Two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal posed the timeless riddle of stewardship and power: “Who will guard the guards themselves?” His satirical jab at husbands who hired strapping young eunuchs to chaperone their wives cuts to the heart of Nigeria’s policing debate. The public fear is that decentralisation will merely replace one unaccountable force with thirty-six rogue militias, weaponised by governors to settle scores and entrench fiefdoms. This dystopian view is not baseless, but it tells only half the story. The current centralised system is already acutely unaccountable. The deeper insight is that we could turn decentralisation into an opportunity to design a system where the watchers could now be better watched.