I thank the Professor for taking the article seriously. But when his critique is read closely, he agrees with the article on every point that matters. He then asks for a level of proof no reform can ever give, and offers one new idea, regional police, which cannot work under our Constitution, cannot work in practice, and is condemned by the very history he relies on.
What the Professor Agrees With
He says nobody can seriously claim the present system is working. He says centralisation did not end abuse of the police; it only moved the abuse from regional politicians to federal ones, and he calls that point difficult to refute. He accepts that it is wrong for governors to be called Chief Security Officers while commanding no police officer. And he accepts that real federations around the world decentralise their policing. Those four points are the foundation of my article. Once you grant the failure, the movement of abuse, the accountability problem and the world’s practice, you have granted the case. What is left is a demand for certainty and a suggestion about geography. I take them one by one.
The Choice the Article Actually Posed
The critique says the article compares a failing national system with a State system assumed to succeed. The article says the opposite, in plain words: the real choice is not between a safe present and a risky reform; it is between a centralised system that has clearly failed and a local system whose success depends on how carefully it is designed. His crucial question, which arrangement better protects the citizen from both the criminal and the politician, is the very question the article was written to answer. Nearness, local knowledge and quick response answer the criminal. Clear responsibility, spread out power and a defined federal check answer the politician. The present system fails both tests at once: absent when the criminal strikes, available when the politician calls.
History Is a Warning, Not a Life Sentence
The article did not play down the past. It called the memory of the First Republic police the single strongest argument against the reform, and it rested that memory on the official record: the Federal Government’s own Working Party of 1966, whose 1967 report found the local forces corrupt, badly trained and used against political opponents. But two things follow. First, by the Professor’s own admission, abuse continued after centralisation. So history condemns unguarded power over the police wherever that power sits. It does not condemn the States as a location. Second, the forces of 1962 operated with no safeguards at all: no independent commissions, no national minimum standards, no certification, no ban on political deployment, no federal power to step in. The present bill creates with safeguards what the First Republic ran without them. History warns the designer. It does not sentence the nation to remain as it is.
The Electoral Commission Point Actually Helps the Bill
The Professor’s strongest point is this: State Independent Electoral Commissions (SIECs) serve their governors, so why would State Police be different? The answer lies in why the SIECs fail. The governor appoints their members. A State Assembly he almost always controls confirms them. The State pays them. And no national standard, certification or outside check restrains them. The State Police design is the exact opposite. The National Assembly sets national minimum standards. A State force must be certified, and the certification can be withdrawn. The governor’s choice of Commissioner passes through the advice of the Nigeria Police Council and the confirmation of the State House of Assembly. Using the force against critics and opponents is expressly forbidden. And abuse of the force is itself a ground for federal intervention. The drafters knew the SIEC disease and wrote the bill against it. The wider claim, that Nigeria’s institutions are too weak for reform, proves too much. It was the argument against democracy itself in 1999, and against every reform since. Institutions do not grow strong by being left alone; they grow strong by being used. And you cannot point to weak institutions as a reason to keep the weakest institution of all, a centralised force whose failure the Professor himself says nobody can seriously deny.
The Fear of Untouchable Governors Points the Wrong Way
Political scientists call it subnational authoritarianism: the fear that a governor with his own police becomes untouchable. The fear is real, but look at where the danger sits today. One hand rests on the only gun. A single Inspector-General, answerable to one President, commands the only police force in a country of over 200 million people. Whoever captures that force captures policing everywhere, and no second force exists to check him. The reform spreads the power and checks it from both sides: as many as 36 forces, each bound by national standards, certification, the courts and a defined federal trigger. A governor who abuses his force will meet the centre. Under the present system, a centre that abuses the force meets nobody. Federalism’s oldest insurance is that each level checks the other. Today the check runs one way only. And let us be honest: governors already influence policing. They fund police operations, buy the vehicles and the fuel, and enjoy quiet influence without open responsibility. The reform turns hidden influence into visible command that can be held to account.
The Federal Takeover Power Was Confronted, Not Missed
The critique presents the President’s power to take over a State force as a contradiction the article failed to notice. The article noticed it, gave it a full section, and resolved it. Yes, the power can be abused. Yes, its absence would be worse, because it is the only answer to the abusive governor the Professor fears. That is why the article proposes the model of section 305 of the Constitution: the President acts immediately once the defined conditions are met, and the takeover dies automatically unless the National Assembly approves it within days. Because the conditions are written down, the courts can test them. A President who invents an emergency answers to the legislature within the week and to the courts after that. With respect, the Professor cannot run both objections at once. He fears the governor who abuses his police, then objects to the only instrument that answers that abuse. Protection without a protector is not a position.
Regional Police: A Force Without a Government
Now to the critique’s one new idea. Nigeria has no regions. Section 2(2) of the Constitution says Nigeria is a Federation of States and a Federal Capital Territory. Section 3 names the 36 States. The six geopolitical zones appear nowhere in the Constitution. They are a political convention, useful for sharing offices, with no executive, no legislature, no treasury, no law and no legal existence. A police force must belong to a government. So to which government would a South West Police belong? Who appoints its head? Which assembly confirms him? Whose budget pays it? Whose law governs it? And the question that ends the matter: who is its Chief Security Officer? Which of six governors? The one whose State is burning tonight, or the one whose party controls the zone? A force answerable to a committee of six is answerable to nobody. Blame shared among six governors is the very problem of responsibility without power that the Professor praised the article for exposing, now multiplied across a zone. His remedy brings back the disease it was meant to cure.
The Old Failure, Only Bigger
It gets worse. To create regions, Nigeria would first have to build a whole new tier of government: change sections 2 and 3, erect six new governments with executives, legislatures and revenue arrangements, and only then build police on top. That is a detour of decades, proposed at the very moment the State Police reform is live and moving in the National Assembly: the Senate passed its version on 24 June 2026, the House passed one on 11 June, and on 14 July the House moved to fast track the President’s revised executive bill, which passed second reading the same day. It is a bridge drawn on paper beside a train already in motion. And history speaks even more harshly against the regional idea, because regional police is not a new middle path. It is the very system that failed before. The forces whose abuse the Professor says the article played down were the regional and native authority forces. The Western Region between 1962 and 1966 is the textbook case of regional police turned into a political weapon. He cannot stress the horror of regional police abuse in one paragraph and prescribe regional police in the next. And size makes it worse, not better. A captured State force is a contained danger, hedged in by the federal trigger and 35 neighbouring States. A captured zonal force spans six States and tens of millions of people: his own nightmare, six times larger. The one real concern inside the proposal, that some States cannot yet afford a force, is already answered within the State framework by the Canadian model in the article: a State that is not ready contracts the Federal Police to police it, under the State’s direction, until it can stand on its own. Neighbouring States can also cooperate by agreement. Everything the zone promises is available without inventing a new government. Everything the zone threatens arrives the moment one is invented.
The Demand for Proof
Finally, the critique says the article proves the present system has failed but does not prove State Police will succeed. With respect, no constitutional reform in history could meet that test. Nobody could prove in 1999 that democracy would work. Reform is judged by the balance of reasons and by the cost of standing still, and that cost is now counted daily in the kidnapped and the killed. The article never claimed a miracle. It claimed a carefully designed remedy for a proven failure. The centralised system has had the field to itself for more than half a century, since the last local forces were absorbed in 1972, and the result is before our eyes, on the Professor’s own finding. The burden of proof does not rest on the arrangement used by the serious federations of the world. It rests on the one system whose failure is no longer in dispute. To demand certainty from the reform while people die under the present system is not caution. It is doing nothing and calling it caution.
Conclusion
I thank the Professor sincerely for the engagement. But strip away everything he concedes, and his critique comes down to a call for safeguards, which the article already supplies in its longest section, and a regional proposal that the Constitution does not know, that command cannot operate, and that our own history has already condemned. His critique ends exactly where the article begins: at the question of design. On the diagnosis, we agree. On the design, the article answers. On his alternative, the Constitution, common sense and his own history all return the same verdict. State Police remains a constitutional and security imperative. Let it be done, and let it be done well.
Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD (Cantab)
