Amidst the clamor for an amendment of the country’s Constitution to allow the creation of State Police to coexist with Federal Policing, Imo State Governor, Senator Hope Uzodinnma, has dismissed it as a needless agitation.
He spoke on Sunday night on a Channels TV live program, “Sunday Politics.”
The Imo State Governor said what was needed was effective collaboration between the State Governors and the Federal Government-controlled security agencies to mitigate the scary security situation in the country.
Senator Uzodinnma, who incidentally is the Chairman of the South East Governors Forum and the Forum of Governors on the platform of the APC, the Progressives Governors Forum, maintained that State Policing was expensive, and the majority of the states lack the financial capacity to fund it.
He said, “Security is very expensive, and I can’t see any subnational government in Nigeria today that can fund, completely, the cost of providing adequate security in the various subnational governments. So, working together as a Federation in synergy with the federal security system… when people say governors are handicapped, I don’t know what they are talking about. Yes, we need the support of the federal government; we need to articulate properly, working in synergy with federal security agencies as a subnational government, how we can create a working relationship that will allow us to be on the same page to be able to fight crime in the country.
“The reason why we must align with the federal government is that the economy of some subnational government is lean, the funding requirement is enormous. So, it has to be a collaboration. Even when the federal government has allowed the Vigilante approach, how many states have been able to fund an effective and efficient vigilante organization? State Police will only work if the states are in a position to fund it! So, when we talk about true federalism, we aren’t joking. As I speak, many of our states can’t even fund their existence without an allocation from the federal government, and the meaning of government isn’t coming to consume. The meaning of government is that you fend for yourself; you make the money before you can spend it.
“It isn’t only about State Police; when people talk about restructuring, we are already a Federation with subnational governments. The first thing to establish is, how many states are viable? Because the geographical jurisdiction of a state and what makes you autonomous as a federating unit is your ability to exist. If you are a state that is existing at the mercy of the federal government, it is now left to you to see whether you are worth existence or not. So, we think we need subnational government that must first earn the money before you can spend it.”
Reacting to the agitation against the relocation of some departments of the Central Bank of Nigeria and the headquarters of the Federal Airport Aviation Authority (FAAN) to Lagos, the Imo State Governor justified the move just as he alleged that certain forces who lost in the last general elections were masterminds of the clamor in the North to discredit the Bola Tinubu administration.
The Imo state governor recalled that as Chairman, Senate Committee on Aviation in the National Assembly, he was always shuttling between Lagos and the National Assembly, noting that Lagos remains the hub of the aviation sector in Nigeria.
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