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WHEN Adebayo Adelabu was appointed Nigeria’s Minister of Power, I publicly congratulated him and offered advice to a fellow indigene of Oyo State. I had intended to do the same for his successor, Joseph Tegbe, who now represents Oyo State in President Tinubu’s cabinet. That intention was interrupted. My attention shifted to unabated insecurity following the beheading of mathematics teacher Mr. Michael Oyedokun and the continued abduction of schoolchildren and teachers by Northern terrorists at Ahoro Esiele, Oriire Local Government Area. When I eventually turned to the new minister, I encountered an interesting political story. His late father reportedly owned a bookshop in Oyo town, where Tegbe also grew up. His emergence revived an old question in Nigerian federalism: when does long-term residency become political belonging in a society where ancestry remains politically significant in competition for limited political space?

When the late Governor Abiola Ajimobi sought to make Tegbe the APC governorship candidate, opposition emerged despite being constitutionally eligible through residence. Politicians native to Oyo reportedly claimed that Tegbe remained an Itsekiri from Delta State. Adelabu became the party’s candidate. A similar debate reportedly resurfaced years later when Governor Makinde considered Tegbe for the PDP Oyo Central Senatorial District before he contested the Oyo South seat, which he lost to Sharafadeen Alli. He has served as Mogaji of Tegbe Compound in Ibadan for about a decade without progressing to Jagun in the Olubadan succession line. While I would welcome Tegbe’s perspective on this matter, the debate about ancestry, residency and political belonging in a federal republic is an important conversation for another day.

Today, however, the focus is on the electricity system. The question is not where Tegbe comes from, but whether the electricity system he now leads is being reformed at the level its structural failures demand.

The case for unbundling the national grid

Tegbe inherited a sector weakened by decades of decay and repeated grid collapses. He resisted making grand promises, cautioning that there was no ‘magic wand’ for immediate 24-hour electricity. As he put it, ‘The challenges that have kept this sector below its potential were decades in the making. They will not be fully reversed in weeks or months.’The question is whether his reforms match that diagnosis.

His early achievements, though technically sound, remain localized and administrative. They have yet to address Nigeria’s greatest electricity bottleneck: the centralized and fragile national grid. The ministry’s examples illustrate this distinction. They emphasize fixing components rather than redesigning the system. The Ministry cited interventions such as the 24-hour restoration of the Katampe feeder station and the revival of a Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) facility that had sat dormant for three years. While these quick wins are useful, they constitute firefighting rather than systemic overhaul. The singly governed national grid remains a single point of failure, demonstrating that Nigeria’s greatest vulnerability lies less in generation than in transmission architecture.

To transform the sector, he must move beyond repairs. Microgrids and isolated state-level projects are insufficient; Nigeria needs regional unbundling of its primary transmission network. A structural solution would involve breaking the national grid into three distinct, interconnected regional units: East, Central, and West. Each regional grid should be co-owned by the Federal Government and adjoining state governments, but managed by independent, private transmission companies. This structure would localize disruptions, encourage regional capital injection, and mirror the global shift toward interconnected regional transmission systems rather than dependence on one national control structure.

Bureaucracy versus blueprints: Discos’ debts and recapitalization

Tegbe’s institutional coordination has been largely bureaucratic. His meetings with the heads of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), NERC, and the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) to demand ‘collaboration, governance, and accountability’ represent a sensible first step, but they remain strictly administrative. Nigeria’s problem is not a shortage of meetings but a shortage of enforceable implementation blueprints, execution discipline, institutional coherence, and measurable public accountability. His calls for synergy raise questions about existing executive mechanisms. Is he leveraging the Presidential Committee-the Gas Monitoring and Clearance Committee (GAMCO)-and the gas-to-power committees initiated by his predecessor, Adebayo Adelabu? If these bodies languish, ‘collaboration across the value chain’ remains rhetoric. Tegbe must use them to resolve commercial and infrastructural friction between gas suppliers and thermal generators.

The ministry has heavily emphasized NERC’s directive forcing Electricity Distribution Companies (DisCos) to compensate Band A customers for supply shortfalls. While holding operators to service claims protects consumers, it ignores DisCos’ debts to the federation and the wider electricity value chain. The Federal Government has acknowledged the sector’s liquidity crisis, and recapitalization remains one pathway to financial viability. The Minister’s silence on DisCo recapitalization is a glaring omission because insolvency remains a primary barrier to infrastructure investment. In his handover notes, Adelabu explicitly recommended an aggressive recapitalization framework for the DisCos. Tegbe must champion this policy, forcing undercapitalized operators to dilute their equity in exchange for fresh, private capital or face asset restructuring. Without viable DisCos, service-level agreements and NERC penalties are cosmetic.

Smashing the subsidy trap via the Electricity Act

The Electricity Act 2023 offers Tegbe a reform opportunity. His announcement that roughly 20 states have enacted electricity laws, with 12 actively moving to absorb regulatory oversight from NERC, is an encouraging development. However, regulatory decentralization does not automatically yield operational state networks. Nor can microgrids or uncoordinated renewables support heavy industrialization. The Act has decentralized regulation. The logical question is whether transmission architecture should evolve in the same direction. Preserving a centralized backbone may constrain the economic benefits the Act seeks to unlock.

True decentralization also requires electricity subsidy reform. Using the national grid to mask unviable tariffs enables corruption and commercial inefficiency. In a three-region interconnected grid system (East, Central, West), subsidies must undergo a paradigm shift. Federal, state and local governments should adopt targeted, card-based subsidies for vulnerable households, allowing operators to charge cost-reflective tariffs, attract private investment, and support commercial and industrial clusters.

The 2060 Illusion: Forgetting Siemens and underestimating national demand

Tegbe announced a 277GW generation target by 2060, over $2 billion in private investment commitments, 82 transformers adding 8,500MVA, and a $1.16 billion grid digitalization project.These figures require rigorous scrutiny. Before announcing aspirations for 2060, Nigerians deserve a progress report on existing commitments, especially the Siemens Presidential Power Initiative (PPI).Launched in 2018 under President Buhari to deliver 25,000MW by 2030, the project remains a binding commitment that President Tinubu’s administration is obligated to fulfill. How much has been completed? What milestones remain outstanding? What revised implementation timetable should Nigerians expect? Announcing ambitious long-term projections without a clear pathway, while the Siemens project faces delays, amounts to political distraction.

Furthermore, a target of 277GW by 2060 betrays a profound lack of ambition in the face of global technological shifts. If Nigeria must undergo an industrial revolution capable of powering a 24/7 economy, matching the massive rural electrification achievements of the American Roosevelt era of the 1930s, and supporting the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure, it cannot wait thirty-four years to achieve 300G W. In the electricity value chain, demand must drive supply. The Ministry should plan for demand growth within the next decade-not for electricity demand that comfortably sits beyond the lifespan of current administrations.

Tegbe’s early tenure has brought operational sobriety and localized competence. But managing a crisis is not solving it. By emphasizing repairs, coordination, and 2060 targets, the Minister risks managing the status quo rather than transforming it. To leave a legacy, he must pivot from administrative realism to structural redesign: unbundle the grid into interconnected systems jointly owned by states and private investors, recapitalize DisCos, execute Siemens PPI, and restructure subsidies. Only then will Nigeria’s power sector move from managed decline to one of industrial prosperity.

nities the police are expected to protect. Until that question is answered, the country risks creating new security institutions while overlooking one of its oldest and most valuable intelligence assets.

Regional cooperative policing offers a more prudent path forward. Equally important, traditional institutions-whether headed by Obas, Emirs, Olus, Igwes, Obis, Shehus, Ochis, Olos, Tor, and other traditional authorities-should be formally integrated into community intelligence gathering. After all, these traditional leaders receive public support, while political leaders routinely seek their legitimacy and blessings during elections. That unique characteristic of the Nigerian republic should reflect in our security architecture.

‘The Federal Police Service shall temporarily intervene in the internal security affairs of a state and shall, to the extent necessary, assume specified operational responsibility, including temporary operational command of a State Police Service or any part thereof…’ (Section 214(10).

‘(12) An intervention… shall be authorised in writing by the President…’

Read those provisions of the passed state police bill again. Read slowly.

For decades, Nigerians have demanded state police. Governors complained that they were constitutionally designated as Chief Security Officers of their states without possessing effective authority over the police. Security experts argued that Abuja could neither understand nor effectively police the forests of Zamfara, the creeks of Bayelsa nor the farms of Oyo from a distant command headquarters. Victims of banditry, insurgency and kidnapping concluded that a centralised police force had become too overstretched to protect a country as vast and diverse as Nigeria.

Last week, the Senate answered that demand. It passed the president’s Constitution Alteration Bill establishing state police. The proposal now proceeds to the state Houses of Assembly where approval by at least twenty-four states will determine whether it becomes part of the Constitution.

That ought to have settled a decades-old constitutional controversy.

It has not.

Buried inside the bill is perhaps its most consequential provision. While creating state police, it simultaneously empowers the President, under specified circumstances, to assume operational command of a State Police Service.

I believe that changes everything.

Casually reading the bill, the grounds of a takeover appear reasonable enough: Federal intervention may occur where there is an actual or imminent breakdown of public order; where a governor requests assistance; where a state police service has become administratively or operationally incapable of functioning; where it is being deployed for systematic human rights abuses, electoral intimidation or ethnic persecution; or where national security itself is threatened. The intervention must be temporary. It must be authorised in writing by the President. The reasons must be stated. The National Assembly, the governor, the state House of Assembly and the National Police Council must all be notified. Judicial review remains available.

Those safeguards deserve acknowledgment and I acknowledge them. They were clearly designed to prevent governors from converting state police into private armies. But constitutions are not judged only by the safeguards they contain. They are judged by the powers they create.

The following constitutional question, therefore, is unavoidable: Are we escaping the possible abuse of state police by governors only to constitutionalise an even greater possibility of abuse by the President? What stops a rampaging President from using that provision to annul all the gains of this state police achievement? How federal is that provision?

We copied our presidential system from the United States but not its federal logic. The contrast is nowhere clearer than in policing. Both countries began with decentralised policing. America had its sheriffs, constables and municipal police; Nigeria had palace guards, hunters’ guilds, age grades, the Dogarai and later Native Authority police. Both countries also experienced partisan abuse of local police. America responded by professionalising local policing while retaining its decentralised structure. Nigeria abolished regional and Native Authority police after the 1966 military coup, replacing them with a single national force. Ironically, Nigeria’s First Republic was in this respect more faithful to federalism than the federation that followed. The current push for state police is therefore less a constitutional innovation than an attempt to restore an earlier federal arrangement. The challenge is not decentralisation itself but ensuring that neither governors nor the President can abuse it.

So, as we make the new law to rebirth state police, I ask again: Are we trading the risk of abuse by governors for the greater danger of presidential abuse?

That question becomes even more intriguing when one compares the present proposal with its immediate predecessor.

In 2022, the Nigeria Governors’ Forum produced its own draft constitutional amendment on state police. I have a copy. It contained no presidential takeover power. In the 2022 proposal, Federal Police could intervene in states only in carefully defined emergencies. These were: where law and order had completely broken down; where the governor requested assistance; or where the State Police had become incapable of functioning. Even then, presidential authorisation required the approval of the National Police Council-a body on which every state governor sits.

Read the passed bill again. It empowers the president to authorise the takeover of the police of a state. The 2022 proposal contemplated federal assistance, not federal assumption of command. Instead of giving the intervention power to the president, it gave it to the National Police Council.

Nigeria never ceases to be a conundrum. Somewhere between 2022 and 2026, something changed. The same Governors’ Forum that had spent years arguing that Nigeria’s security architecture was excessively centralised revised its own 2022 proposal. In 2026, it submitted a reviewed draft to the Senate. I have a copy. In that draft, the governors introduced the very clause empowering the President, through the Federal Police Service, to assume operational command of a State Police Service. The President’s own bill apparently agreed with it, and the Senate retained it.

One is tempted to ask a simple question: Who voluntarily weakens the constitutional autonomy he has spent decades demanding? Our governors may have answers to that. One possible explanation is that more than thirty of Nigeria’s thirty-six governors now sing President Tinubu’s song: ‘On Your Mandate We Shall Stand.’ Whether that political reality influenced this constitutional retreat is for the governors themselves to explain.

Meanwhile, I showed that provision to my professor and told him that a good President might never use such a power. He smiled and reminded me that constitutions are never drafted on the assumption that office holders will always act in good faith. They are drafted on the assumption that power attracts abuse. He then pointed me to America’s James Madison, who argued that constitutional design must proceed on the assumption that those entrusted with power are not angels. ‘We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels’ (William Shakespeare in Henry VIII).

‘Constitutions,’ my professor said, ‘are not written for good men. They are written to restrain bad ones.’ The question, therefore, is not whether today’s President would misuse this authority. The question is whether tomorrow’s President could.

Nigeria’s political history offers sufficient reason for caution. Consider the turmoil in our political party system today and the immense influence (rascality) exercised by the Federal High Court in electoral and party disputes because the law concentrates jurisdiction over many such matters in that court. The lesson is obvious: once a constitution or statute mass power in a single institution or individual, everything depends on how that power is exercised. The same caution applies to policing. Federal security agencies have repeatedly been accused of selective deployment during elections and political disputes. Imagine a President and a governor belonging to rival political parties. Imagine an election approaching. Imagine the constitutional power to assume operational command of a state’s police. The issue is not whether such authority will be abused. The issue is whether the constitution should make such abuse possible.

Let us consider other issues. One question immediately arises: who provides security during elections-the Federal Police Service or the State Police Service?

I have read carefully the bill passed by the Senate. I have examined the powers assigned to both police services. If you do as I did, you should be surprised that the bill is completely silent on who bears operational responsibility for election security.

That silence is remarkable because elections involve two distinct but overlapping functions. The first is the enforcement of federal electoral laws. Since elections are conducted under the Constitution, the Electoral Act and regulations issued by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), one would ordinarily expect that responsibility to rest with the Federal Police Service. The second is the maintenance of public order within the states. Securing polling units, preventing violence, controlling crowds and preserving the peace are traditional policing functions which, under the proposed constitutional framework, would ordinarily fall to the State Police Service.

Yet the bill designates neither service as the lead agency. It establishes no joint command structure and provides no mechanism for resolving operational disputes where both federal and state police officers are deployed. Its only reference to elections appears in Section 214(10)(d), which permits federal intervention where a State Police Service is being used for ‘partisan or electoral intimidation, obstruction or violence.’ That provision authorises federal takeover after abuse has occurred or is imminent; it does not answer the prior constitutional question of who secures elections in the first place.

The omission is troubling. Election day is the most politically sensitive day in the life of any democracy. It is precisely the day on which the Constitution should leave no room for ambiguity over who is in command. Instead, the bill creates two armed police services operating within the same constitutional space without clearly allocating responsibility for election security. The result is an avoidable constitutional vacuum that could invite overlapping claims of authority, conflicting operational decisions and, in the worst case, armed confrontation between agencies owing allegiance to different political authorities.

Constitutions are meant to prevent conflicts before they arise, not leave judges, politicians and police commanders to improvise solutions in the heat of an election. And no moment tests this federation more severely than election day.

Almost exactly one hundred years ago, the American political scientist Howard Lee McBain reviewed Raymond Fosdick’s studies of policing in Europe and America. He observed that while policing in Europe had become ‘a matter only of highly technical administration,’ in America it had become ‘politics-ridden.’ His warning remains timeless: ‘Politics will play with and upon the police function as long as it is possible for elected officers to apply varying policies in the matter of law enforcement.’

McBain’s point was profound and America has since fixed what he saw. The danger today in Nigeria lies not just in abused centralised or decentralised policing. It lies also in allowing political power to dominate law enforcement.

That is why the agenda (and debate) before the state Houses of Assembly must be deeper than whether Nigeria should have state police for the sake of having it. The real questions are constitutional: Who appoints police chiefs? Who dismisses them? Who disciplines them? Who investigates abuse? What happens during elections? Under what circumstances may federal intervention occur? Who decides that those circumstances exist? What independent institution stands between political power and police power?

These are not technical questions. They are the questions that determine whether the police protect liberty or threaten it.

Nigeria undoubtedly requires policing that is closer to the people, more responsive to local intelligence and quicker in confronting local threats. But the location of police headquarters is not what guarantees freedom; institutions are.

The challenge before the Houses of Assembly is therefore much greater than voting ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to state police. Their task is to ensure that neither governors nor the president can weaponise the police against political opponents.

Otherwise, history may conclude that Nigeria demanded state police but ended up constitutionally creating the president’s police.