Beyond Colonial Inheritance: Rethinking the Nigerian Police

To speak about policing in Nigeria is to speak about a memory that has not finished shaping the present. The crisis is not only in conduct or in training or in funding. It is deeper than that. It is in the way an institution remembers what it was created to do and what it was never designed to become. The Nigeria Police Force still carries within it the shadow of its origin. A force built not to protect citizens but to manage them.

Formally established on 1 April 1930 through the amalgamation of earlier regional constabularies, the police system that would become Nigeria’s national force did not emerge as a neutral civic institution. Its roots lay in colonial administrative needs, where maintaining order often meant suppressing dissent and securing imperial authority. That origin continues to echo in the present.

Under colonial rule, policing was never imagined as a civic service. It was an instrument of order deployed to secure authority and suppress dissent. That logic did not disappear with independence. It simply changed hands. The architecture remained even as the flag changed. What Nigeria inherited was not just an institution but a way of thinking about power in which the citizen was not central but secondary.

This is why the relationship between the police and the public often feels strained in ways that are difficult to fully explain through policy alone. It is also why it is easier for many Nigerians, especially young people, to expect suspicion than protection. A routine stop can feel like exposure. A question can feel like an accusation. Over time, this shapes behaviour on both sides. Caution from citizens, control from officers and a growing distance between them.

There are moments when this distance becomes visible in ways that are almost ordinary in their repetition. A young man is stopped because he carries a laptop bag and is asked to prove his identity beyond what is reasonable. A commuter is delayed at a checkpoint where the conversation is less about safety than about settlement. A mother already anxious approaches a station not with confidence but with negotiation in mind. These are not dramatic events. Their significance lies in how normal they have become.

Part of this reality has been captured in the cultural memory of resistance. When Fela Kuti sang that “police station don turn to bank,” he was not merely criticising corruption. He was describing a shift in meaning - the transformation of an institution of law into a site of transaction. What was once meant to represent order begins in certain encounters to resemble exchange. The uniform remains but its moral clarity does not always follow.

In cities like Lagos, this tension is felt in the rhythm of everyday movement. Transport workers speak quietly of stops that are expected rather than surprising. The language is often coded, almost routine. What should be enforcement becomes negotiation. What should be protection becomes permission. Over time, citizens adapt not by trusting the system but by learning how to move through it.

Yet it would be incomplete to describe this only as individual misconduct. What exists is also an institutional culture that has struggled to redefine itself beyond its inherited framework. The challenge is not simply that some officers act wrongly. It is that the system often lacks consistent mechanisms to correct deter and prevent such behaviour in a way that restores public confidence.

This becomes more serious when the use of force enters the picture. Incidents such as the killing of Mene Ogidi in Effurun, Delta State, are not just tragic events. They are reminders of what happens when accountability is uneven and restraint is not consistently enforced. Each case reinforces a perception that consequences are unpredictable, sometimes severe for citizens often uncertain for officers. In that imbalance, trust erodes further.

Leadership within the IGP Tunji Disu administration operates inside this inherited complexity. Reform cannot be reduced to announcements or reorganisations alone. It requires something more difficult, a shift in how authority understands itself. A police institution cannot serve the public effectively if it continues to see the public primarily as a risk to be managed rather than a community to be protected.

This tension is visible in how security is distributed. In Nigeria today, proximity to political power often determines proximity to protection. Public office holders move with heavy security details while ordinary citizens in many communities face insecurity with far less support. The result is a quiet inversion. Protection becomes concentrated where vulnerability is lowest and thinnest where it is highest.

In such conditions, it is not surprising that other security actors are increasingly drawn into roles the police should ordinarily fulfil. The growing reliance on the military for internal security tasks reflects not just operational demand but institutional strain. When a police system cannot consistently respond to everyday insecurity, the burden shifts elsewhere, often at a cost to both efficiency and public perception.

And yet, despite all this, the question is not whether the police can be reformed. It is whether it can be reimagined in a way that goes beyond surface adjustment. Decolonising policing in practical terms does not mean erasing history. It means refusing to be confined by it.

It means moving from a logic of control to a logic of care, not as sentiment but as structure. It means recognising that suspicion cannot be the default language of engagement with citizens. It means building systems where accountability is not occasional but consistent, where misconduct is not absorbed into routine but addressed in ways that are visible and consequential.

It also means confronting the conditions under which officers operate. A force that is poorly supported, inadequately trained and inconsistently supervised cannot be expected to function with moral clarity alone. Reform must therefore hold two truths at once. That citizens deserve protection without fear and that officers require systems that do not push them towards compromise as a mode of survival.

But beyond systems and structures lies something more difficult to name: culture. Institutions live through habits not just policies. They reproduce themselves through what is tolerated, what is rewarded and what is quietly ignored. To change policing in Nigeria is therefore to change what is considered normal within it.

This is where the idea of rethinking becomes essential. It is not a cosmetic exercise in reform language. It is an attempt to ask again and again what policing is for in a society that has outgrown the logic in which it was first designed. A force created to manage subjects must now learn how to serve citizens. That shift is not automatic. It is earned slowly through consistency.

Nigeria does not lack the language of reform. It lacks persistence. Policies are announced, reforms are launched and committees are formed. But what endures is not always intention; it is practice. And practice once formed is difficult to undo.

To rethink the Nigerian police then is not to begin from zero. It is to begin from inheritance and to refuse to accept inheritance as destiny. It is to insist that authority must be justified not by force but by trust. And it is to recognise finally that the distance between a feared police and a trusted one is not merely administrative. It is moral.

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