Silencing Hamdiya: Targeting critics instead of criminals and the question of police transparency

Sometimes certain things happen that bring to mind that proverb that says a man whose house is on fire does not go around chasing rats. The Sokoto State government and the Nigeria Police’s decision to pursue, arrest, and secretly arraign a young woman, Hamdiya Sidi Sharif, has to be one of those moments. They left […]

Sometimes certain things happen that bring to mind that proverb that says a man whose house is on fire does not go around chasing rats. The Sokoto State government and the Nigeria Police’s decision to pursue, arrest, and secretly arraign a young woman, Hamdiya Sidi Sharif, has to be one of those moments. They left the bandits attacking villages, raping women, abducting hundreds of people, and displacing whole communities and went after a young, harmless woman for crying out that people are being killed by bandits.

As far as bizarre decisions go, this has to be one of the most discombobulating ones. It is even more confusing considering that this woman is only 18 and is not even a major voice on social media. Most crucially, her video, recorded among victims of banditry, was not an attack on the government but an impassioned appeal to address the insecurity in the state.

But the gusto with which the government and its operatives have gone after her is stunning. First, she was arrested on November 9, detained, and then subsequently released. And then again, on Wednesday, November 13, she was accosted on the streets, dragged into a tricycle, beaten with a machete, and was then arraigned in a court of law in Achida town for allegedly embarrassing the government of the state.

This pursuit of Hamdiya takes a lot of commitment, the sort of gusto and verve you would think should be invested in the pursuit of actual criminals like the bandits ravaging the state, not young women calling for help.

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Hamdiya did not embarrass the Sokoto State government. What is embarrassing the state and the governor is the persecution of Hamdiya. In media studies, we call this the Streisand Effect. This occurs when an attempt to cover some piece of information ends up drawing more attention to the information. In 2003, the American singer Barbara Streisand tried to suppress the publication of a grainy photo of her clifftop residence on an obscure website documenting coastal erosion. When she found the photo of the house on the site, she called her lawyers and demanded the photo be taken down. The data analytics showed that not up to 10 people, including her lawyers, had seen the photo at this time. When she filed for a court order, millions of curious people rushed to see the previously obscure photo. It is still up on the internet two decades later.

Following the catastrophic steps taken by the authorities in Sokoto, far more people have sought out Hamdiya’s video calling out the state government over the insecurity in the state. They want to know exactly what she said to draw such ire. The authorities have instead succeeded in drawing more eyeballs to the video.

All these calls by rights organisations like Amnesty International and other CSOs for the immediate release of Hamdiya have put the state in a very damning light.

Beyond the persecution, abduction, and secret trial of Hamdiya, this incident is disturbing on many levels. We are just recovering from the national embarrassment of putting minors on trial for treason after detaining them for over 90 days. We are just recovering from an elected public official threatening to “disappear” a Nigerian and getting away with it. And it brings back painful memories of the disappearance of Abubakar Idris Dadiyata, who has been missing for five years now.

This should not be the way to deal with dissenting voices in a democracy that is approaching 30 years of practice. This is not the way to deal with a people inundated by a crushing economic avalanche and an overwhelming criminal horde of bandits and terrorists. We need to rethink our approaches to human rights and policing, but it seems that we are far from that.

In a week in which Hamdiya was arrested by the Nigeria Police and detained, during which all of these questionable actions have been taken, the Inspector General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, made a public call to Nigerians to stop reporting police misconduct on social media. Instead, he said, they should report it to the Police Complaints Response Unit.

While reporting to a designated channel is important, it is also necessary to address some of the issues that the IGP ignored with this call. The first is that not many Nigerians are aware of this Complaints Unit: its existence, its function, or how to access it. So, the police need to actively promote its existence and make it more accessible so that it is easy for people to use this service. This may entail increasing its social media visibility. Second, the police do not, generally speaking, have a good record of transparency, especially with regards to the misconduct of its officers. Police officers, like the police commissioner who several years ago made a speech inciting the religious killings of hundreds, were shielded by the force and transferred to a location to ride out the storm he created before continuing with his career. How about the officers who arrested and detained minors for over 90 days? Is that not misconduct? Have the police been transparent about that? How about all those officers indicted for shooting people at checkpoints over failure to grease their palms or not dropping “something for the boys”? Or those induced to unlawfully arrest, detain, and torture Nigerians? Or those culpable of detaining minors and sexually assaulting them for days? How does the IGP think these and thousands of cases like these have impacted Nigerians’ confidence in the police?

While occasionally there are the odd cases of errant officers being dismissed for misconduct, these cases are far outweighed by instances where the force throws these reports under the carpet or buries them in the graveyard of police bureaucracy. Officers who have been caught in various acts of misconduct have often not been treated in a way that would show Nigerians that they can trust the police to police the police.

So, the recourse to the court of public opinion, where the erring officers and the force are shamed into some form of justice, has become inevitable. It will not change until the police change their approach to this and build the confidence of Nigerians in their system.

It is even ironic that the IGP is calling for these misconducts not to be reported to social media in this era of citizen journalism where everyone with a camera is suddenly a reporter and where social media is a platform for the publication of these reports.

Police elsewhere in the world are incorporating technology and social media to ensure transparent and honest conduct from their officers. The wearing of bodycams is now a requirement for police functions in several countries. Citizens, at all times, are allowed to record police officers at work—provided the recording is done from a reasonable distance and does not interfere with the police work. Where incidents are recorded, these recordings often become public records. There are YouTube channels operated by the police to upload this incident’s footage. The goal is to demonstrate transparency at all times, not just when it is convenient.

So the IGP’s call does not address the real issue here. The real issue is how the police hold their officers accountable for their misconduct in an honest and transparent way that will ensure public confidence in the force.

Clearly, the IGP needs to discard this rather antiquated approach, embrace technology, and seriously consider fitting his officers with bodycams to improve the transparency of police conduct.

Reports of police misconduct on social media are not what is damaging the image of the police but rather what the police does with these reports and the others not published on social media.

Attempts to do damage control, as the IGP is trying to do with this call, should not perpetuate or exacerbate the self-harm that the police have been inflicting on themselves by the way they handle errant officers and their cases. Just like the handling of the Hamdiya Sidi case is damaging Sokoto State and its government.

No citizen should be treated the way this poor girl has been treated for crying out for help from the government over the real and imminent danger from bandits facing her and the people in the state. Free Hamdiya. Pursue the criminals, not the critics. Silence the guns, not the voices.