They gathered under a low sun and a higher anxiety, a small circle of elders, robes folded, faces weathered by winter politics and summer violence. When Yusuf Abubakar, a senior voice among the Northern Progressive Elders Group, finished speaking the room felt ten degrees colder: “If the federal police can be weaponised against the opposition, one can only imagine how much worse it would be if governors had their own police forces.”* The warning was blunt, immediate, and aimed squarely at the presidential office.
Their timing was deliberate. Just hours earlier President Bola Tinubu had reiterated publicly that the creation of state police is now “inevitable” as part of a strategy to tackle the nation’s deepening insecurity.
Tinubu’s pledge, framed as a necessary decentralisation to bring security closer to communities, suddenly collided with an older fear: devolving coercive power into fragile political hands risks turning neighbourhood protectors into partisan enforcers.
A reasonable fix — Or A Political Time Bomb?
On paper, the idea sounds sensible. Nigeria’s federal police have struggled for years to cover a country the size of Western Europe while responding to banditry, kidnappings and communal conflict.
A state police model promises faster response times, local intelligence, and community trust, especially if designed with legal safeguards. That was the promise Tinubu and other proponents sold this week.
But the elders’ reply is not ideological nitpicking. It is historical memory and practical caution. They pointed to recent episodes in states such as Kaduna and Kebbi, where critics say security forces were seen as partial, used to intimidate rivals, stifle political events, or respond unevenly to violence. If federal forces, constitutionally accountable and (at least formally) institutionally insulated, have been accused of bias, the elders ask: what happens when governors control the guns, radios and recruitment? The potential for abuse multiplies.
The elders also warned that rushing a state police law ahead of the 2027 general elections could weaponise security architecture for political persecution.
That’s not alarmist conjecture, it’s a forecast grounded in recent patterns of enforcement, contestation, and local-level grievance.
Under The Surface
This is where the debate gets hot. Proponents argue that the national police can’t do what local forces can, and that devolving responsibility, with a proper legislative framework, funding formula, and federal oversight, will deliver better results.
The president has signalled he wants to work with governors and the National Assembly to get the architecture right.
Sceptics don’t deny the security gaps. They fear that who controls the state police will matter more than how it is structured.
In Nigeria’s highly polarized states, governors have both political enemies and patronage systems that could be reinforced with local security forces, not reined in by them. The outcome? A patchwork of state police forces that protect incumbents more than citizens. BusinessDay sums up that the debate is already dividing regions and political classes.
What The Elders Want Instead
The Northern Progressive Elders Group did not call for inaction. Their ask was surgical: strengthen institutions that already exist, invest in accountability, improve training and oversight, and run a long campaign of public enlightenment on security rights — rather than leap to a decentralised model that could be abused. “What this country needs is justice, rule of law, and fair application of security measures for everyone,” Yusuf Abubakar said.
Those suggestions are practical and inexpensive compared with building, staffing and sustaining dozens of separate police forces — each with recruitment, pensions, procurement and politics attached. But they are also slower, less dramatic, and therefore easier for politicians to ignore.
The Wider Danger: Politics Trumps Protection
At bottom, the elders’ warning is a hedged moral claim: don’t let clever governance fixes become blunt instruments of political control.
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Tinubu’s insistence that state police is “inevitable” may be sincere; insecurity is real and urgent. But inevitability is not an excuse for haste. The wrong model, rushed into law, could convert legitimate efforts to protect communities into systems that protect power.
A Country’s Choice
Nigeria stands at a crossroads: design a decentralised security architecture with patient legislation, robust oversight and civic buy-in, or risk handing governors the tools to remake policing into partisan power.
The Northern elders have chosen their words carefully; they are warning, not rejecting. That caution should not be dismissed as nostalgia.
It is a reminder that when you centralize force, you must centralize safeguards, and when you decentralize, you must build iron-clad, apolitical protections first. Otherwise, we will have traded one danger for another.
