[Ibadan Journal of Sociology, Dec., 201 9 , 9 ]
[© 2014- 2019 Ibadan Journal of Sociology]133In the case of Rivers examined earlier, perhaps, it would have
been a more serious crisis if the party that was against the action of the
police boss had countered the action of the police via violence! May be,
while the crisis lasted, the state would have been embroiled in greater
political conflagration. This would have made the Federal Government to
declare a state of emergency. Resultantly, constitutional rule would have
been suspended as were the cases in the Western Region and Ekiti State,
in 1962 and in 2006 respectively. To be sure, no matter how one views it,
emergency rule symbolizes democratic reversal and not democratic
consolidation. The thesis here is that politicisation of policing in a
democracy could have serious implications for democratic consolidation
especially in countries that have just emerged from a long period of
dictatorships.
The crux of the Matter: The Triple Syndrome of Statism,
Authoritarianism and Centrism
The seeming politicisation of public order management in post-military
Nigeria, really, cannot be treated in isolation. At the root of the problem
is the structural character of the Nigerian state and the politics it
engenders. As Ake (1996:7) puts it:
Much of what is uniquely negative about politics
in Africa arise from the character of the state,
particularly its lack of autonomy, immensity of
its power, its proneness to abuse, and lack of
autonomy and lack of immunity against it. The
character of the state rules out a politics of
moderation and mandates a politics of
lawlessness and extremism for the simple reason
that the nature of the state makes the capture of
state power irresistibly attractive.As fascinating as the above contention is, it cannot be divorced from the
country’s political history. The precursor of the post-colonial state, in
Nigeria, emerged in manner that was nothing but undemocratic. Unlike
the American federal state that emerged organically through the
franchise of the peoples, the Nigerian colonial state was forcefully
cobbled together by the forces external to it (Ezonba, 2012:326). So ab
initio, the state that emerged in Nigeria was a product of force. Upon its
consolidation, it also depended on force to extract surplus from the
natives. Its raison d’être was hard policing of the colonial economies for
the benefit of the metropoles (Onoja, 2012:22).
Interestingly, the post-colonial state that succeeded it, in 1960,