Guest Columnist Edoba Omoregie In the last few weeks, the nation has witnessed a flurry of impassioned exchanges over the constitutional proposal to reform the police system in Nigeria. Put simply, the proposal seeks to alter sections 214 and 215 of the Constitution by outright deletion and enactment of new sections 214 and 215. The extant sections 214 and 215 create a single Nigeria Police Force, under the professional leadership of the Inspector General of Police (IGP) as overall head, and state commands under Commissioners of Police (CP) who are answerable to the IGP. Section 215 also subordinates the IGP directly to the President or his responsible minister, and requires the IGP to comply with the lawful instructions of the President or his minister so empowered to issue such instructions. Similarly, the section empowers the governor of a state or his commissioner so directed to issue command instructions to a CP. Two troubling aspects of section 215 are worthy of note, although only one of them has received greater public attention. The first is the proviso to subsection 4 which grants a discretion to a CP to decline a lawful command instruction from a Governor or his Commissioner until cleared to do so by his superior at the federal level. The second is subsection 5 which outrightly prohibits judicial review of the command instructions given either to the IGP or CP. The new constitutional proposal fundamentally alters the present law, and introduces an entirely new police system for the country. The new draft sections (clauses) 214 and 215 abolish the Nigeria Police Force and replace it with two police organizations, one for the federal government and the other for any atate government that chooses to establish it. The new proposal retains the powers of the President (or his responsible minister) and the governor (or his responsible commissioner) to give lawful instructions to the IGP and the CP, respectively. However, the nature of an instruction to be given is now limited to broad policy matters. The new constitutional proposal expressly excludes command instructions from the purview of “lawful instructions” which may be given. As a matter of fact, the new proposal specially identifies the nature of instructions prohibited to include those directing the police to infringe on the fundamental rights of citizens or obstruct political meetings, among others listed in the new draft section 215. From the point of view of principle, the new constitutional proposal is a remarkable truimph of federalist solution to a protracted and seemingly impossible constitutional reform – the decentralization of the police system of Nigeria! It is instructive that the proposal to create separate federal and state police organisations is the first of its kind since 1930 when the Nigeria Police Force was created through the merger of several police formations in different parts of the young colonial Nigeria. Perhaps the closest to what resembles a decentralised police system was the native authority police forces in many parts of the country. The NA forces were under the command of native authority councils (equivalent of present-day local government councils), but the NA forces were later abolished by the General Yakubu Gowon military government due to widespread (mostly proven) complaints of abuse of police powers by those local forces, underscored by reported infringements on human rights; and their deployment to inflict violent attacks on political opponents of the native authority council governments. Notwithstanding, the new constitutional proposal seeking to decentralise the police for the first time, after many years of what may be considered analysis paralysis, is a feat worthy of celebrating, especially for many federalist proponents who have long advocated for the states to be properly and constitutionally mainstreamed into the imperative task of securing lives and property, with independent police organisations which are exclusively managed and commanded by the respective states of the federation. The primary justification for the call for decentralization is the proposition that decentralization accords with the organising principle of subsidiarity, as decentralised police structure enables the states, as integral components of federal system, to act as first-liners in the goal of securing lives and property. This is without prejudice to the authority of the federal government to also secure lives and property, albeit in support of the states, where there is manifest inability of the latter to play that role given the scope and complexities of the security concerns. Thus, the subsidiarity principle, _afortiori_, is a notion which promotes cooperation between the state governments and the federal government to achieve common goals of good governance, with the preference accorded to the government better
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