Insecurity: Obasanjo recants, now backs state police

Former president Olusegun Obasanjo says the country needs state police as the worsening insecurity has exceeded what community policing can tackle.

Obasanjo’s statement comes almost a decade after he fiercely opposed the idea of state police.

TheCornet reports that Obasanjo, in 2012, said the creating state police would set the country backward.

“With my little experience of the knowledge of what Nigeria is, I think we cannot afford to witness what happened in the 50s again because of state police,” Obasanjo told Muhammed Tsafe, a former assistant inspector-general of police who was visiting him at the time.

In a new statement by Kehinde Akinyemi, Obasanjo’s special assistant on media, the former president reportedly stated the exigency of state police as countermeasure to insecurity.

“Our situation in Nigeria concerns everyone, particularly, the case of terrorism. The case has gotten over the issue of community police. It is now state police. It is from that state police that we can now be talking about community police,” Obasanjo reportedly said during a courtesy visit by members of the National Association of Ex-Local Government Chairmen in Nigeria.

He also spoke on the need to strengthen the traditional system and the local government administration.

“I prepared during the popular Murtala/Obasanjo administration, because I believe that there is need to enable that tier of government to work truly as a local government. They have their own Executive, Judiciary and Legislature.

“They were working and they were very visible, building and managing roads, looking into education, health, local administration, agriculture, but they are all gone.”

The ex-local government chairmen were said to have officially requested that Obasanjo be their life patron.

The former president promised to look into the request and to make himself available when called upon.