Governance in Nigeria, military or civil, has always been fraught with many publicly funded theories and projects that appear excellent on paper but produce awful results when implemented.
Be it in the management of the economy or political engineering, the country has remained one large laboratory for a recurring nervous search for solutions to problems that political will and attitudinal change could have rested on permanently.
To forge poorly welded nationalities into a single sovereignty in 1960, a parliamentary system of government was adopted. History has confirmed that the incurable frailties of politicians failed the maiden independent national government, not the system.
Today, after experimenting with the Presidential system of government cloned from the United States of America in 1979 and 1999, many thoughtful Nigerians have begun to share in the conclusion that our unceasing afflictions may not be all domiciled in our system of government but largely in ourselves!
Good governance is driven more by vision, altruism and patriotism than quick fixes thrown up by happenstance. In the 70s, General Gowon literally threw money at public servants in what many would today charitably call “empowerment”!
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The attendant inflation, though unforeseen or ignored by the junta, gained a riotous entry into the then-stable excess petrodollar-serviced economy. Another military adventurer came in 1985. He adopted a civil nomenclature of a president in military uniform. He diagnosed godfatherism as the ravenous virus in civil politics.
To exorcise the malignant virus, he resorted to public resources to establish and provide infrastructure for political Parties! This novel experiment all ended in 1993 with no successful transition to full democratic government.
The present civil government midwifed by General Abubakar in 1999 has arguably survived infant mortality. And it is approaching three decades of uninterrupted lifespan. But it cannot boast of the uninterrupted good health of the polity and economy.
The daily increasing insecurity unleashed by bandits, terrorists and kidnappers has forced the national government to consider the establishment of State Police as a solution. The thinking is that the indigenous Police institution will comb the nooks and crannies of each state to neutralise terrorists and kidnappers!
A very ambitious project predicated on wrong assumptions, which may be counterproductive. A security institution like the Police should not be a panic invention. If and when established, it will rival the already ill-funded federal police force and birth unavoidable role conflict.
The exponents of state Police have not sufficiently reckoned with the economic capacities of states in our dysfunctional federalism! Many states may abandon life-changing projects to raise and equip an elite army in the name of the police force.
No need to posit here that with generous funding, personnel morale will be high to achieve and exceed the constitutionally entrenched roles. Many state governors will use the proposed state Police to overrun neighbouring states during boundary skirmishes, crush internal political opposition and perpetuate nepotism in the choice of leadership and command control of the envisaged state security agency.
We should not allow the present insecurity challenges to lead us to the wrong destination because of an ill-digested roadmap! The same quick-fix solution to reduce the powers of the national election commission, INEC, stampeded the military in 1999 to cede the conduct of local government elections to states.
Today, local elections at that tier of government have acquired, in conduct and outcome, the ignoble description of statutory selection. The establishment of state Police is a one-size-fits-all solution for insecurity, which will be counterproductive both sooner and later!
If the government cannot combat insecurity with better funding, personnel training, maximum punishment for identified sponsors and foot soldiers of terrorism/kidnappers, creating a new constitutional armed wing of a state-controlled hit squad is most unnecessary and uncalled for in the absence of true federalism.
