Joining calls for state police, a former Deputy President of the Senate, Ike Ekweremadu, said in Lagos on Monday that Nigeria’s policing system had failed to tackle insecurity.
Speaking on “Nigerian State and the Call for Restructuring’’ at the opening of Law Week 2021 of the Ikeja branch of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Ekweremadu called for the decentralization of the police.
The Week has “The Nigeria of Our Dreams’’ as its theme.
Ekweremadu said the decentralization of the police had become expedient in the face of the rising wave of banditry and kidnapping across the country.
“Our policing system has failed woefully. There are no other federating states that have done what we are doing in policing.
“It is no surprise that with the capsizing of the national police, the nation’s security has also collapsed.”
Ekweremadu said that restructuring the police was no longer a matter of choice but a matter of urgency.
“In an instance where we have decentralized police, we will have a federal police system and 774 police systems in all the 774 local governments in the 36 states and in Abuja.
“The implication, therefore, is that if the federal police fail, we have additional layers in 36 states; but right now, they are absent.
“Now that the federal policing have collapsed because they do not have the resources, the funding, and the manpower, there is nothing to hold on to, Ekweremadu stressed.
In his address of welcome, Mr Bartholomew Aguegbodo, Chairman of the NBA branch said there was no better time to hold the Law Week than now in the light of Nigeria’s current political climate.
“Sometime in 2004 or 2005 the then President Olusegun Obasanjo, set up a committee with the task of setting a national vision targeted at the year 2020 with all the dreams and hopes.
“The year 2020 has come and gone and the dreams are far from being realized.
“The founding fathers of this country had policies which would have birthed the Nigeria of our dreams if we had followed them to the letter.”
Aguegbodo said bad leadership and tribalism had, unfortunately, derailed the objectives of the nation’s founding fathers and set the nation backward.
