There is some motion towards improving the national security architecture. President Buhari bestirred himself this week and authorised the release of some N13 billion for the take-off of community policing effected through the special constabulary. It represents a step forward, warts and all.
The president mooted the idea in 2019 as an alternative to state police. In January 2020, the Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar Adamu, was ordered to recruit 50 volunteers in each of the 774 local government areas; he in turn ordered state police commissioners, traditional rulers and others to form screening committees to carry out the presidential order.
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Then, as often happens here, it became quiet on that front. The insecurity continues to worsen without a determined resolve on the part of the president, the nation’s chief security officer, to offer the Nigerian state a definitive answer to the problem consuming the country. Let us hope for some movement in this direction that would not be arrested by motion.
It seems to me however that the nation is going into this complicated business of improving the security architecture without the public any wiser. The current approach to refining or reconstructing the nation’s security architecture with community policing smacks of a cynical attitude on the part of the federal government. It wants to be seen to be responding to public demands for a second tier of policing a.k.a state police in an oblique way and in a manner that is unlikely to improve the security of the country.
We are clearly once again approaching a serious national problem with a cavalier attitude, beginning with a handsome vote seeking a public applause. As a nation, we are in the habit of tackling a problem with money before we define it and decide on how the money voted for it can best be used to successfully tackle it. The national landscape is full of failures of such decisions that washed good money down the gutters of Ajegunle.
It would be naïve to think or even suggest that committing such a handsome sum of money to community policing would be the answer to the effectiveness of the Nigeria Police as a reliable arm in the country’s security architecture. We do not know for sure how the special constabulary would complement the regular police. From the bits and pieces that escaped from the covers of official files last year, we know that they would not bear arms or have the power to arrest suspected criminals. They would be, for want of a better phrase, a volunteer force sans force. Their job has not, to the best of my knowledge, been defined to convince the public that this alternative route to state police is a well thought-out option deemed to be either as effective and productive as state police or even more so.
The Northern Regional government created the special constabulary, made up of volunteer civil servants in the regional public service willing to give their time in the evening to assist both the Nigeria police and the NA police in containing the menace of petty thieves in Kaduna. We cannot equate the relevance of the special constabulary then with a similar outfit today. Our insecurity has nothing to do with petty thieves. It has everything to do with violent criminals. How, tell me, would an unarmed special constable respond to a group of bandits and kidnappers armed with the ubiquitous and lethal AK-47?
The special constabulary should not be created through an administrative fiat. It should be created through an act of parliament as a complementary security agency to the Nigeria Police. Nor should it be created with an army of volunteers in their local government areas. That would be a recipe for its failure. If the president had submitted a bill on the creation or the formation of the special constabulary to the national assembly, it would have been debated in the open and the public would be much better informed on what it is all about.
The success of this option as an alternative to state police would depend largely on the co-operation of the public. That co-operation must not be taken for granted if the public is uninformed or ignorant about it. The need to reform the nation’s security architecture to make it effective enough to serve the security needs of the Nigerian state cries out loudly to be attended to.
We may have to wait for the full details of how the special constabulary would operate to judge its potential relevance to our security needs. But one pointer stands out like a sore thumb. It is funding. The current federal budget contains no provision for community policing. The N13 billion given to it by the president must have come from another source. It is not the right way to run the system.
When the idea was first mooted, the federal and state governments argued among themselves as to which of them should fund it. This must be satisfactorily resolved before the new system can move forward. Surely, the N13 billion cannot be a one-time payment for the current and future funding needs of community policing. It requires sustained funding captured in the annual federal or state budgets or both.
When all is said and done, we will still come down to this: we are running away from the inevitability of a second tier of policing consistent with a federal system of government. Buhari may not like it but he is not unaware that the federal government is clearly unable to bear the burden of our national security with a single federal police, poorly staffed, poorly funded, poorly motivated and poorly oriented as a civil force. If a single federal police was a wise option during the long years of military dictatorship, it is a naïve option and deleterious to the health of democracy.
Security is local and the centre cannot appropriate it to itself without weakening, as is indeed the case now, the fabrics of our national security. By the time we find the will to apply common sense to a commonsensical problem, a lot of money would have been wasted and the nation and its citizens would be utterly frustrated. And barring a miracle, the criminal lords would still make life in our country brutish.
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