By Adeyinka Adeniran
The performance of the Nigeria Police will be better enhanced if the Federal Government provides the needed funding for training and procurement of modern policing tools.
The Chairman Board of Trustees of the Nigeria Society for Criminology, Professor Etannibi Alemika, stated this while speaking on “Policing and Police in an Anomic Society” at the second international conference of the society.
According to him, there is chaos and strain in the country due to the erosion of cherished cultural values.
The foremost Criminologist said Police and policing in Nigeria is dependent on adequate government funding of the policing institution and socioeconomic as well as political factors.
He said, “What is responsible for the erosion of values is the limitless aspirations of humans. We should see Police and policing as dependent variables.
“Socioeconomic and political factors, including the inability of the government to provide funding to equip the police are the independent variables.”
In their separate papers, Professor Sadiq Isah Radda and Abdulmajeed Ahmed speaking on the paper “the clamour for state police in Nigeria: the arguments, the fallacies and the way forward,” argued that there was no doubt that Nigeria needs alternative policing strategy.
They noted that the policing system is already decentralised with different layers of community policing and police-community relations.
While noting that the current clamour for state policing is due to political exigency, the duo warned about the tendencies of abuse of such system.
They also noted that there is a way in which the state abdicated its responsibility once there is decentralization, such as the fate of education and health sectors.
