By John Mayaki
I read a piece by Vanguard columnist Emmanuel Aziken, published last Saturday, wherein the veteran journalist intervened in the state police debate while also devoting considerable attention to the person of Edo State Governor, Senator Monday Okpebholo.
I confess I was mildly intrigued with the wonky logic of Aziken’s arguments accompanied by the thinly disguised ad hominems with which he supported the said arguments.
Aziken’s intervention on the state police debate suffers from a fundamental defect: it mistakes political criticism for constitutional analysis. Rather than interrogate the merits and demerits of state policing as a structural reform, he constructs an elaborate case around his apparent disapproval of Governor Monday Okpebholo and then invites readers to treat that disapproval as a sufficient basis for accepting his legislative suggestions.
He has not pointed to anything in the bill seeking to institutionalise state police that is defective, but he is already making corrections while immolating Governor Okpebholo on the altar of his arguments. The result is less a serious examination of federalism and security than a political broadside disguised as constitutional commentary. Such an approach may produce dramatic headlines, but it contributes little to a debate that demands intellectual rigour and institutional reasoning.
To start with, the issue of state police is one that touches all 36 states of the federation and then the federal capital territory. Yet, Aziken only referenced one state and its governor throughout his nebulous literary excursus against the entire issue of state police.
He says, “no state better illustrates that fear today than Edo”. It sounds like a tired way of evading the due research and evidence to back the serious claims he is making against the constitutional amendment. He then proceeds to construct his entire argument on incidents that are neither central to the constitutional question nor particularly relevant to the broader debate on state policing.
The article never truly confronts the principle at the heart of the state police question. Instead, it proceeds on the assumption that because one governor may allegedly possess certain flaws, an entire constitutional arrangement must therefore be considered dangerous. That reasoning is difficult to sustain. Constitutional systems are not judged by the personalities of those who temporarily occupy office; they are judged by the safeguards, checks and accountability mechanisms built into them.
To transform a debate about institutions into a referendum on an individual officeholder is to evade the very question that ought to be answered: whether a properly regulated state police structure can better serve Nigeria’s security needs than the current centralised model.
It is apparent that the matter of state police was not his aim; it was merely a means to an end, which end was the debasing and mauling of Governor Okpebholo’s standing in the eyes of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the wider world. He little could disguise his animosity against the governor, whom he portrayed as a tyrant, a brute and a despot in his piece, while discussing a matter that touches the very heart of Nigeria’s security structure and federalism. Who references only one state in a federal republic of 36 states and portentously declares that democracy in that republic is being brought to an end? Such reasoning is an affront to intellectual rigour, a caricature of logical analysis and, ultimately, an unsustainable basis upon which to assess a constitutional reform.
Indeed, beyond the dramatic headline and apocalyptic warning about the “end of democracy,” the article leaves more questions than answers.
Its central weakness is simple and revealing. He simply reduced a constitutional question to a personality contest. The article spends considerable energy portraying Governor Monday Okpebholo as Exhibit A in the case against state police. The underlying suggestion is unmistakable: if this is how a governor behaves without control of a police force, imagine what he would do with one. It is a compelling political argument, yet it is not a compelling constitutional one. Constitutions are not designed around individuals. They are designed around institutions.
The test of any constitutional arrangement is not whether a particular officeholder is admirable or objectionable. The test is whether the system contains sufficient safeguards against abuse regardless of who occupies office. Otherwise, where does the argument end?
If only one governor can be cited as compelling evidence against state police, could one president not be cited as evidence against federal police? Could one corrupt legislator be used as an argument against legislatures? Could one compromised judge become an argument against the judiciary? Democracy does not operate on such logic. Indeed, democracy operates on “majority”, and to submit the argument against one governor as being compelling against 36 others and then term it the end of democracy is incongruous, dramatic and quite undemocratic to say the least. As a matter of fact, the article appears to assume what it should have proved. It assumes that abuse under a state police structure is inevitable while largely ignoring the fact that abuse is possible under any structure, including the present one.
This is where the debate should become more serious. Nigeria does not have a shortage of examples of alleged misuse of power by federal institutions. The mere centralisation of authority in Abuja has not immunised the country against accusations of political interference, selective enforcement or abuse of security agencies. The question therefore is not whether power can be abused. Power can and will always be abused. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. To hide policing structure behind a laborious network of bureaucracy and paperwork is to frustrate the policing system. You do not “cage” what has not even been born. You define the genetic material of its conception.
Curiously, critics of state police often demand a standard of perfection from governors that they do not demand from the Federal Government. Governors, we are told, cannot be trusted. Yet the same argument is rarely deployed with equal force against those who control the nation’s security architecture from the centre. Such reasoning creates the impression that abuse is dangerous when it occurs in a state unit but somehow less dangerous when it occurs in Abuja. That position is difficult to sustain. More importantly, the article overstates its case. To suggest that state police would signal the “end of democracy” is to advance a claim requiring substantial evidence.
Aziken should have showed us an existing arrangement for state police which is faulty and then criticised that structure. Such evidence is not provided. Many of the world’s leading democracies operate state, provincial or regional police structures. Their democratic credentials have not collapsed because policing authority is decentralised.
To say state police is a necessary evil is also false. State police as a structure is no less evil than any police at all. Nigeria already has a police force and this police force currently is stretched thin under the present arrangement as Aziken himself observed.
State police is only created to localise the structure and to decentralise accountability, making it even more accessible to the people. That is why the conversation should not revolve around Governor Okpebholo or any other governor for that matter. Governors come and go. Constitutional arrangements endure.
The proper debate should focus on safeguards. Who appoints police chiefs? Who disciplines them? Who investigates complaints? What role would state legislatures play? How would election security be protected? Under what circumstances would federal intervention be justified?
Ultimately, Aziken’s article is less an argument against state police than an argument against Governor Monday Okpebholo. He is entitled to his views on the governor, but personal political preferences cannot be elevated into constitutional doctrine. The danger in his reasoning is that it asks Nigerians to accept an institutional reform without providing any evidence of a current form. Those who seek to “cage” state police that has not even been created are free to make their case, but they must do so on the strength of evidence and constitutional reasoning, not on exaggerated predictions of democratic collapse.
Democracy in Nigeria will not end because policing is decentralised. If anything threatens democracy, it is the growing habit of replacing reasoned debate with alarmism, and constitutional analysis with political hostility. That is the real weakness in Aziken’s apocalyptic thesis.
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