Thirty-Six Drums for One Leopard

There was a town in the old Igbo-Ora of the 16th century, troubled by a leopard. It came at night, took their goat here, a child there, a hen at the other end, and slipped back into the dark before the cock crows for the next morning.

To curb this menace, the elders met, and they did for long. And after much wisdom, they resolved to a decision, so bold and historic.

Every compound would henceforth keep its own watchman, and to each compound they handed a drum. Night after night, the town throbbed with the drummings of vigilance.

Men beat their drums and felt safe.

Mothers slept to the rhythm of their own protection.

Yet leopard kept feeding.

The leopard kept feasting because it lived in no compound. It lived in the ungoverned bush between the compounds, and it bred where no one had ever cleared the land, where no farm had ever been, where the elders had agreed never to go.

Permit me, I digressed a bit, but that is the town. This is the news.

Yesterday, the Senate gave Nigeria thirty-six drums. After 66 years of central policing, the Red Chamber passed the State Police Bill. It was an executive bill, transmitted by the President himself, sponsored on the floor by the Senate Leader, midwifed by the Deputy Senate President's committee.

I watched the proceedings via the Channels Television station, and I cannot but vent my disagreement.

Governors sat in the chambers to watch. The Chief of Staff to the President came to watch. Attorneys-General came to watch. The owners of the new drums had come to make sure the drums were carved to their measurements.

After all, when the main beneficiaries of a law gather to witness its passage, you do not need a soothsayer to interpret the omen.

Let me be fair from the outset, the case of the legislature is not stupid.

Nigeria's central police are far too stretched. It is absent from the vast rural places where danger actually lives. Far from the Abande and Turan Axis of Benue State. Difficult to reach Yelwatans of the Middle Belt, The Eda Oniyo of Ekiti, Oriire in Oyo.

Very slow to respond because every order comes from Abuja and crawls back down. A federation this large, this plural, this bleeding, cannot be policed from one desk along Shehu Shagari Way in the Central area of Abuja.

On the principle of devolution, I am a believer.

I have in times past, argued that this country is too over-centralised to breathe, that Abuja is a desert that takes and never gives. So no one should mistake what I am saying.

I am not defending the rotten centre.

All I am saying is that the drum is not the leopard.

The Yoruba have an adage: bí ọ̀pọ̀lọ́ bá n sáré l'ọ́sàn-án, ohun kan ń lé e, when you see a frog running in broad daylight, something is chasing it. There is always a cause to the thing you can see.

We see kidnapping;

We see banditry;

We see the Old Oyo National Park swallowing schoolchildren in Oyo State;

We see bandit lords taxing whole villages in Zamfara.

These are the running frogs. State police promise to chase the frog. But what chases the frog? What breeds it?

Go to the North and ask. UNICEF will tell you that Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children on the entire earth, somewhere around 18 million. The majority of them in the North. States like Sokoto and Kebbi, where two out of every three children of school age will never see the inside of a classroom.

Add to that the Almajiri, 9 million boys, sent from home barefoot to a distant Mallam, fed by the alms of strangers, raised on the street as their own security.

A boy who learns at 6 that society owes him nothing and protects him from nothing grows into a man easily rented by anyone with a rifle and a meal.

This is the bush between the compounds. This is where the leopard lives. You cannot police your way out of that.

You can put a constable in every village in Maiduguri, give him a new uniform and a new shoulder badge that says Borno State Police, and he will still be standing guard over a generation that was abandoned before he was recruited.

Born and thrown away.

Schooled in begging.

Married off at twelve.

Married off in their hundreds.

A whole demographic raised to be combustible, and we answer it with a change in the colour of the uniform.

The sore we refuse to clean does not heal because we have bought a finer bandage.

Now to the second danger, the one the bill protests too loudly about. Read the safeguards, and you will smile the smile of the disenchanted.

The bill prohibits any governor from directing the state police against persons, parties, groups. The bill expressly forbids the use of police powers for partisan, ethnic, religious, or personal ends. The Senate Leader, the erudite Michael Opeyemi Bamidele, stood up and assured opposition interests that these fears had been "directly addressed."

You see, when a law shouts so loudly that it will not be abused, it is telling you, in advance, in the exact way how it will be abused. The loud denial is the confession.

We have done this before. We are not virgins to this experiment.

In the First Republic, the regions ran their own Native Authority and Local Government police, and those forces became the private armies of whoever held power in the region.

They harassed the opposition.

They rigged for the incumbent.

They jailed the inconvenient.

They were so notoriously partisan that after the country fell apart, one of the first acts of reconstruction was to disband them and fold everything into a single national force.

The minorities had seen it coming. The Willink Commission of 1958 had recorded their terror that regional governments would turn regional police into instruments against them. They were right then.

The bush has not changed; only the year has.

The Romans, who had thought about everything before we were born, left us the whole question in four words. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, meaning: who will guard the guards themselves?

Juvenal asked it as a joke about watchmen and unfaithful wives. We will live it as tragedy across thirty-six jurisdictions.

Robert Peel, who invented the modern police in London, built it on the idea that the police are the public and the public are the police; that policing works only by consent.

Where on this map of ours does that sort of consent live? We police by coercion, not by covenant. Decentralising coercion without first building consent is not reform. It is franchising.

And here is the part we already know without being told, so let me say it plainly and spare us the suspense.

Lagos will do well. Of course, Lagos will do well; Lagos has the money, the institutions, the technology, the decades of municipal habit. Lagos always passes the exam.

Borno will do woefully, and we will pretend to be surprised.

Jigawa will never once make the headline of any story.

And somewere in the East, in a state that has never in its life known good governance, a governor will rise in May 29, 2027 from nowhere, win miraculously, and proceed to perform with a brilliance that shames his peers and his predecessors.

We will write think-pieces about him. We will hold him up as proof that state police works.

And before you finish your thought, No, I am not talking about Alex Otti.

Uneven country, uneven drums. State police will not make the states equal; it will only project their inequality in high resolution and hang it on the wall.

The strong states will grow stronger. The collapsed states will collapse. And the federation, which is the real patient on the table, will be told once again that what it needed was more uniforms.

So what did I want them to do instead?

I wanted them to dig where the rain began to beat us; ibi tí òjò gbé bẹ̀rẹ̀ sí pa wa.

Put the eighteen million children back in school before you arm the man who will one day chase them.

Kill the almajiri's poverty before you fund his pursuer.

Build the consent before you franchise the coercion.

Fix the bush, and the leopard loses its nursery.

But fixing the bush is slow, and unglamorous, and wins no applause in a chamber full of governors. Buying drums is quick. It photographs beautifully. It lets a tired nation beat something in the dark and call the noise safety.

The town is still drumming. The leopard, well fed, is still yawning in the bush we swore never to clear.

Listen closely and you can hear it purrrrrrrrrr.