Lock and key
The Plateau State University situated in Bokkos Local Government Area has been shut down following the killing of a 200-level student of…
The Plateau State University situated in Bokkos Local Government Area has been shut down following the killing of a 200-level student of the university after gunmen attacked the Chikam community close to the university. Meanwhile, the Inspector-General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, has rejected the state police proposal, warning that governors can abuse the outfit for political or personal gains and compromise human rights and national security. He proposed that “The Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps and Federal Road Safety Commission should form a department under the Nigerian police’’ instead. However, the Federal Government insisted there was no going back on the initiative.
The genesis of last week’s crisis in Bokkos that culminated in the school’s shutdown is a direct fallout from the perennial indigene-settler conflict that has pitted Hausa/Berom natives against nomadic Fulanis. Since the crisis began in the third quarter of 2023, communities in Bokkos, Barkin Ladi and Mangu have carried out retaliatory attacks on herders, exacerbating the cycle of violence and ongoing land disputes linked to Fulani attacks. The latest incident is a tragedy of at least two acts. First, the killing of the student–Dading James Jordan–was preceded by the deaths of a woman and child around the same vicinity. Residents in some communities in the LGA noted that several times, attack intel had been shared with security forces before an attack, but there was usually no response, allowing the attackers to act freely. Second, the penchant for the state’s suppression of dissent inflates tensions in many ways than necessary. The build-up to the army’s shooting of one of the protesters bears a marked resemblance to the protest management techniques deployed by the Nigerian military, especially the Lekki Massacre of 2020. In Lekki, the military used live rounds and fired directly at protesters, and as in Lekki, they also took the victims away. Lastly, this raises the issue of campus security in Nigeria. Student communities around the country are facing a security crisis, shifting from youth gang violence to organised national security threats due to policing failures. While the Inspector General’s opposition to state police has merit, he may be in the minority as Nigeria moves towards this change. It is an anomaly that a unified police force serves Nigeria’s federal arrangement. However, the IG’s argument falls short in his failure to recognise that even with its current structure, the police are still being used and abused by special interests with government and state access. To prevent state policing from elevating state governors to god-like status, power should not be centralised at the state level. Instead, it should be decentralised to the community level with mechanisms of accountability that are independent of government control.