Police and governance for sustainable development in Nigeria

Abstract

Exercising political power to utilise nation’s resources for citizens’ progress for better tomorrow is often constrained in atmosphere of insecurity. This makes security, law enforcement and order inevitable function of police across the world. In Nigeria today, combating insecurity has been difficult for the police. So, people are no longer free to lawfully move around to look for what to eat including worship places for fear of being bombed, killed, or kidnapped. Unfortunately, the Islamic States of West African Province has joined Boko Haram, herdsmen, and other bandits in making Nigeria more unsafe. The paper investigated the performance and challenges of police towards achieving governance for sustainable development in Nigeria. Data were sourced from textbooks, journals, newspapers, conferences, and magazines. Descriptive method was used to analyse the data. Using the Frustration-Aggression theory as theoretical framework, the police were identified as governance work in progress in ensuring sustainable development. The paper found police performance unimpressive and identified poor political leadership and followership, disrespect to law, poor Nigerian characters, deprivation of people basic socio-economic needs unhealthy struggles for survival, pervasive level of poverty and unemployment as major issues challenging police performance. The paper concluded that police non-performance in Nigeria reflected the characters of political leaders. It recommended among others that there should be ethical rebirth and self cleansing for political leaders, police and other Nigerians to rejuvenate police performance to enhance governance for progress of present and future Nigeria.