By Eyimofe Atake, SAN
Dear Professor, you promised us that your last message would be your final word, and I am delighted that you broke your promise. A conversation this good deserved a longer life. Let me also say plainly what your generosity makes easy to miss: across this exchange you have conceded the failure of the present system, withdrawn the regional proposal with a grace rare in public argument, and sharpened every safeguard in the bill by testing it. What remains between us is now a single proposition, and I want to name it honestly, because naming it is half of answering it. Your argument is no longer about law, and no longer truly about design. It is about people. You believe that no structure, however careful, can restrain the Nigerian political class. That is a proposition about our national character, and I will meet it squarely at the end. But first, your points in turn.
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ON THE LEGISLATORS WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE BILL
You suspect that few of the lawmakers advancing this bill could defend it with rigour. You may be right, and it would not matter. No law anywhere has ever been validated by the depth of each legislator’s understanding; if that were the test, no parliament in history has ever validly legislated. Legislation is the product of an institution, not an examination of its members: committees, hearings, drafts, experts and debate, so that the process knows more than any person in it. And this bill’s process has been unusually long and unusually open: decades of advocacy, public hearings across all six geopolitical zones in July 2025, and passage by margins too broad for caprice, 84 of 109 senators and 289 votes to 4 in the House. That is not a fashionable stampede. It is a national consensus finally finding legislative form. As for the shallow understanding you fear, its cure is exactly what you and I are doing now: public argument that legislators, journalists and citizens can read. Your critique is not evidence that deliberation is absent. It is the deliberation.
THE CHAIN AND THE NET
You describe my safeguards as a chain whose links may be weaker than we hope. Professor, your metaphor has conceded my case. A chain fails at its weakest link, because a chain is a series arrangement: break one link and the whole fails. That is a perfect description of the system we have now, which hangs on a single link, the centre. But the bill is not a chain. It is a net. The checks do not hang one from another; they operate side by side, independently, so that abuse succeeds only when every strand snaps at once. And here is what I must correct most firmly: you read my argument as optimism. It is the opposite. I never assumed the governor would behave, or the Assembly would resist, or the Council would scrutinise, or the centre would act. I assumed that every single one of them is unreliable, and that is precisely why the design multiplies them. One unreliable guard is a scandal waiting to happen. Nine unreliable guards, watching from different towers, answering to different masters, are a fortress, because their simultaneous failure is a far taller order than the failure of any one. This is not my invention. It is the oldest wisdom in constitutional design. James Madison, writing in Federalist No. 51 in 1788, put it in words that have never been bettered: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” And his solution to a government of non angels was exactly this architecture: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The American constitution was written by pessimists, for scoundrels, and it has processed nearly two and a half centuries of them. Structures built for flawed men are the only structures ever built. There is no other kind of man to build for. So the true comparison is not between my net and perfection. It is between a net of nine imperfect strands and a chain of one imperfect link. You have told me the strands are weak. You have not told me, because you cannot, that the single link fails less often. Its failure is the one thing we agreed on before we began.
THE BALLOT BOX YOU LAUGH AT
Your account of voting in Nigeria moved me, and I will not pretend the instrument is undamaged. But three things follow, and none of them is the conclusion you draw. First, every broken election you describe was conducted under the centralised police monopoly. The thugs who menaced your polling station, the intimidation that kept honest citizens at home, the insecurity that turned civic duty into personal risk: all of it happened on the watch of the single federal force, because for fifty years there has been no other watch to be on. Your indictment of our elections is an indictment of policing under centralisation. You have entered evidence, Professor, but on my side of the ledger. Second, the damaged instrument has nonetheless drawn blood at the highest level our politics has. In 2015, a sitting President of Nigeria was defeated at the ballot box, telephoned his opponent, and conceded before the final results were announced, saying that nobody’s ambition is worth the blood of any Nigerian. It was the first time in our history, and a weapon that has felled a sitting president is not a toy. Ruling parties have lost States before and since. The ballot in Nigeria is a wounded soldier, not a dead one. Third, and most important, I never offered the voter as the sole protector. The ballot box was the outermost ring of nine. Strike it from the count entirely if you wish: the net still holds eight strands against the status quo’s one. And notice a final irony. Today the vote cannot discipline security failure at all, however free the election, because no elected official in Nigeria commands a police force. The reform gives the wounded instrument something to aim at. Instruments heal with use.
THE OSUN CASE: THE OPPONENTS’ NIGHTMARE, ALREADY HERE, WITHOUT STATE POLICE
Professor, as we exchange these letters, a living experiment is running in Osun State, and it belongs in this debate because it is the opponents’ exact nightmare, performed under the very system they defend. A governorship election is fixed for 15 August 2026. The police in Osun remain, of course, fully centralised: one Commissioner, posted from Abuja, answerable through one Inspector General to the Federal Government. And what do we see? The elected Governor of the State has publicly told the Inspector General’s own delegation that the Commissioner of Police has shown a lack of willingness and capacity to act fairly and without partisan bias, has demanded his redeployment, and has complained of three political murders in a matter of weeks without a single arrest.
Residents have marched to demand the Commissioner’s transfer. Civil society groups have petitioned for it. The Governor’s campaign has gone further still and alleged open collusion between the police command and the campaign of the party that holds the Federal Government. That party, for its part, praises the Commissioner’s professionalism and urges the Inspector General to refuse the transfer. I take no side on who is telling the truth, and my argument does not need me to. Look instead at the structure. Everything the opponents of State Police warn about, a police command allegedly serving one party against its rivals on the eve of an election, is being alleged today, under total centralisation, with not a single State force in existence. Centralisation, offered for fifty years as the cure for partisan policing, has not cured the disease. It has merely fixed its direction, so that the alleged abuse now flows from whoever holds Abuja. And observe the remedy available to the aggrieved. The elected Governor, the man our arrangements mock with the title of Chief Security Officer, can do precisely nothing but write letters and hold press conferences, petitioning for the transfer of one officer to the very centre alleged to benefit from that officer’s conduct. The voters of Osun can do nothing at all, for the Commissioner answers to nobody they elect. Both camps now besiege the Inspector General’s office, because the only lever over Osun’s policing sits in Abuja, in the hands of an appointee of a President whose party is a contestant in the very election at stake. Even if every allegation on every side is false, a structure that concentrates that discretion in a contestant’s appointee is indefensible, and its indefensibility does not depend on the truth of any allegation. The mere plausibility is the indictment. Under the reform, the ordinary policing of Osun would answer to the government and Assembly that the people of Osun elected, under national standards binding on all. And if a governor then abused his own force, the abuse would meet remedies defined in law: the prohibition on political deployment, the certification that can be withdrawn, the federal trigger, ratification by the National Assembly, and the courts. Today, the only remedy on offer is a lobbying contest over one posting. Defined and justiciable remedies, against discretionary postings by an interested centre: that, Professor, is the whole choice, and Osun has placed it on our television screens three weeks before the poll.
VARIANCE, NOT VIRTUE
You ask what evidence suggests the State political class is more competent than the federal one. None, and my argument never needed it. The case for 36 forces does not presuppose 36 competent governments. It requires only that some States are better governed than others, which no observer of Nigeria, yourself included, would deny. Under one national system, every Nigerian is chained to the average; the best State cannot rise above the centre’s mediocrity, and the worst hides inside it. Under 36, the best are freed to show what is possible and the worst are shamed by the comparison next door. You say our history shows States do not copy each other’s successes, and you cite education and health. But look at the one sector we are actually discussing. When the South West States created Amotekun, other States and regions followed with their own security outfits within a season. Security innovation is the one policy Nigerians have demonstrably copied across State lines, and the reason is the one you taught me: incentives. Education reform pays off in a generation; security pays off before the next election. Where the reward is immediate and visible, our politicians imitate with remarkable speed. As for your local government reduction: it is less absurd than you think, since the United States runs municipal police and elected county sheriffs among its 18,000 agencies without dissolving. But the bill’s own answer is simpler. The line is drawn by capacity, not theory: a force exists where a government can sustain one under national standards and certification, and a State not yet ready contracts the Federal Police on the Canadian model. Nobody is licensing a force for every village. We are licensing forces for the federating units the Constitution itself names, as and when they qualify.
LOCAL TYRANNY IS STILL TYRANNY
Here you are at your most humane, and I concede the moral point without reservation. For the citizen under the boot, it is no comfort that the boot is local. But complete the comparison, Professor, because the choice was never between tyranny and its absence. It is between tyranny with a rescuer and tyranny without one. Under the reform, the citizen of a rogue State has an outside to appeal to: a federal trigger built for exactly that abuse, a certification that can be withdrawn, courts beyond the governor’s reach, 35 neighbouring States, a national press, and a federal government whose political interest lies in humbling a rival governor. Under the present system, if the single force turns oppressor, there is no outside. No second force, no external certifier, no rescuer on the map. Localisation does not excuse tyranny. It creates the exit, and it creates the cavalry. Monopoly abolishes both. And remember the commonest victim of the present arrangement: the community sacked at dawn with no police of any kind within a hundred kilometres. She is not protected by the status quo. She is abandoned by it, and abandonment is also tyranny, of the quietest and most lethal kind.
STRUCTURES AND MEN
Now to your deepest point, that institutions are only as strong as the people who operate them, and that character, not design, is the decisive variable. Half of that is true, and the half you omit decides the question. Structure and character are not rivals; structure is how character is farmed. Our political culture is not weather that must clear before we may build. It is, in large part, the harvest of what we built before: fifty years of unaccountable, centralised, consequence free power have taught our politicians exactly the lessons they have learned. Traffic lights do not wait for drivers to become careful; they manufacture careful drivers. Accountability teaches responsibility, and impunity teaches its opposite. You ask why State politicians should be better men than federal ones. They need not be better men. They need only be nearer to consequence, and moving power nearer to consequence is the entire design of this reform. If we must wait for a virtuous political class before we build restraining structures, we wait forever, because virtue without structure has no ladder to climb. And forgive me for observing that your philosophy devours your own prescriptions before it ever reaches mine: better recruitment, professional command, judicial oversight, all the reforms you favour are also structures, operated by the same imperfect Nigerians. If design cannot restrain our people, your remedies fall with my bill. If design can, then the argument between us is over which design, and that argument I have made across four letters, clause by clause.
WHERE WE TRULY STAND
So let me gather the threads. You began with regional police; you have withdrawn it, with a candour that honours you. You pressed the history; it stands as a warning absorbed into the design, not a sentence upon the nation. You raised the electoral commissions; the bill is built as their structural opposite, and by your own logic of incentives, policing is the better bet. You offered alternatives; each faces your own implementation objection with equal force, and each fits inside the reform rather than in place of it. What remains is the last redoubt: that Nigerians cannot be restrained by design at all. If that were true, it would condemn far more than this bill. It would condemn the Constitution, the courts, the ballot, democracy itself, and every reform you have ever favoured. It is not caution. It is surrender, wearing caution’s gown. And the record says it is false: Madison’s scoundrels have been processed by structure for two centuries; a sitting Nigerian president picked up the telephone in 2015 because the structure left him no better option; Amotekun leapt State lines in months because the incentives were aligned; and this very exchange, two citizens reasoning in public and moving each other’s positions, is the political culture you say we lack, functioning before your eyes. Skepticism has done its work, Professor, and its work is done. Every seat at the table was given to doubt, and every seat has been answered.
ON YOUR FAR TOO GENEROUS SUGGESTION
As for the Senate, the House, or a Government House: you made me laugh, and you moved me, in one paragraph. But the Bar took my vows long ago, and I hold that every profession guards the republic from its own post. You have guarded it from the bedside for sixty years; I guard it from the courtroom and, lately, from this group. The advocate’s chamber is also a constituency, and the pen sometimes outlasts the seat. What I will accept from you is an appointment of my own devising: I hereby name you, without salary and without term limit, Auditor General of my optimism. Hold our feet to the fire through every clause, every standard, every protocol of this reform, exactly as you have done here. Because you were right from the beginning about the one thing that matters most: eighty percent of any idea is implementation. The remaining twenty percent is the courage to begin. The patient is on the table, Professor. We operate, and then we keep watch together, and the watch is stronger now that it has a second doctor.
Warm regards,
Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD (Cantab)
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