President Bola Tinubu has formally called on the Nigerian Senate to initiate constitutional amendments that would establish State Police across the federation, framing the move as an urgent and unavoidable response to the deepening security crisis threatening lives and livelihoods in virtually every part of the country.
Tinubu made the appeal on Wednesday night during an interfaith breaking of fast with senators at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, a gathering that brought together Muslim and Christian legislators under the shared symbolism of Ramadan and Lent. Speaking with evident urgency, the President described Nigeria as “extremely challenged” by terrorism, banditry, and insurgency, and argued that devolving policing powers to the states had become a constitutional imperative rather than a political preference.
“What I am asking for tonight is for you to start thinking how best to amend the Constitution to incorporate the State Police for us to secure our country, take over our forests from marauders, free our children from fear,” Tinubu told the assembled senators.
The appeal was not an isolated one. Just three days earlier, on Monday, Tinubu had made a near-identical commitment to state governors at a separate Iftar dinner, where he gave what appeared to be a firm timeline. “What I promise you is not to be postponed. We will establish State Police to combat insecurity,” he had declared on that occasion. The repetition of the call within the space of seventy-two hours, before two of the country’s most powerful constituencies, signals that the Tinubu administration intends to press the matter with renewed seriousness in the weeks ahead.
The debate over State Police in Nigeria is not new. It stretches back decades and sits at the heart of a broader, unresolved tension between federal control and state autonomy that has defined Nigerian governance since the return to civilian rule in 1999. Under the current constitutional arrangement, policing is placed on the Exclusive Legislative List, meaning the federal government retains sole authority over law enforcement through the Nigeria Police Force. States have no independent command structure, no direct operational control, and no power to deploy or discipline officers beyond the limited leverage they exercise through informal political pressure on police commissioners who are appointed and answerable to Abuja.
This centralised model has attracted sustained criticism from governors, traditional rulers, community leaders, and security analysts across the political divide. The argument from proponents of State Police is straightforward: a federally controlled force cannot be sufficiently responsive to the specific geography, language, culture, and threat patterns of thirty-six diverse states. Bandits operating in dense forests across the North West, kidnappers who know local terrain with precision, and armed herdsmen navigating routes that federal officers are often unfamiliar with have, critics argue, consistently outmanoeuvred a police structure designed for central command rather than local intelligence.
The clamour intensified significantly between 2020 and 2024 as insecurity worsened dramatically. The Nigerian Security Tracker, a project of the Council on Foreign Relations, documented thousands of deaths attributable to armed non-state actors during that period, with states in the North West, North East, and parts of the South East bearing a disproportionate burden. The collapse of agricultural activity in bandit-affected states, the displacement of farming communities, and the economic toll of persistent insecurity have given the State Police debate an urgency it lacked in earlier years when it was treated largely as a matter of abstract federalism theory.
For the proposal to become law, Nigeria’s constitutional amendment process demands a formidable legislative threshold. Any amendment to the Constitution must pass through both the Senate and the House of Representatives with the support of at least two-thirds of members in each chamber. Beyond the National Assembly, the amendment must then be ratified by not fewer than twenty-four of the thirty-six state Houses of Assembly. That process is neither quick nor guaranteed, and past attempts to move policing to the concurrent list have stalled at various stages, often because of disagreements about accountability structures, fears of political abuse by governors, and the absence of a consensus framework for how State Police would be funded, trained, and overseen.
Tinubu acknowledged the legislative complexity on Wednesday night but did not outline a specific timeline or propose a draft framework. His call to senators was to “start thinking” about the mechanism, suggesting the administration is still at the stage of political mobilisation rather than concrete legislative drafting. Whether that momentum translates into a bill, a joint committee, or a constitutional review process within the life of the current National Assembly remains to be seen.
The President used the occasion to commend the Senate for what he described as unwavering support for his administration, while also pledging continued partnership. “You never fail to make the right response to these calls. All the critical support that I’ve enjoyed, I will promise that I will continue to enjoy it and will not take you for granted,” he said.
Tinubu also used the platform to respond directly to critics who have accused him of engineering the collapse of opposition politics in Nigeria through large-scale defections to his ruling All Progressives Congress. The accusation has been a persistent one, with the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour Party both experiencing significant losses of elected officials and party members since Tinubu assumed office in May 2023. Rather than dismissing the criticism, the President addressed it with characteristic bluntness. “When they accused me of killing opposition, I didn’t have a gun. I could have given myself a license when I have the authority, but I can’t blame anybody from jumping out of a sinking ship,” he said, a remark that drew pointed attention to his characterisation of opposition platforms as structurally unsound.
On the economy, the President defended the two signature reforms that defined the opening of his administration and generated enormous public controversy. The removal of the petrol subsidy in May 2023, announced on the day of his inauguration, and the unification of the foreign exchange market triggered sharp rises in fuel prices and a severe depreciation of the naira that deepened cost-of-living pressures for millions of Nigerians throughout 2023 and into 2024. Tinubu has consistently argued that these measures, however painful, were necessary corrections to a system he described on Wednesday as one of “monumental corruption.”
“What we gave up and what we stopped is monumental corruption in subsidy. We gave it up. We don’t want to participate in monumental corruption, in arbitrage, foreign exchange. You don’t have to chase me for dollars like in the past,” the President said. He credited the National Assembly with providing the political support that made those reforms possible. “I have a lot of credit for bold reforms. Without your collaboration, without your inspiration, those reforms are not possible. We are reformists together,” he stated.
Tinubu also expressed confidence that the country was on a path to recovery, making claims about economic stability that sit in tension with the lived experience of many Nigerians who continue to contend with elevated food prices, persistent inflation, and reduced purchasing power. “What we are enjoying is stable economy, prosperity beckoning on us. We just need to work hard,” he said, urging the senators to take pride in what he framed as a turning point for Nigeria.
Closing on a note of national and spiritual solidarity, the President drew attention to the rare calendrical convergence of Ramadan and the Christian season of Lent, describing the coincidence as a call to collective reflection and sacrifice. “The season of reflection, sacrifice, compassion and national unity is reflected by you tonight. And I don’t take it lightly,” he said.
