Nigerian politicians have a peculiar talent. They can support an idea in January and condemn it in June, with a straight face, and expect us to applaud both positions. The latest victim of this gymnastics is state police, an idea that had near universal backing until the National Assembly actually passed it and sent it to the states for concurrence.
Mind you, I am not surprised. I have watched this movie before. Every time insecurity claims another batch of lives, the same politicians who now want the bill delayed are the ones who rush to television studios to lecture us on the government’s failure to protect its citizens. Consistency is not their strong suit.
Let’s start with the numbers, because numbers don’t lie even when politicians do. Nextier’s Nigeria Violent Conflicts Database recorded 279 kidnap victims across the country in May 2026 alone, alongside 156 violent incidents that claimed 842 lives. Compared to May 2025, violent incidents rose by 51.5 per cent, casualties jumped by 90.1 per cent, and kidnap numbers climbed by 19.7 per cent. Read that again. Casualties nearly doubled in one year.
As if that figure was not sobering enough, a separate six-year investigation by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, unveiled in Jos and titled “Four Times Boko Haram? How the World Misreads Nigeria’s Violence,” puts the death toll from terrorism-related violence between 2020 and 2025 at 79,323, with 34,773 civilians abducted in the same window. ORFA’s Senior Research Analyst, Frans Vierhout, says that translates to roughly seven attacks and 36 deaths every single day. More than 42,000 of the dead were civilians who had nothing to do with any war.
These are not abstract figures for a research paper. These are Nigerians. Farmers ambushed on their own land. Traders are kidnapped on federal highways. Schoolchildren snatched from dormitories while the country debates grammar. When these killings happen, opposition politicians and civil society activists are usually the first to march to the nearest camera to declare that the government has failed and must act decisively. Fair enough.
So when the National Assembly finally passed the state police bill, sending it down to the 36 state assemblies for the 24 required to give assent, I genuinely expected some form of national relief. I expected editorials celebrating a rare moment of legislative courage. Instead, a curious thing happened. Many of the same voices that spent years demanding state police did a complete about-turn and started finding reasons to kill it.
Suddenly, the governors will abuse it. Suddenly, it will be weaponised against political opponents. Suddenly, the timing is wrong. Some have even suggested we shelve the whole idea until after the next election cycle, as though insurgents and kidnappers have agreed to observe an electoral truce.
Look at the pattern of attacks that keep filling our newspapers. Farming communities in Benue and Plateau wake up to fresh killings almost every other week, and by the time state governors mobilise a response, the attackers are long gone into forests that stretch across multiple state boundaries. Travellers on the Zamafara- Katsina and other highways have been kidnapped so routinely that some now avoid the roads entirely, choosing costlier flights instead. In each of these cases, the complaint from residents is the same: the police response came too late, from too far away, commanded by officers who do not know the terrain and answer to a hierarchy in Abuja rather than to the people being killed. That is precisely the gap state police is designed to close, assuming we build it properly instead of strangling it in the crib.
Let me be honest about the governors. Yes, some of them will abuse the state police. We have governors who cannot be trusted to run a local government election, let alone command an armed force. That fear is not imaginary; it is grounded in the conduct we have watched for 27 years of this democracy. But since when did the possibility of abuse become a sufficient reason to abandon an entire policy in a country burying an average of 36 citizens a day?
By that logic, we should have scrapped the Nigeria Police Force decades ago, given how comprehensively it has been abused, politicised and weaponised by whoever sits in Aso Rock. We should have scrapped the EFCC and the ICPC, too, given how selectively they pursue looters depending on which party they belong to. Nigeria does not have the luxury of waiting for a perfect institution before we build one. We build the institution and the guardrails as we go.
That is the honest argument for state police: not that governors are angels, but that a single, centrally controlled federal police force patrolling a country of over 220 million people across 36 states has comprehensively failed. One policeman is currently expected to cover roughly 700 Nigerians, far below the United Nations recommended ratio. You cannot police Sokoto and Bayelsa with the same command structure sitting in Abuja and expect local intelligence, quick response and community trust to magically appear.
What we need now is not another round of postponement. We need state assemblies to move fast, and we need safeguards built into the enabling law before governors get their hands on a new toy. Tenure protection for state police commissioners to prevent them from being sacked on a governor’s whim.
A state police service commission, independent of the governor’s office, is to handle recruitment and discipline. Clear constitutional boundaries on the use of state police during elections, so that no governor can turn a security outfit into a private thuggery unit dressed in uniform. These are not difficult conditions to write into law. What is difficult is the political will to write them honestly rather than use them as an excuse to kill the whole project.
I also find it revealing that the loudest calls for postponement are coming ahead of an election season. As a rule, I don’t believe in coincidences in Nigerian politics. Governors who fear losing grip on the security architecture during a contested election cycle have every incentive to delay state police until after votes are counted. That is not statesmanship. That is self-preservation dressed up as caution.
God forbid we allow election calculations to determine whether Nigerians live or die between now and next year. Is an election more important than the nearly 843 lives lost in a single month? Nobody serious should be asking us to choose between electoral convenience and citizen safety. There is no version of that trade that a responsible leader should be willing to make. Ask the families in Nextier’s May report whether they would have preferred a delayed election or a living relative, and you already know the answer.
As I have said previously on this page, insecurity in Nigeria has never been a partisan problem, and it must never be treated as one. Boko Haram does not check party cards before it strikes a village. Kidnappers on the Abuja-Kaduna highway do not ask their victims whether they voted for APC or PDP. Every governor, regardless of party, inherits the same broken security architecture the moment they are sworn in. That should be reason enough for all 36 state assemblies to move on this bill with urgency rather than partisan calculation.
What this entire episode has exposed, once again, is that a good number of our politicians do not actually care about the thousands of Nigerians dying to banditry, terrorism and kidnapping. What they care about is how any given policy affects their own grip on power. Insecurity is useful to them as a talking point when they are in opposition, and inconvenient as a policy commitment the moment it threatens their control. Nigerians are being used as props in a script written entirely for the benefit of the political class.
We deserve better than a political establishment that treats mass killings as a campaign issue in one season and a security threat in another, depending on whose ox is being gored. The state police bill is not a perfect solution, and nobody is pretending it is. But it is a necessary one, and further delay only means more Nextier reports, more ORFA investigations, and more names added to a body count that has already grown too long. Our politicians must decide, once and for all, whether they are in it for the country or for themselves. These are the issues.
