My dear Professor, your graciousness does you honour, and your modesty fools nobody. A man who has taught medicine for sixty years understands implementation better than most lawyers ever will, because medicine is the one profession where the gap between the prescription and the cure is measured in lives. Your old professor’s saying, that eighty percent of any idea is implementation, is not a small complaint about my article. It is the right test, and I accept it completely. So let me answer you through it.
First, let me record how much ground we now share. You agree the present system has failed. You agree reform is necessary. And you have graciously accepted that regional police would need a regional government that does not exist. So only one question now stands between us: will the safeguards in the bill actually restrain power in real life, and not just on paper? That is a serious question, and here is my serious answer.
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YOUR TEST IS MY STARTING POINT, NOT MY WEAKNESS
My article’s whole argument rested on the very phrase you quote: that the reform’s worth depends on how carefully it is designed. That is an implementation statement. The bill is not a slogan about moving power to the States. It is an attempt to design the enforcement itself: national standards, certification, filtered appointments, confirmations, prohibitions, a federal trigger, ratification by the National Assembly. You may say the design can fail. Of course it can.
But look where your objection leads if we treat it as a veto. No law enforces itself. No court order carries itself out. No constitution, no electoral law, no anticorruption statute works without willing hands. If the possibility of failed enforcement is enough to stop a reform, it stops every reform, including every alternative you list, and it stops constitutional government itself.
You know this from your own science. No doctor refuses to operate on a dying patient because recovery will depend on nursing, drugs and follow up that may fail. The doctor operates, writes the protocol, monitors, and adjusts. Nigeria is the dying patient. The question is not whether the protocol can fail. It is whether the protocol, even imperfectly followed, gives the patient a better chance than the disease.
THE “SAME POLITICIANS” POINT CUTS BOTH WAYS
You say the same political class that weakened our national institutions will build the State ones. True. But that same class runs the present system too. An objection that condemns both systems equally cannot help us choose between them. What can help us choose is structure: which system makes responsibility visible, which one multiplies the checks, and which one keeps failure local instead of national. On all three, the decentralised design wins, as I will show.
I NEVER OFFERED NEARNESS ALONE
You are right that nearness guarantees nothing, and that local strongmen can capture local institutions. But the article never offered nearness by itself. It offered nearness plus accountability plus design. And consider two things. First, in vast parts of Nigeria today the problem is not a nearby force that lacks the will to act. It is that there is no force there at all. Will cannot act through officers who are not present. Second, the strongman you fear already captures policing under the present system. He simply procures the cooperation of a force his governor does not own, and everybody involved can deny responsibility.
When a known criminal walks free today, who answers? The governor says the police are not his. The President is too far away to blame. Ownership ends that excuse. When a State force ignores a known criminal, every citizen will know exactly whose government failed, and can punish it at the next election. Political will is not a fixed quality of character. It follows responsibility. Today, responsibility has no address. The reform gives it one.
COUNT HOW MANY MUST FAIL
Here is the heart of my answer to your deepest point. You say commissions can be captured, certification can become a rubber stamp, prohibitions can be ignored, and protectors can be politically compromised. Each of these is possible. Now count. For abuse to run unchecked under the reform, the governor must act, his Assembly must go along, the Police Council must look away, the certifying authority must fail to withdraw certification, the federal government must refuse to use its trigger, the National Assembly must stay silent, the courts must fail, 35 other States must watch and say nothing, and the voters must forgive it all. Under the present system, how many must fail? One. The centre.
That is how engineers deal with unreliable parts: they build in many independent checks, so that disaster requires many failures at the same time. No single safeguard is fully trustworthy. The design does not pretend otherwise. It simply ensures that abuse needs many failures at once, while the system we have now needs only one.
And your strongest scenario, a President whose party controls the federal government and most States, so that he never intervenes against a friendly governor, deserves an honest reply: that scenario condemns the present system far more than the bill. Today, that same President already commands, through one Inspector General, the only police force in every State of Nigeria, including the opposition States. The nightmare of fully aligned, politically directed policing is not a risk the reform creates. It is the standing possibility of the system we live under right now. Under the reform, even a completely captured centre does not command the police of Lagos or Adamawa in ordinary times.
THE PROTECTOR YOU LEFT OUT
You ask, rightly, who the reliable protector is. Let me name the one your analysis leaves out: the citizen at the ballot box. The vote is the one enforcement tool that does not depend on officials policing themselves. But the vote can only punish what it can see, and today no elected official in Nigeria can be voted out over policing, because none of them commands it. The reform is what finally puts the ultimate protector to work. A governor who owns his police force answers for it every four years to the very people that force polices. That is not protection on paper. That is the oldest protection democracy has.
WHY THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION COMPARISON FINALLY BREAKS
Your point about the State Independent Electoral Commissions (SIECs) taught us where safeguards fail, and I took it seriously. But push it one step further and it breaks, on your own chosen ground: incentives. For an electoral commission, partisan failure is the reward. The governor’s party wins precisely when the commission does its main job badly. The incentive and the abuse are the same thing. Policing is different. A governor’s political survival is served by security succeeding, because voters measure safety in their own daily lives, in the kidnappings that stop and the roads that become safe again. So the main incentive pushes toward performance.
Abuse is a temptation at the edges, and the edges are exactly where the bill posts its guards: the ban on political deployment, the certification, the federal trigger, the courts. Where incentives run in the same direction as the safeguards, safeguards hold far more often. By your own logic, State Police is a much better bet than the electoral commissions ever were.
THIRTY SIX EXPERIMENTS, NOT THIRTY SIX TIME BOMBS
You say spreading power may spread the opportunities for abuse. It also spreads the opportunities for excellence, and it changes the arithmetic of failure. Under one force, one failure is a national failure. There is nothing to compare it with, nowhere to take refuge, no example to copy. Under 36 forces, failure is local and can be contained, while success is visible and spreads. Our political culture is not the same everywhere. Some States are governed clearly better than others. A single national system chains every Nigerian to the average. Decentralisation frees the best States to show what is possible, and shames the worst by comparison. That is how federations learn.
YOUR ALTERNATIVES FACE YOUR OWN OBJECTION
You suggest community policing, operational independence, better funding, judicial oversight, and decentralisation within a national framework. I welcome every one of them, and I note two things gently. First, each of them depends on exactly the same fragile institutions and willing hands as the bill does. Your implementation objection hits them with equal force, so it cannot be a reason to prefer them. Second, most of them have been urged, and tried, inside the present unitary system for decades, and they all ran into the same wall: the constitutional monopoly of one force. They belong alongside the reform, not in place of it. And your own instinct about raising the quality of the officer, better recruitment and better training, lives inside the bill’s national minimum standards, which is the very instrument through which such things can be made compulsory.
YOUR PRAYER ABOUT DELTA AND EDO IS ALREADY WRITTEN INTO THE BILL
Your closing worry, that neighbouring forces will fight over jurisdiction, is real, and my article faced it directly as the problem of two captains in one theatre. But note the bill’s own answer. Any crime that crosses a State line is, by design, a federal matter: the Federal Police lead, and the State forces are bound to cooperate. So the moment your Delta and Edo scenario arises, it already belongs to the federal tier.
Beneath that, the Nigeria Police Council, on which the States themselves sit, is the standing forum for settling rules of primacy and coordination, and the enabling laws can and should spell out rules for hot pursuit, information sharing and joint operations. This is not unknown territory. The United States has run about 18,000 police agencies side by side for over a century, and boundary questions are handled through settled arrangements of mutual help, not turf wars. The seam between two forces is a problem with known solutions. The absence of any force is a problem with none.
PRUDENCE BELONGS AT THE DRAFTING TABLE
You are right that urgency is not proof, and I never offered the bill’s speed as proof of its merit. My point was about the burden of proof. The centralised system has had the field entirely to itself since 1972, more than half a century, and its results are before our eyes, on your own finding. After a trial that long, to demand that the alternative prove itself in advance, something no constitutional reform in history could ever do, is to make the proven failure our permanent default. And let me withdraw any suggestion that your concerns amount to doing nothing. They do not. They are the test sheet against which the standards, the certification criteria and the coordination rules must now be written. Prudence is not opposition to reform; on that we agree. But prudence’s proper seat is at the drafting table, not the doorway.
IN CLOSING
You say you did not recommend a remedy, and you ask who you are to try. Permit me to disagree with you one last time. You have recommended the most important remedy of all: the insistence that enforcement must be designed, and never assumed. That insistence should follow this reform through every clause, every standard and every protocol, and I invite you to keep holding our feet to that fire
Between your caution and my conviction lies, I suspect, the version of State Police that will actually work. Medicine and law meet at the same bedside in the end, Professor. The patient is failing under the current treatment. We do not withhold the operation because recovery will demand vigilance. We operate, and then we keep watch together.
With respect and warm regards,
Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD (Cantab)
