Ogun State Governor, Dapo Abiodun, has declared the state ready to operate its own police force once Nigeria’s constitution permits it, saying more than 6,000 personnel already serving in the Amotekun Corps and the So-Safe Corps can form the manpower base for the proposed command. He spoke at the 50th anniversary of Ereke Day in Ikenne, where he confirmed that the Ogun State House of Assembly had approved the creation of state police.
Abiodun’s claim carries particular weight because he chairs the Nigeria Governors’ Forum Committee on State Police Creation and represents President Bola Tinubu on the body. By his account, the combined strength of Amotekun, So-Safe and allied outfits gives Ogun an operational head start that most states lack, built on community structures his administration has expanded over several years.
The declaration lands at a decisive moment for a reform Nigeria has debated for decades. The National Assembly passed the Constitution Alteration (State Police) Bill in 2026, with the House of Representatives approving it in June by 289 votes to none, with a single abstention. The bill, which seeks to amend Section 214 of the 1999 Constitution to create both federal and state police and to move policing off the Exclusive Legislative List, has since been transmitted to the 36 state Houses of Assembly. At least 24 of them must endorse it before the amendment can take effect.
Abiodun has consistently argued that the numbers justify the change. He has put the likely scale of recruitment at about 6,000 officers per state, which would add close to 200,000 personnel to the national total if every state matched that figure. Citing Governors’ Forum data pegged to the United Nations benchmark of one officer to 414 citizens, he has estimated that Nigeria needs roughly 554,353 additional officers to police its population adequately, a gap he says state forces spread across the 774 local government areas are best placed to close.
The foundation he points to is real. Amotekun, formally the South-West Security Network, was established by the region’s governors in 2020 to counter kidnapping, banditry and rural violence, and Ogun passed its enabling law that year. The state has since recruited in batches, approving an additional 1,000 operatives in 2026 to push the Amotekun roll past 2,000, while the So-Safe Corps, hunters and vigilante groups have been folded into joint operations, including the protection of schools.
Caution remains warranted, however. No state police service exists anywhere in Nigeria yet, and none can until the constitutional amendment is ratified by the required states and assented to, after which a separate National Policing Bill must set out recruitment, funding, command and oversight. Tinubu inaugurated a working group led by his Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, in July to draft that implementing law, and Gbajabiamila has stressed that the Nigeria Police Force remains the only constitutionally recognised police institution for now. The 2014 National Conference recommended state police but produced no constitutional change, a reminder that momentum has stalled before.
Governors have also pressed for safeguards rather than raw power. Through the Forum, they have consulted state attorneys-general on constitutional guardrails covering funding, command relationships with the federal police and mechanisms to stop the forces being turned into tools of incumbents. Abiodun has predicted that the state assemblies will pass the amendment simultaneously, though no date has been fixed.
At Ikenne, the governor tied the security push to development, ordering the immediate reconstruction of the Delabo-Ikenne Road and reporting that his administration had built or rehabilitated more than 1,700 kilometres of roads statewide. He also warned young people against allowing politicians to use them for violence ahead of the 2027 general elections, insisting that no political ambition was worth the peace of a community.
For residents of Ogun and the wider South-West, the practical question is whether a formally constituted state police would perform better than the hybrid outfits now in the field, which have faced criticism over capacity even as kidnapping persists. Abiodun’s answer is that the personnel, structures and legislative approval are already in place, and that only the constitution now stands between the state and a command of its own.