By Olukayode Ajulo
My brother, Professor Chidi Odinkalu, offers a critique of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s nationwide security emergency announcement on November 26, 2025. He expresses significant concerns regarding the proposal for state police, suggesting that it could potentially lead to challenges that resemble a form of ‘decentralised despotism.’ Odinkalu invokes ghosts of colonial-era Native Authority abuses, Sharia-era missteps in Zamfara, and vigilante fiascos in Benue and Anambra to argue that state-level security is a Pandora’s box of impunity and ethnic strife. This criticism is not just path-dependent nostalgia; it is a dangerously narrow refusal to confront the undeniable limitations of Nigeria’s current centralised policing structure, an overburdened institution struggling to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving security landscape.
Despite the dedication of countless officers, the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) is patently constrained by a structure that no longer aligns with the size, diversity, and complexity of the federation. The result has been persistent security gaps that have allowed abductions and violent crimes to escalate. From July 2023 to June 2024 alone, Nigeria recorded 7,568 abductions, a grim reminder that reforms cannot remain theoretical.
In the face of this reality, state police is not a fad or sleight of hand; it is an existential necessity for a federation suffocating under a one-size-fits-all approach. And nowhere does this truth shine brighter than in the quiet but powerful example of the South-West Security Network, Operation Amotekun, South-West Nigeria’s home-grown innovation that demonstrates how decentralised policing can function; equally, transparently, and effectively.
Let us dispense with the historical red herrings Odinkalu trots out. The Native Authority Police of the 1940s-1960s were not federalism’s progeny but colonial relics, weaponised by local potentates in an era bereft of democratic guardrails or judicial oversight. Zamfara’s Sharia experiment in 1999 was no policing innovation but a theocratic gamble that conflated religious zeal with security, breeding chaos not through decentralisation but through ideological overreach.
Benue’s vigilantes and Anambra’s Bakassi Boys? These were ad-hoc unregulated militias improvised in the early Fourth Republic security vacuum, products of political desperation, not structured police forces with constitutional legitimacy. To extrapolate from those anomalies to a modern state-police framework is intellectual overreach. It overlooks Nigeria’s 2025 democratic ecosystem, which includes independent judiciaries, civil society oversight, human rights commissions, and legal guardrails that did not exist two decades ago.
The NPF’s structural challenge is not rooted in a lack of effort or patriotism; it stems from a centralisation model that restricts responsiveness to local threats. With an overstretched command system, underfunding, and the diversion of officers to duties far removed from core policing, the Force’s capacity is routinely tested. This is why multiple reform committees, including the Parry Osayande Committee in 2012, have consistently recommended decentralisation to improve efficiency and local intelligence gathering.
Enter Operation Amotekun: Established in January 2020 and codified into our laws, the South-West Security Network stands as a distinguished example of how decentralised policing can function effectively within a framework of constitutional and democratic oversight. As the Attorney-General of Ondo State, I can affirm that Amotekun operates in full compliance with state law. My office has provided effective supervision of the Agency in Ondo State as prescribed.
In contrast to Professor Odinkalu’s concerns, Amotekun has successfully enhanced community-centred security while upholding principles of fairness and inclusivity. In 2025 alone, its border surge operations created a security “firewall” across the South-west, disrupting infiltration by criminal cells through community-based intelligence that the centralised structure struggles to access at the same speed. These results are rooted not in brute force but in cultural fluency, localised intelligence, and accountability.
The United Nations’ September 2025 romance of Amotekun as a “clear signal” of innovative subnational security architecture for insecurity’s defeat underscores its global acclaim: in five years, it has curtailed daredevil attacks, rescued hostages, and restored night-time normalcy in forests once bandit havens, all while operating under strict gubernatorial oversight tempered by inter-state coordination and civil society audits.
Amotekun‘s playbook is emphatic. The data is undeniable: by mid-2025, reported kidnappings in Ondo and Osun dropped by nearly 70%, despite Amotekun operating without the full access to arms and resources available to conventional federal agencies. No ethnic pogroms. No governor-driven repression. Just measurable wins.
The December 1, 2025, commissioning of Ondo Amotekun’s state-of-the-art Command Centre by Governor Lucky Orimisan Aiyedatiwa, featuring drones, surveillance systems, intelligent mapping, and real-time citizen security reporting, demonstrates both scalability and modernisation. But this milestone is only one strand in a broader system of deliberate reforms and investments that have repositioned Ondo State as the pacesetter of subnational security governance in Nigeria.
Governor Aiyedatiwa has provided what critics like Odinkalu conveniently ignore: a living demonstration of how state-level security can thrive under constitutional discipline, democratic oversight, and responsible leadership. His recent approval of 500 new Amotekun recruits, the largest single expansion since the corps was created, reflects not just manpower strengthening but strategic foresight, ensuring that intelligence gathering, border patrols, forest surveillance, and rural rapid-response capabilities are scaled proportionately to modern threats. This recruitment drive sits alongside continuous training programmes, expanded operatives’ welfare, new patrol vehicles, digital communication systems, and the restructuring of operational zones across senatorial districts.
Indeed, Governor Aiyedatiwa’s approach embodies the very model of “decentralised accountability” that scholars insist is needed for state police to flourish: clear operational mandates, legislative transparency, inter-agency intelligence fusion, and unwavering gubernatorial backing untainted by political interference. His firm public defence of Amotekun’s leadership, refusing to bow to unfounded media pressures or politicised agitation, demonstrates the maturity and continuity required to stabilise security institutions. Far from Odinkalu’s phantom of “local despots,” Governor Aiyedatiwa has shown that decentralised security powers can be exercised as instruments of protection, not tools of oppression.
Under his stewardship, Ondo has become the South-west’s most consistent case study in measurable security returns: reduced kidnapping hotspots, fortified forest corridors, proactive anti-banditry operations, and operational synergy with traditional rulers, hunters, farmers, and community networks. What emerges is not repression, but participatory security built on trust and shared intelligence the very ethic that centralised policing cannot replicate with equal speed or cultural fluency.
Aiyedatiwa’s interventions expose the hollowness of the anti–state police argument. If Amotekun can achieve these outcomes with limited arms and without constitutional police powers, then imagine what can be accomplished when legal authority, resources, and federal oversight converge in a fully domesticated state-police system. Ondo State today stands as empirical evidence, not theory, that responsible subnational leadership can enhance national security, deepen public confidence, and strengthen the federation.
In every sense, Governor Aiyedatiwa has shown that when a state chief executive embraces decentralised security not as a political ornament but as a governance obligation, safety becomes a demonstrable reality, not a rhetorical promise. His administration’s commitment proves that Nigeria’s future security architecture must be bottom-up, not top-down; community-driven, not command-chain congested. And that is precisely why Amotekun, under leaders like Aiyedatiwa, is the brightest beam pointing Nigeria toward the inevitability of state police.
Critics like Odinkalu argue that 37 subnational police units would fragment the country. But the Amotekun model proves the opposite: with federal oversight standards (training, vetting by the National Police Service Commission, uniform guidelines, and transparent budgeting through state assemblies), decentralised security becomes a force multiplier, not a threat. These sub-national police units will immensely amplify, not erode, national cohesion. This is true of federalism, not the “variable geometry” Odinkalu sneers at, but a pragmatic mosaic that decentralises risk while centralising accountability.
Nigeria’s challenges differ across regions: herder–farmer conflicts in the North, cultism in the South, kidnapping in the Middle Belt and oil theft in the Niger Delta. A centralised force cannot effectively tailor solutions to all. State police can.
President Tinubu’s “innocuous insertion” inviting National Assembly review of state police laws is no artifice, it’s an overdue gauntlet thrown to lawmakers to codify Amotekun’s virtues nationwide. It is pragmatic. It is constitutional. And it is a call to respond to a nation in distress.
Dr Ajulo is the Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Ondo State.
