The Nigeria Police: A Post-Mortem Organization?

With confidence, I went to the police desk at the airport to make a complaint.  The officer there virtually ignored me after murmuring something like “the public announcement you have been hearing repeatedly that everyone should hold on tightly to his luggage is not for fun”. The incident always reminds me that the police are […]

With confidence, I went to the police desk at the airport to make a complaint.  The officer there virtually ignored me after murmuring something like “the public announcement you have been hearing repeatedly that everyone should hold on tightly to his luggage is not for fun”. The incident always reminds me that the police are the same everywhere.  I am thus usually amused whenever something happens in our land and we all become relieved as soon as there is a hint that America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or Britain’s Scotland Yard are around to unearth the issue at stake. We donot seem to know that FBI and Scotland Yard also fall short of people’s expectations. For example, in 2009,  Richard Daley, the Mayor of Chicago alleged that  FBI ‘was going after star athletes like Barry Bonds and public officials who accepted small bribes while ignoring the conspicuous consumption of big-time drug dealers’. Is this different from how Nigerians see their security forces?  What about the case of FBI’s Robert Hassen who for 20 years reportedly gave the Soviet Union and Russia several documents and computer diskettes filled with America’s security information? Of course there are such moles in our security system too. But whereas our police coerce suspects to confess to crimes they did not commit, the British Police do set up innocent people for trial as was done many years back to one Colin Stagg of Wimbledon. While welcoming FBI to Nigeria over the recent bombing of the United Nation’s office in Abuja, we look back to “9-11” with a firm belief that no security set up is invincible

Thus to write-off the Nigeria Police because many of us have no faith in it, misses the point that other Nigerian institutions are not better perceived apparently because Nigerians have a tendency to be exogenous. Many of us have faith only in ‘outside matters’ hence manufacturers of products in Nigeria label such products as made elsewhere. So, should our police operatives be recruited from Ghana, or Libya? No; we have to have our own police. That our publicly despised police force continuously won the most prestigious prizes for peacekeeping operations in Namibia, former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Haiti, etc is instructive. The magic we hear is that what they receive at home as salaries and allowances are a fraction of what they get while on international engagements where they are paid promptly and their lives well insured. It is also said that they always have adequate state-of-the art work facilities when carrying out international assignments. Why have we been unable over the years to create a similar enabling environment at home for our police? One reason which a traditional ruler, the Ewi of Ado-Ekiti, Oba Adejugbe gave while receiving in his palace the new minister of police affairs Navy Captain Caleb Olubolade was that past military regimes deliberately marginalized the police due to perceived rivalry between the police and the military.  This probably explains why the military government dumped a 1995 report of a panel it had set up supposedly to reform the force. Another report on police reforms by the Committee on Vision 2010 set up under General Sani Abacha was similarly discarded. If the problem was the military, why has the plight of the Nigeria Police not changed since 1999 when the army gave way? In 2002, the report of a Presidential Panel on National Security, headed by Professor Tekena Tamuno, was never considered by the Government. Although a substantial number of recommendations of the Muhammad Danmadami Committee set up by President Obasanjo in 2006 were accepted by Government, very little efforts were made to implement them. In 2008, another committee of experts led by a former Inspector General of Police, M.D. Yusuf, submitted a well articulated report with 125 recommendations.  Since then, every communiqué at the end of any workshop for the police has been calling for its implementation.  It is therefore obvious that the police have never been our priority. Indeed, we erode their powers and functions at will.  None of us seems to realize any more that the roles of our anti-corruption bodies and that of the commission on road safety normally belong to the police. Even in election matters, the police that should take full charge of mal-practices play a second fiddle. Imagine the arrangement which mandates an electoral officer to direct the police to arrest any criminal at an election venue. What puts an electoral officer in a position to detect crime better than a police man? Worse still, the arrangement does not explain who should direct the police when it is the electoral officer himself that commits a crime.

In addition, with a police council, a police service commission, a ministry of police affairs and the police force itself, no one knows who does what, where ,when and how in the industry.  During the Yar’Adua days, for instance, no one knew who sent Nuhu Ribadu from the anti corruption body he was heading to training or who later sought to stop his graduation. Although the service commission claimed to have first demoted him and later dismissed him from the service for good reasons, the body was perhaps on sabbatical when he was recalled and his rank restored for another set of good reasons before he retired. So, who is in charge of our police? Whoever it is needs to immediately become proactive discarding such things as the invitation a few years back to Britain to help restructure the Nigeria Police. That is not what we need. The diagnosis of my great colleague-Bayo Ononuga- about 5years ago is still valid today. According to him “our policemen are ill-kitted, inadequately armed and not mobile enough; they lack information and data about all of us, they lack forensic labs, not to mention the capacity to use DNA tests to crack crime”.

What the Nigeria Police needs is not FBI or Scotland Yard but their type of equipment and technology which we can procure without them. The rumour that police funds are often embezzled is no point because government can easily deal with that. In earnest, our police are in dire need of proper reforms not cosmetic issues like change of uniform or an in-house melodious band. We need a police force that is properly served and not that which is the least paid in West Africa. Otherwise, our police will continue to embrace mundane strategies like ‘Operation fire for fire’ which makes them post mortem experts that are ever battle ready to deal with criminals only after the latter have completed their crimes. Let us reform our police so that they can in reality be “on top” of every matter. We need to note that every nation deserves the police it has.