On 24 June 2026, the Nigerian Senate approved the State Police Bill, which advances with safeguards for decentralised policing in Nigeria. The bill had already passed the House of Representative on 10 June 2026 and proposes a constitutional framework for establishing State Police Services alongside a restructured Federal Police Service. It aims to improve local response to insecurity while adding national minimum standards, oversight commissions, and limits on political abuse. The Bill thus seeks to amend the 1999 Constitution so each State may establish its own police service, while the Federal Police retains responsibility for federal policing, the Federal Capital Territory, federal assets, interstate and national-security matters. To take effect, the Bill still requires approval of the State Houses of Assembly and the President’s assent.
The bill could shift policing from a highly centralised model to a constitutional federal–state framework, improving responsiveness, accountability, and protection of rights. If fully adopted and implemented, it would alter Nigeria’s security architecture, redistribute policing powers, and set new national standards for how police powers are exercised across the federation. This is particularly significant considering long-running problems with police concentration and abuse risks. The current model has been widely criticised for weak local responsiveness and for enabling arbitrary use of police power. The bill tries to address that by expressly banning partisan, ethnic, religious, or personal misuse of police authority, protecting tenure, and requiring oversight by police service commissions and the National Police Council.
However, for the bill to effectively improve policing, it needs to incorporate stronger accountability safeguards as the assessment conducted by a coalition of 30 civil society organisations found. Security governance experts, policy analysts, and governance advocates have similarly published detailed assessments discussing strengths of the proposed dual-police model, risks of political capture, funding sustainability, accountability institutions, human rights protections. The possibility of creating new abuse risks if state-level oversight is politicised or underfunded makes civil society monitoring especially important at the ratification and implementation stages, because the real test will be whether safeguards are enforceable in practice rather than only on paper.