By Omoyeni Ojeifo
State police alone cannot resolve Nigeria’s worsening security crisis, according to former Inspector General of Police Mike Okiro.
He warned that creating new policing structures will fail without comprehensive, underlying reforms to the country’s current security system.
He stated this on Tuesday during an interview on Arise TV, monitored by Persecondnews, focusing on rising insecurity, repeated kidnappings in schools, and ongoing debates over restructuring Nigeria’s policing architecture to improve national security and operational effectiveness.
Okiro said insecurity has remained a recurring national challenge despite years of policy discussions and repeated interventions aimed at addressing it across successive administrations without achieving lasting results or meaningful structural improvement nationwide.
“I think we have discussed this insecurity issue for many years now, almost endlessly, yet it continues to persist across the country, affecting communities, schools and public life without any sustainable resolution or lasting structural improvement over time,” he said.
He noted that insecurity has become a nationwide burden affecting all categories of citizens, with schools increasingly becoming soft targets for criminal attacks, kidnappings and violent incidents across different regions of the country.
“Every part of society is affected by insecurity today. Whether in urban centres or rural communities, rich or poor, no one is spared. School children are being targeted, workers are affected, and people live in constant fear daily across the nation,” he noted.
The former IGP stressed the urgent need for a complete rethink of Nigeria’s security strategy, noting that existing approaches have not delivered the level of coordination, intelligence and prevention required to effectively reduce insecurity.
“It is obvious that we need a completely different approach to tackling insecurity. The current system has been in place for years, yet the challenges have only grown deeper and more complex over time without any clear resolution,” he maintained.
On the state police debate, he said Nigeria’s former regional policing structure provided useful lessons but also exposed deep structural weaknesses that continue to affect policing effectiveness under the current centralised system.
“Nigeria once operated regional policing structures before they were unified. Over time, we discovered serious challenges such as inadequate funding, insufficient manpower and lack of proper equipment, which still affect policing effectiveness today significantly,” he emphasized.
He warned that introducing state police without addressing existing institutional weaknesses would not resolve insecurity, but could replicate the same operational inefficiencies under a different structure with similar systemic constraints.
“If we do not first address the fundamental problems within the existing police system, then creating state police will simply introduce another structure with the same weaknesses, inefficiencies and operational constraints already affecting national policing,” he stressed.
Okiro also called for strong constitutional safeguards to prevent political interference and abuse of security institutions under any decentralised policing arrangement at state level across the federation.
“There must be very clear constitutional and legal safeguards to define the limits of authority between governors and policing structures, otherwise decentralisation could lead to political interference and abuse of security institutions nationwide,” he added.
He recalled that earlier initiatives included training programmes and coordination mechanisms for schools, but were not implemented due to financial constraints and administrative bottlenecks within the system at the time.
He said ongoing insecurity and repeated attacks on schools underscore the urgent need for structural reforms, improved coordination and stronger political commitment to national security transformation efforts across Nigeria
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