State police should be created before 2027 elections —Bewaji, ex-Rep Minority Leader

By Philip Ibitoye

Dr. Wunmi Bewaji is a legal practitioner and Minority Leader of the House of Representatives from 1999 to 2003.

The Kaiama attacks in Kwara reportedly killed over 160 residents in a single episode. What does this scale of violence say about the limits of Nigeria’s centralised policing system?

Well, the centralised policing has never worked, you know, in a federal state. It has never worked. But the issue of what happened in Kwara is far more than the issue of policing. It also has to do with the attitude of the locals themselves in aiding and abetting criminality in the name of religion. There’s policing, but everybody has to take part in that policing. Security is everybody’s business. There’s no way all of us, over 200 million Nigerians, can become policemen. Even if we have local government police, if people aid and abet criminals in their communities, there’s nothing the police can do.

The governor of the state, AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, has claimed that the people were killed because they resisted the terrorists. Residents also said that they had cried to the state government for help for months, that terrorists may invade their communities, but they were met with inaction. Do you think the loss of lives could have been forestalled or even completely prevented if there was police presence in the area?

But for a while, for a period of time, these people have been coming into that particular community. They have been coming into that community in the name of religion. And they have been preaching in that particular community for a length of time. It was only at a particular point when some people started suspecting them, that they now decided, okay, we are not going to give them a chance again. Then that was the time they informed the authorities. So it happened that the terrorists now got to know that they had been reported to the authorities. So their coming back was some kind of reprisal. So in the name of religion, people have to be very careful because people come in all guises, you know, with deception, you know, to come into a particular community. I’m saying this to you because I’m also involved in the trial in the North-Central of some of the captured terrorists. So, I know what I’m talking about.

But in the end, do you think that initiatives like state police can still help to forestall or prevent attacks like that?

State police is good, but it must be built on everyone’s vigilance. I was a foremost advocate of state police for over 20 years. But what I am saying now, I believe that community vigilance, individual vigilance, will rank first in order of my priority when I want to talk about state police. State police is good because the people of the community will have confidence in people that speak their own language, and so they can be able to go to them and report to them, but if you accept a stranger into your own, you accept foreigners into your community without investigating them, then there will be problems.

Lastly, with the 2027 campaigns approaching, are you concerned that the politics of election and re-election could stall state police?

Of course, I strongly believe that the issue of state police should be tackled before the 2027 general election because security is a priority. I think the time is right for state police. The time has been right for 20 years, but there has been little progress, maybe because the states were not financially strong enough to bear that burden. But I think they have enough money now. Instead of building useless flyovers all over the place, they should face the security of lives and property. The funding and the structure, we still need to talk about that because, in terms of structure, I believe that regional police will be better than state police. I believe so because some of the governors can be power-drunk. Some of the governors could use their funding on useless programmes. But if you allow the geopolitical zones to have that police, and then the state police will be under the control of the regional police, it would be a better idea. That will insulate the police from whatever excesses of the state governors. So when you ask, for example, Ekiti State, the state police commissioner can probably come from Oyo State or Ogun State. So, he will not be an ordinary lackey of the state governor.