State police: FG Opens Public Consultation on State Policing Bill, Sets Seven-Week Timeline for Reform

For most of Nigeria's democratic life, "state police" has functioned less as policy than as ritual, a proposal wheeled out after every mass-casualty attack, litigated at every constitutional conference since 1999, and quietly shelved once the news cycle moved on. Governors demanded it after Boko Haram's rise in the northeast. Southwest leaders demanded it after the kidnapping waves that gave birth to Amotekun in 2020.

The 2014 National Conference recommended it, and the recommendation went nowhere. Now, with a constitutional amendment advancing and the Federal Government drafting a National Policing Bill, the conversation has shifted from whether Nigeria should have state police to how such a system should be designed, funded and regulated. What is different in 2026 is not the argument, Nigerians have made every version of it for two decades, but the machinery now being built to receive it: a signed constitutional amendment, a working federal secretariat, a public-comment window.

The Roadmap

The Presidential Working Group on the National Policing Bill, chaired by Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila, told Nigerians on Monday that they have two weeks to submit memoranda on how a dual federal-state policing system should be built.

The group is working from a seven-week programme, running from July 27 to September 14, and is due to hand President Bola Tinubu a draft Executive Bill on September 3, ahead of a further round of national consultation.

Outlining the proposed framework, the Presidency said states would not be allowed to establish police services until they met clearly defined operational standards.

“A proposed State Police Service must demonstrate that it has credible arrangements for recruitment, vetting, training, pay, pensions, equipment, custody, complaints, discipline, data, firearms control, independent oversight and financial sustainability before it begins policing.”

However, one of the longstanding concerns about state police has been that governors could use the institution to target political opponents.

Acknowledging those concerns, Speaker of the House of Representatives Tajudeen Abbas said the drafters of the executive bill had deliberately built safeguards into the framework.

"A state must satisfy clear and demanding standards and safeguards before it may be entrusted with a police service. There will be accountability, the protection of fundamental human rights, and firm boundaries between federal and state authority so that no state police force may ever be reduced to the private instrument of a governor." Abbas said during the 2026 National Assembly Open Week.

Although the proposed National Policing Bill establishes safeguards intended to prevent the political misuse of state police, questions remain about whether legal provisions alone can guarantee accountability in practice.

While the Presidency has emphasised national standards for recruitment, oversight, human rights protection and financial sustainability, Ogun State Governor Dapo Abiodun argues that the success of state police will depend just as much on the strength of the institutions responsible for enforcing those safeguards as on the constitutional framework itself.

Speaking at a THISDAY/ARISE TV Town Hall Meeting on the State Police Bill, Abiodun said the proposed policing system must be accompanied by broader judicial, fiscal and institutional reforms.

He called for the establishment of independent Police Complaints Commissions at both the federal and state levels to investigate misconduct and prevent abuse of power, while advocating fixed tenures for State Commissioners of Police to insulate them from undue political influence.

The governor also cautioned that financial disparities among states could undermine the effectiveness of state police if lawmakers fail to establish a sustainable and equitable funding framework.

According to him, states with weaker revenue bases may struggle to recruit, train and equip personnel, raising concerns about uneven policing standards across the federation.

"The ongoing legislative process must answer fundamental questions about why the existing Nigeria Police Force has struggled to deliver optimal results and how both the federal and state police systems can complement each other effectively," he said.

A Debate Nigeria Has Had Before and Lost

Regional and community security outfits, Amotekun in the southwest, Ebube Agu in the southeast, Hisbah in parts of the north, were themselves improvisations born of the same frustration: a single centralised police force patrolling a country of more than 200 million people, vast ungoverned forest corridors, and security threats that look entirely different in Zamfara than they do in Rivers or Anambra.

None of those outfits was ever given arrest powers or firearms under the old constitutional order, which is precisely the gap this amendment closes and precisely why the bill's drafters felt compelled to state, explicitly, that no existing vigilante, community or regional outfit becomes a State Police Service automatically.

Amotekun does not simply get rebadged; a state has to build and certify a real force.

The House of Representatives passed its version on June 11, the Senate passed the executive bill on June 24 with more than the constitutionally required two-thirds, and the House gave final concurrence on July 23 with 311 votes in favour. Speakers of all 36 state Houses of Assembly publicly pledged support within 24 hours of Senate passage.

The bill now needs ratification from at least 24 of those assemblies, two-thirds, before it goes back to the President for assent. That is where it currently sits: closer to becoming law than any state-police proposal in Nigeria's Fourth Republic, and further from being tested.

The structure being built is a dual system. A reformed Federal Police Service would retain the cross-border and complex threats, terrorism, cybercrime, and organised and interstate crime, while State Police Services, headed by a commissioner appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state legislature, take local policing.

The Federal Police retains emergency intervention powers, including it can step back into a state's policing if public order collapses, if a governor asks for help, if a state force cannot function, or if there is evidence of systematic rights abuse. On paper, the guardrails are extensive. Nigeria's problem has rarely been the paper.

The Guardrail Being Tested in Real Time

Ten days before Osun votes for governor, the Nigeria Police Force pulled its state Commissioner, Ibrahim Gotan, off the assignment and replaced him with Commissioner Erale Samuel Etaifo, brought in specifically to run election security.

Gotan's removal followed months of pressure from the state government and persistent allegations of partisan conduct in the run-up to a tightly contested race between incumbent Governor Ademola Adeleke and APC candidate Bola Oyebamiji, among fourteen other candidates on the ballot.

The Nigeria Police Force, however, maintained that the decision was a routine operational measure and not a disciplinary sanction.

According to Force Public Relations Officer CSP Anietie Iniedu, speaking to The Nation, “the new Commissioner of Police had been deployed to Osun specifically to coordinate security arrangements for the governorship election."

It is not the first time an Osun police commissioner has been swapped out under political heat close to an election. Ahead of the 2022 governorship election, the Inspector-General of Police also replaced the state's police leadership following allegations of partisanship.

This raises the question of how to prevent police partisanship at the sub-national level, under a system where, unlike today, the person making the call on who commands the police in a state would not be a federal Inspector-General responding to pressure but a governor appointing his own Commissioner.