THE NEED FOR STATE OR COMMUNITY POLICING IN NIGERIA.
The Nigeria Police Force is a creature of the 1999 Constitution and the Police Act. Section 214 (1) of the 1999 Constitution provides that ‘ There shall be a police force for Nigeria, which shall be known as the Nigeria Police Force, and subject to the provisions of this section no other police force shall be established for the Federation or any part thereof.
This unfortunate provision has unwittingly been the source of the problems relating to law enforcement in Nigeria.
By designating against all known principles of federalism, a federal agency as the sole Police Force for the Centre and 36 States, the Constitution had unbeknownst to it created a recipe for anarchy and incompetence.
The present Police Force is understaffed and ultra-sensitive to the principles of Federal Character that it usually jettisons merit for geographical representation.
Again, Nigeria being a heavily populated country with diverse cultures, usually suspicious of one another underscores the need for individual States to have their own Police Force, we shall return to this issue in due course.
In an effort to remedy the glaring lacuna created by the constitutional insistence on ‘one police force’ the Federal Government has created several pseudo police forces with independent powers to track-down, investigate and prosecute crimes and criminals, in short, to exercise the same Inter-State Police Powers that the Constitution has expressly prohibited any other organisation Federal or State from exercising.
They include but are not limited to the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps[1] Economic and Financial Crimes Commission[2], Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Offences Commission[3], Nigerian Customs Service[4], Immigration Service[5] etc.
Some of the States recognising the inadequacies of the Federal Police Force have unsuccessfully tried to legislate thereon by creating in name vigilante organisations and traffic wardens but ostensibly to exercise law enforcement duties.
The truth is that all the aforementioned organisations are in clear breach of section 214 of the 1999 Constitution, particularly the Nigerian Civil Defence Corp, which by section 3 of the amended Act now has more powers than the Nigerian Police Force itself.
There are other severe factors equally militating against the efficiency of the law enforcement agencies, (constitutional or otherwise), they range from the treatment of suspects while awaiting trial and especially that grey period between apprehension and arraignment before a court.
Documented abuses during this critical period include who or where the suspect is kept before the grant of bail or if he is refused same, in other words who has the custody of the accused during this period, deliberate deprivation of counsel, abuse or breach of the suspect’s right to remain silent, denial of police bail especially in simple matters leading to frequent breaches of the constitutional[6] and statutory provisions[7] which specify maximum periods in respect of which such suspect can be detained without trial, torture and other acts calculated to extract confessional statement from suspect, extra judicial conduct including homicide etc.
These abuses are nauseatingly rampant in the system.
Nigeria is locked in a complicated debate of whether there should be State and Community police agencies.
There is need to subscribe to that school of thought because if the Federal Police is to resume its efficacy, its policing jurisdiction must conform to the Federal Constitution.
At the moment, their intervention in State’s policing is an aberration, which unfortunately impinges on the efficiency and reputation.
It is a matter that the Police high command should take up with the authorities that be.
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