A word on the Police Reform Trust Fund Bill

There has been a renewed agitation for making the component states of the federation more productive by flipping the exclusive legislative list in favour of the federating states. Proponents of this reform have variously described it as restructuring or true federalism.
One major derivative of that reform is the institution of state police. A major downside of restructuring with state policing as a derivative is that it is cast in the media as a zero sum game.
For instance, there seems to be a generic consensus that the topmost in the list of asphyxiating problems bedeviling the Nigerian nation is corruption yet proponents of restructuring cannot see any need to push through various anti-corruption bills with the National Assembly as an alternative to restructuring that may feed the incentive for civil war. The Police Force Reform Trust Fund Bill has been domiciled at the NASS since 2008 yet the legislature is not in a hurry to pass it. Let’s imagine where state police apparatus is under the control of a hot head state governor, will this not amount to an ignition of anarchy? A governor that can use his security details to physically prevent EFCC or DSS from performing their jobs cannot be entrusted with control of state police. The decibels resonating over restructuring must be moderated with guarded introspection. What we forget is that what constrains any Nigerian president in turning the police to personal agent of vendetta is the oversight function of the NASS. This oversight restraint is absolutely absent at the state level where state legislatures are mere appendages of the executive. A social media clip where a legislator was kneeling down to beg a state governor for merely criticising the governor can attest to the master-servant relationship that exists between the executive and the legislature at the state level. It is trite to say that toothless state assemblies pose a veritable danger to the orchestrated true federalism particularly as it affects state police. Rather than pushing this nebulous restructuring that spells doom for the corporate existence of Nigeria with civil war as a proximate corollary, the NASS should progressively pass reformative bills pending before it.
Nobody has articulated how restructuring will end corruption yet the more allocation various states of the federation get, the more impoverished the people become, and the more governance is degraded and the more reckless governors become. Corruption and not restructuring deserve the greatest attention.
► Bukola Ajisola wrote via [email protected]