If Nigeria isn’t ripe for state police, what is it ripe for?

YOU would not imagine, assuming you were still firmly nestled in Plato’s cave, that the United States is some 248 years old already. The dissensions, the deadly push for power, with all the trappings of yet another civil war barely disguised, could make you think that the United States is some rookie country. Yet it is the world’s (self-appointed) manager, the beacon of democracy whose president is the leader of the free world. Apparently, nations are works in progress, regardless of the self-confident assertions of their greatest heroes and unifiers. Ask Spain. Ask the UK.

If countries like the United States which are federally run in every sense and have had what is called state police for centuries still have their security issues and concerns, it sounds utterly hollow to think that Nigeria with 64 years of Independence behind it is not ripe for state policing. Indeed, I have serious questions about the idea of a country being (un)ripe for anything, because life by its very nature is a perpetual struggle, a contention between forces pulling in different directions. If Nigeria isn’t ripe for state policing, just what is it ripe for? Anarchy?

Think about it: there were state police forces/armies before the Lugardian experience with all its strenghts and lunacies, and someone says Nigeria in 2024 is somehow unripe for state police, a formation inherent in the very nature of human existence? Surely, the peoples of the Oyo, Benin and Borgu empires would never have imagined that the time would come when they would need permission from some powers beyond their geography to own and hold the weapons of self-protection, because some authorities fostered by the forces of combination have somehow decreed that the time is not ripe for a basic condition of humanity!

So resolutely, says the Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, “does nature abhor a vacuum.” Which is why in the absence of state police, a facility that came with independence but was abrogated with the 1963 Constitution, crime has festered to the point of sheer lawlessness. For years, Nigeria has occupied a prominent spot on the Global Terrorism Index, being one of the world’s most extensively terrorised countries. Apparently, Nigeria is/has been ‘ripe’ for kidnapping, armed robbery, and the rape and murder of farmers on their ancestral locations. Thankfully, those who love Nigeria more than justice and fairness dictate cannot deny these obvious crimes against humanity. Nigeria needs state police to be a nation-state.