PDP Governors Urge Federal Government to Establish State Police to Combat Insecurity

Governors elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, yesterday lamented the security challenges facing the country, indicating that for the nation to overcome the problem, the present police structure must be decentralised to give way to the establishment of state police across the country.

The PDP governors spoke in Jos, Plateau State capital when they visited the Plateau State Governor Caleb Mutfwang at the Rayfield Government House.

The visit follows the series of attacks and killings by gunmen in the state which had reportedly claimed over 200 lives in the past month with properties worth millions of naira destroyed in various communities of the state.

Chairman of the PDP Governors Forum, who is also the Bauchi State Governor, Bala Muhammed, who spoke on their behalf, said, “We are just being very honest with ourselves. We are not just indicting unreasonably the Nigerin police or the security agents as they are doing their best, but certainly, the ratio between citizens to policing is very low and the states know the peculiarities of their states and local governments and their towns and villages and even the crisis of community crisis and others.

So we have always been advocating. There is no dissent between the governors and the National level but we need to get some decentralisation of the security apparatus so that we can enhance good governance by having good state police.

And again, that would allow us to engage the structure, the security agencies to train our youths and also make sure the rules of engagement are not abused; there are no extrajudicial killings, and so on.

We will work in tandem with established practice, globally rather than just be forced to be doing vigilante. Even on the vigilante, we’re doing our best to make sure we involve the security agencies, but we are still being accused. We are copying from Amotekun.

We have seen what happened in Zamfara, in Katsina and other places. This is good to go because Nigerians want to sleep with their two eyes closed and the PDP, as a party, has always ensured good governance as our governor of Plateau said.

We have no option other than to show the difference between beans and rice. That’s what we are trying to do to – make sure we bring projects and programmes, good governance with the little resources we have, even though we may not get special intervention, but we are doing best with the least that we have.