LOCAL AUTHORITY POLICE FORCES
| Published date | 01 April 1954 |
| Date | 01 April 1954 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/j.1099-162X.1954.tb00047.x |
64 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN
ADMINISTRATION
(3) Areas which are fully ready for regulation.
(4) Areas where action has been too long postponed and lost ground may now
be difficult to recover, perhaps literally as well as metaphorically!
Special Lands Officer.
23.
The
task is almost entirely an exercise in practical administration and,
like all such exercises, it requires organization and direction by an administrator
who has a thorough understanding of the problems involved and a practical
mastery of the various techniques which may be appropriate to their solution.
He must be able to diagnose and prescribe. He must have the confidence both of
the people and of the administration.
It
is a full time job of great importance
to any developing country and as such demands high enough scaling to make it
attractive to the right sort of man, who must then be allowed to do it without
the distraction of other work or responsibility. Until an officer of sufficient
administrative experience, ability and enthusiasm is appointed to this sort of post
with reasonable assurance of some permanency, a
visiting"
expert"
can hope to
do little more than add yet another report to those
already"
read with
interest"
which make so little contribution to the continued planned practical action which
is required.
LOCAL
AUTHORITY
POLICE FORCES
By
African Studies Branch.
IN
1949 in the Gold Coast the Coussey Committee on Constitutional Reform
recommended
that
the native authorities and the native authority police should
be abolished.'
The
native authorities should be replaced by local government
councils and the native authority police by the central police force.
The
com-
plete reorganisation of the police forces of the territory was a major task that
would take several years. Meanwhile the Local Government Ordinance of 1951
transferred to the new councils responsibility for the native authority police,
henceforth to be known as the local authority police; it also imposed upon the
councils collectively and upon the individual councillors the responsibility for the
maintenance of order and for the prevention of crime.
The
clauses"
whi~h
imposed these duties were taken from an earlier local government ordinance 10
Eastern Nigeria."
In
the Eastern Region of Nigeria, however, there were no native authority police
in existence and no local police forces have been established. In fact it is unlikely
that
they could be established under the provisions of this ordinance.
The
pro-
visions here are therefore little more than a general, though possibly rather widely
worded, statement of the duty of local councils to promote the public peace. In
so far as they impose a duty on individual councillors, they are probably
redundant in law (though no doubt useful administratively) since all persons have
a duty, to the best of their ability, to prevent crime. In the Gold Coast, where
native authority police forces were in existence, these provisions took on an
entirely different colour. On a strict interpretation, the local councils, and
~v~n
the individual councillors, were given direct police powers and not only adm
tn
1S-
trative
but
also operational control of forces of police agents.
--------------------------------
1Colonial 248 para. 173.
2No. 29 of 1951. Clauses 47, 48.
3'No. 16 of 1950. Clauses 85, 86.
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