Writing the 21st century policing of Nigeria, By Adagbo Onoja
The new law is worth being celebrated because it is only one of the many reforms that Senator Mallam Madori is understood to be also pursuing as chairman of the very vital Senate Committee on Police Affairs. There is significance in what he is doing because he is showing that it is escapism to keep blaming colonialism or the military for things we can change without much ado. That is the message of this law. Above all, he goes about his legislative activism without shouting too much or drawing noisy attention to himself.
‘Writing,’ as used in the title of this piece, refers to a situation in which a discourse produces a reality. Now, there has been a case of a legislative discourse producing an institutional moment in Nigeria recently. That explains the title of this piece. It is the unpacking of how that happened and what it implies. This is deliberately written in an approving tone of the principal actors involved, but it is not propaganda. It is rather about drawing attention to something that would otherwise be buried in the heaps of the discursive commotion in Nigeria now and, indeed, in the world.
There’s a case for widening and deepening elite interest in policing Nigeria, in tandem with the global movement for widening and deepening in security studies. One major reason for that is the historical location of the police as the vanguard of modernity. That has been the experience in the Western world, where the police served as the key institution for superintending the chaos that came along with the transition from an agrarian to the industrial order. The police served, as such, in terms of the law and order requirement for the coexistence of plural elements in the new cities and settlements which welcomed capitalism.
That was not the experience in much of Africa where capitalism came through the export of capital and policing assumed the ‘foreignness’ of capitalism in all such emergent national societies. In other words, it meant that the police did not emerge as the vanguard of modernity in much of Africa. Rather, the police and policing formed part of the apparatus of colonial government, by which fabricating the people in the image of the colonial ‘regime of truth’ was accomplished. The outcome has been a policing practice that holds everyone else to be a suspect, a dissident and a threat, until they can prove otherwise. Such a police cannot serve as a vanguard but as escorts of a colonising modernity.
There’s nothing in this piece to suggest that Nigeria is about to put the coloniality of policing behind. What is drawn attention to is the potential of a legislative discourse to transform the police factor in the national security layout, if Nigerians take note of this discourse, so that it doesn’t fall victim of heterogeneity. In this usage, heterogeneity speaks to the infinity of alternative mini-discourses within any dominant discourse and the capability of each and every one of such mini-discourse to rise in challenge to the dominant discourse and even undo it. That has been the familiar story in Nigeria, as can be seen from the existence of laws that are obeyed more in breach than in compliance. It is not the lawlessness of Nigerians that explains that, but the inherent incompleteness of every discourse, due to the rather discursive nature of society itself. In other words, I do not agree with postmodernists that heterogeneity is a feature exclusive to the postmodern world. No one who studies the pattern of the organisation of the entrenched palaces in Nigeria, for example, will be comfortable with such a claim, but that is a matter for another day.
What is immediately key in this piece is the pleasantly shocking development about policing Nigeria early in October, when the news hit the streets to the effect that the ‘Nigeria Police Force Training Institutions’ bill had been signed into law. The new law is a legislative hit because of the whooping number of federally owned institutions involved: 49 of them, none of which was known to the law before the 3rd of September when the president’s signature transformed the bill into law. Meanwhile, some of them, such as the Police Colleges in Ikeja, Kaduna, Maiduguri, Enugu and Jos have been in existence since 1936, much, much earlier than Nigeria itself came to be. The 49 police institutions covered by this law include five Police colleges; 18 Police training schools and the others distributed into tactical, technical and related training schools spread across Nigeria.
These institutions train a huge chunk of the policemen and women who the majority of Nigerians encounter on the streets, and the ugliness of much of such encounters. It makes for a credible inference to say that the problem with policing is not with the policemen and women, but with their grooming, their grounding in the basic doctrines of policing, and the larger assumptions in the national security praxis they emanate from. This inference informs the connection of the new legislation to a writing act as far as the 21st century policing of Nigeria is concerned. This is so because, hitherto, these institutions were nothing but juridical white elephants. They were, in so far as they had no budget line, meaning they could not draw directly from the federal budget. Whatever funding they got was obtained administratively because they were unknown to the law. Which modern Police College anywhere in the world today can be anything but a white elephant if it has no budget of its own that enables it to plan and execute such plans on its own terms?
Two, they could not enter into legally binding relationships with similar institutions within or outside Nigeria. They could not because such partnership would equally be unknown to the law and no infractions of it by any party could have been actionable in court without dragging in the entire Nigeria Police Force, under which they were hidden. How could any police training institution function optimally in such condition in a world of extreme fragmentation?
Three, what these translate to is that Nigerians were paying a price daily in terms of vulnerability to sophisticated criminal operations, because a huge chunk of the institutions which train or process the majority of the policemen and women existed on no more than the verbal authority of colonial operatives or military rulers who simply wished these institutions into being through a military fiat. It has been a huge price to pay and any legislative move which unmakes that situation acquires the status of the historical.
The 2025 ‘Nigeria Police Force Training Institutions’ Act has been a case of where everything that should go well went well. Obviously taking his brief seriously, Senator Ahmed Mallamadori, the Jigawa born chairman of the Senate Committee on Police Affairs took his time to dig and discover that there was such a gap. He also understood that filling the gap was an imperative. His colleagues in the Senate had no difficulty in appreciating the imperative to quickly fill the gap. And when the National Assembly (NASS) finished its job and sent the bill to the president, he too understood the essence of the bill and wasted no time in signing it into law. There were no glitches at any point in the progression from a bill to a law.
It may be true that a law will not, in and of itself, solve all the problems with policing Nigeria, but the point here is that if the grounding of the average policeman and woman is more modernist and critical, policing Nigeria would have taken off for the 21st century. In any case, it is progress for such a piece of legislation to exist because the legal foundation is an all-time imperative. How effective the law turns out will depend on what the heads of these police institutions do, what the police force itself does, the oversight functions on the police establishment (which brings in the NASS again) and what Nigerians demand and pressure the police to do. Therefore, the haplessness of law in itself does not preclude celebration of the key actors in the making of the new law. Senator Abdulhamid Ahmed Mallamadori who initiated the bill has already been mentioned. But so also should the Senate and its leadership, as well as the NASS and the presidency. A common sense view of the law- making function of an individual lawmaker, as well as the NASS, would frown at any celebration of the individual and collective agency behind the law. But this is not just another bill signed into law. Rather, it is a history-making piece of legislation.
Interestingly, the NPF itself understands this. A 13th October statement by Benjamin Hundeyin, a Chief Superintendent of Police and Force Public Relations Officer gave it a landmark score. The statement added that the legislation “represented a historic step toward enhancing professionalism, ensuring sustainable funding, and improving welfare within the Force”. It went further to note how the legislation provides “foundation for building a modern, accountable, and well-equipped police institution that meets the security needs of a dynamic society.” He was sure the new law would bring about far-reaching changes to policing Nigeria, scoring it again as a “victory for national security, professionalism, and public trust.”
The NPF cannot be wrong on this. The new law is worth being celebrated because it is only one of the many reforms that Senator Mallam Madori is understood to be also pursuing as chairman of the very vital Senate Committee on Police Affairs. There is significance in what he is doing because he is showing that it is escapism to keep blaming colonialism or the military for things we can change without much ado. That is the message of this law. Above all, he goes about his legislative activism without shouting too much or drawing noisy attention to himself.
Yet, through one of his efforts, Nigeria has now reconstituted a bunch of institutions belonging to the NPF into proper, corporate legal entities. These institutions can now have provisions in the budget and stop draining the financial resources of the NPF; they can sue and be sued; they can enter into professional or technical relationship with other similar institutions in and outside Nigeria. The totality is that Nigerians should expect more professionally cued-in police officers and ORs (other ranks), qualitatively trained to chaperon Nigerians in the image of the police as the vanguard of modernity, historically. A police force without officers and men well trained in modernity cannot exercise the discretion required for the police job. The expectation with this law is that, now, the firework will begin. Should the firework begin and there is a turnaround in policing the country, Nigerians will not forget who provided the condition of possibility for that: Senator Ahmed Mallamadori, his staff and colleagues in the 10th NASS.
Adagbo Onoja is an IRs researcher.