point, sentiment must yield to reality. Nigeria cannot continue to recycle failed strategies and expect miraculous outcomes. That is not governance. it is institutionalized self-deception.
What Nigeria needs is a paradigm shift. One firmly anchored in law, local intelligence, and operational effectiveness. That is precisely the rationale behind the clamour for State Police. Can it be abused? Oh yes. But as the ancient legal maxim reminds us, abusus non tollit usum-the abuse of a thing is no argument against its proper use.
By that logic, we should abolish virtually every institution in Nigeria. The military is frequently abused. In some cases, influential citizens deploy soldiers as personal enforcers or “maiguards” in private disputes. The judiciary, too, is occasionally manipulated by those with deep pockets and political influence. Yet no reasonable person suggests dismantling either institution because of abuse. That argument has become tired, stale, and intellectually exhausted.
Every era presents its own peculiar challenges, and every challenge demands a strategy commensurate with its scale and complexity. The insecurity ravaging Nigeria today is not the Nigeria of yesterday. It requires fresh thinking, bold reforms, and decentralized responses.
For years, billions upon billions of naira have been poured into the military campaign against banditry, kidnapping, and terrorism. Yet the results remain largely underwhelming. To many Nigerians, the war against insecurity increasingly resembles a perpetual enterprise rather than a mission approaching victory.
The time has come to domesticate this fight. Security must become local, intelligence-driven, and community-rooted. Every state should have the legal authority to recruit, train, equip, and deploy personnel who understand the terrain, speak the language, know the communities, and can distinguish strangers from residents.
And if insecurity persists after the establishment of State Police, governors will find it far more difficult to manufacture excuses. The era of passing responsibility to Abuja will be over. States will possess the authority to arm, fund, and operationalize their own security architecture. Criminals armed with assault rifles cannot be confronted with whistles and dane guns. It must be a credible force capable of matching threat for threat and capacity for capacity.
State Police does not magically solve insecurity overnight, but it eliminates the endless alibis from Governors that have dominated the national conversation for decades. It transfers responsibility to their doorsteps; where accountability can be more easily demanded and measured.
The question before us is no longer whether the current model has failed. The evidence is already written across our headlines. The real question is whether we possess the courage to embrace a new security architecture before insecurity further erodes the very foundations of the Nigerian state.