By Innocent Okon
Governance in Nigeria, military or civil, has always been fraught with many public-funded theories and projects that appear excellent on paper, but post awful results when implemented.
Be it in the management of the economy or political engineering, the country has remained one large laboratory for recurring nervous search for solutions on problems that political will and attitudinal change could have rested or resolved permanently.
To forge poorly welded nationalities into a single sovereignty in 1960, our colonial masters adopted the Parliamentary system of government.
History has confirmed that incurable frailties of politicians failed the maiden independent national government and not the system.
Today, after experimenting with the Presidential system of government cloned from the United States of America in 1979 and 1999, many thoughtful Nigerians have begun to share in the conclusion that our unceasing afflictions may not be all domiciled in our system of government, but largely in ourselves!
Good governance is driven more by vision, altruism and patriotism than quick fixes thrown up by happenstance.
In the 1970s, General Yakubu Gowon literally threw money at public servants in what many would today charitably call
“empowerment”! He mantra was that our problem was not money, but how to spend it.
The attendant inflation, though unforeseen or ignored by the junta, gained a riotous entry into the then stable excess petro Dollar serviced economy.
Another Military adventurer, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, came in 1985. He adopted a civil nomenclature of a President in military uniform.
He diagnosed godfatherism as the ravenous virus in civil politics. To exorcise the malignant virus, he resorted to the use of public resources to establish and provide infrastructure for two political parties – the National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP) he singlehandedly decreed to life. He said the philosophical leaning of one was a little to the right, while the other was a little to the left.
This novel experiment all ended in 1993 with no successful transition to full democratic government. After what seemed like an endless transition to nowhere, following several postponements of the terminal date for the exit of the military from governance, the outcome of the democratic experiment on June 12, 1993, which was adjudged by local and international observers as the freest, fairest and most credible electoral exercise, was annulled in controversial circumstances.
To mid-wife a new system of government from the ashes of the post-June 12, 1993 crisis, a contraption called transition government was foisted on us with the mandate to oversee the interregnum to transit into another democratic experiment.
In 1999, the present civil government, which arguably survived infant mortality, was midwifed by General Abdulsalami Abubakar. Luckily, the experiment is approaching three decades of uninterrupted life span. Sadly, it cannot boast of uninterrupted good health of both the polity and economy.
The daily increasing insecurity unleashed by bandits, terrorists and kidnappers has forced the national government to consider the entrapment of establishing State Police as a solution.
The thinking among the people romancing with the idea of State police is that an indigenous Police institution will be able to comb the nooks and crannies of each state to easily neutralise terrorists and kidnappers!
Before we are hoodwinked into taking this idea too seriously, what is obvious is that this is a very ambitious project predicated on wrong assumptions which may be counter productive.
A security institution like the Police should not be a panic invention. If and when established, it will rival the already ill-funded Federal Police Force, and nobody needs a soothsayer to conjecture that the arrangement will give birth to unavoidable role conflict.
The exponents of state Police have not sufficiently reckoned with the economic capacities of states in our dysfunctional Federalism!
Many states may abandon life-touching projects to raise and equip an elite army in the name of Police Force driven by selfish political considerations. No need positing here that with generous funding, personnel morale will be high to achieve and exceed the constitutionally entrenched roles.
Apart from using the state police to pursue political campaigns, no one can guarantee that many state Governors will not use the proposed state Police to overrun neighbouring states during boundary skirmishes, crush internal political opposition and perpetuate nepotism in the choice of leadership and command control of the envisaged State security Agency.
We should not allow the present insecurity challenges railroad us to a wrong destination because of an ill-digested road map!
The same quick fix solution to reduce the powers of the national election commission, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), stampeded the military in 1999 to cede the conduct of local government elections to states.
Today, local elections at that tier of government have acquired, in conduct and outcome, the ignoble description of statutory selection by state governors who use the exercise to build and populate their clan of political loyalists to fortify their political base.
The establishment of state Police as a one-size-fits-all solution for insecurity will be counter productive both sooner and later!
If the government cannot combat insecurity with better funding, personnel training, maximum punishment for identified sponsors and foot soldiers of terrorism/kidnappers, creating a new constitutional armed wing of state-controlled hit squad is most unnecessary and uncalled for in the absence of true Federalism.
Okon, a lawyer and journalist, lives in Uyo.
