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Nigerian Police: A Dysfunctional Affront to Human Rights

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh, Ph.D - 10/7/2005

Predicates!

A living body can never entertain the fatal inconveniences of a rogue cell, spiralling uncontrollably out of the orbital path of its genetic trajectory, or a cancerous mutant dangerously metastasizing, and spewing forth its toxic payloads of infections, in silence and quiet. Not only that the radar screens of survival beeps it’s Mayday, or recommends instant reaction, the whole body is alerted because the risk of extinction is staring it squarely in the face.

If the body offers no response to this ravaging onslaught of its integrity, it will be bludgeoned out of existence. This is because the vital fortress guarding its health and existence has been poached upon and stormed by adversaries from within. Primed by self-preservatory default, it must rise to defend itself against this onslaught. This scenario according to the biology plays itself out a million times in the microscopic universe of living bodies.

The same can be said of a nation or society of men. On the macroscopic level of human social organizational, a society can never afford the social costs of allowing its sensitive institutions metamorphose into a citadel of cancerous impunity populated by lecherous thugs, killers and freelance opportunists, who are primed by default to nibble away at its collective health and destroy its integrity from within. It is the natural trajectory adopted by entities that wish to survive in a world that is as inclement as the Darwinian jungle, where only the fittest survive.

The angst coagulated and vented in this piece stems not only from the fact that Nigeria is an artificial farce created to self-destruct, but equally from the disappointment that this nation has not deemed it fit on her own, to chart a new course that will help her transcend and overcome the ontological disabilities of her birth. And one major theatre where this abject failure plays itself out is in the area of social corruption, and audacious disrespect for human rights. Ironically, the prominent fountains and vectors of this social disease are those institutions that were crafted to ensure the obverse. This is why every prophylaxis ever offered to the Nigerian problem has never succeeded. It is akin to the HIV virus laying siege and incapacitating the Helper T-cells that are supposed to defend the body against invasion by the armada of diseases environing it.

Those who predict that Nigeria risks internal implosion have ample fodder for their canons. But the fault lines of this disintegration may not be tectonic or internal tribal-sired geopolitics. It would come most certainly from a broad spectrum of social dissatisfaction, which will inspire upheavals of tsunamic proportions. And that will sound the death knell for the Nigerian project, because the reaction formations to this upheaval will then coagulate along tribal lines, which has forever been the refuge of every Nigerian problem.

This dangerous portent is grave because since the Nigerian society has refused to review the toxic alliance between the police and criminals, the Nigerian police have degenerated into a licentious stew of destructive roguery fabricated by disordered minds. This institution charged with the statutory responsibilities of Policing our security and order acquitted itself extremely badly. It has till this moment spent itself constructing embarrassments, courting outrageous corruption, incompetence and crime. And the patience of the people is wearing so very thin, that it will not take a massive pressure for the people to cross the Rubicon of their patience. And the day they would rise against those rogue institutions that have ensured their minimal influence and maximum inconvenience that would be a very sad epilogue to the Nigerian story.

Some analysts are wont to argue that the only reason why crime and corruption bestride Nigeria today is that the checks and institutional balances that constituted bulwark against them in other climes were ontologically compromised in ours. This view echoes with validity. We share this view totally. When those who should be custodians of our welfare transform themselves into embezzlers of our posterity, it is then siesta time for development, peace and social stability. It is equally an invite to revolution. Ghana got to that point, that it needed only time for a Jerry Rawlings to appear on the scene in order to wipe out the purveyors of impunity. Nigeria is very ripe for that. And when such a thing comes upon us, the Ghanian bloodbath will pale into inconsequence in comparison, to the Nile of blood that will flow across the streets of Nigeria.

In the Nigeria of today, shadows reign over substance. There is no separation of powers in our governmental system. The executive breaches the independence of the other arms of government. The legislature peopled by rogues handpicked by the executive is more of a toothless canine that has lost every pretence of being a legislature. The judiciary which should check the others is tied to the incestuous caprices of the executive; the Police that should protect and watch out for those who cross the bounds of the law remains a dysfunctional fountain of corruption; and the courts are shamelessly tied to the whims of corrupt politicians. With an ambient like this any country, even if ruled by the Pope, is well entrenched on its journey to hell.

Today, we take up the Nigerian Police out of this stinking morass of social variables that are decadent to say the least, and wishes to expose the rottenness within, to see if we could shock the authorities into taking reformative actions.


The Recommendations and Ordinance of Reason

We confess an indebtedness, which we can never retire to reason. It always imbues our considerations with the conceptual scaffolds which worships facts, as the perceptual apparatus which we must essay always to propitiate. We have pledged ourselves here to adduce evidence for our convictions, and then invite reason to judge.

In this piece we are going to direct our slender attention span to Police dysfunctionality in Nigeria. Our decision is informed by fact that the Nigerian Police Force, has risen as a dysfunctional affront to human rights of Nigerians. We are confronting this issue, despite the dangers inherent in such a public critique of this rotten institution, because fundamental freedoms remain the hallmark and fulcrum of every civilized society. Social felicity, equilibrium and development revolve around, and enjoy greater chances of success in the ambience of cultured existence, which the presence, operation, and respect of fundamental freedoms guarantee. This is proved by the historical and developmental successes recorded in human advancement by open societies, where fundamental freedoms are major social currencies, as well as the marginal absence of such successes for those societies that abuse, censure, circumscribe and violate these fundamental freedoms of its citizens. Amartya Sen’s seminal work, Development as Freedom, spent its life arguing and proving this point beyond doubts.

The issue of freedom has attended almost all philosophic epochs and theatres of discourse. George Wolfgang Frederich Hegel, the pinnacle of German Idealism, in the introduction to his Philosophy of History, was of the view that “the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom”. For Jean Paul Sartre, the phenomenological existentialist, man is condemned to be free. But Jean Jacques Rousseau verbalized and lamented our predicament as we sojourn in all climes. He saw that though born free, man is everywhere in chains. To this end, freedom despite its hallowed station, is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take. And people are as free as they want to be, writes James Baldwin. To that end, Karl Marx reminded us that the only thing we have to lose is our chains. Human life is either a psalm to freedom or it is not worth living. This realization may account for Jesus the Christ assertion that he came to men may have life and have it in full. And this fullness of life was foreshadowed in the 61st chapter, of the prophesy of Isaiah, wrapped in the re-echoing theme: “To proclaim liberty to captives!

Bondage is subhuman existence worse than death. Little wonder Patrick Henry screamed: Give me liberty or death! It is an existential imperative to work for liberty. The liberty of others extends ours to infinity. Freedom should never be compromised. We are imprisoned in every bondsman. Humanity is enslaved in every man bearing whatever yoke, or whatever shackles and fetters. No society has succeeded in developing until they were freed from fear and from the hands of all the elements manacling their freedom. Einstein will forever be right. Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labour in freedom.

These rights and freedoms are deeply etched in the core of the human experience. They are inalienable. They are granted to man, by the very fact of his being. They are not conferred on him by any government, establishment or institution. They are his birthright by the simple fact of his being human. Their absence invites savagery. Their disrespect enthrones inchoate panic, and constant social disequilibrium. Their non-existence creates and spells out a social jungle in all its putrid and fearful dimensions. A human embrace devoid of it mirrors the headquarters of hell on earth. Soviet Russia, Communist China, Communist Cuba, Pol. Pot’s Cambodia, Amin’s Uganda, Mobutu’s Zaire, Abacha’s Nigeria, etc, are footnotes to this.

In a social construct, where human freedoms and rights are violated with impunity, the stage is set for the re-creation of the Hobbesian State of Nature, where life would most certainly be nasty, brutish and short. This is what we are presently experiencing in Nigeria today, even to the thresholds of the 21st century.


The Necessity of the Police

There seems to be a propensity towards the negative in human nature. And since human beings possess frailty in their being, every society has its own share of deviants. And to protect its integrity, no society allows its peace, quiet and equilibrium to be hijacked by its deviant members, as that will amount to the tyranny of deviance.

Every society, to forestall the installation of the social jungle recommended by anarchy, polices its internal security and territorial integrity. The Police are statutorily detailed with the former charge, while the army checks incursions against the latter, and rises in defence of same, when threatened. These two established institutions are armed for their detail. They are conferred with the monopoly of consultation, and deployment of force and arms in the course of executing their responsibilities. They are armed forces so to say. The army is statutorily empowered with arsenals and rights to the use of heavy weaponry, necessary for their task. The Police are lightly armed with minimal weapons and maximum of authority for their task of maintaining law, order, peace and internal security of the state.

These two institutions are designed to be under the authority of the government, and are answerable, like the government to the people, who are the repositories of ultimate power in every social democratic set up. This is why any violation of legitimate, jurisdictional boundaries, usurpation of power, or overthrow of the political structure by these institutions, borne on the wings of their legitimate monopoly in the use and deployment of force constitutes a crime constitutionally outlawed and prohibited in all civilized climes. This prohibition flows from a sound political and legal philosophy, to the effect, that the state as a Leviathan, to whom we surrendered our rights, to enable it accumulate and enjoy a monopoly of supreme power, in ordering the affairs of men, subleased the teeth of this monopoly to these two establishments, on the legal and political understanding, that these dogs should never rise to convoke a meal off the bone hung round their necks for safe-keeping. But the Nigerian socio-political experience has repeatedly witnessed these dogs not only gobbling the bones, but graduated to assaulting and raping the construct, which called them into being, and conferred them with relevance.

The first to violate this social contractual protocol was the military carnivore. She leapt like a rogue Leopard, in what was code-named “operation Damissa” (Damissa is an Hausa word for Leopard), and sacked the political and legal system of the immediate Nigerian Post- Independence society. That was on January 15th 1966. Since then Nigeria has been positioned and repositioned over and again for subsequent assaults, plunder, rape and pillage, by this military mastiff, and its allied consortium of civilian collaborators. The military brazenly advertised its own abominations, because they sat astride the wheels of power. And the klieg lights of public awareness always beamed on their indiscretions. But backstage, underneath and away from major public coverage, the Police kept on reinventing itself and took that opportunity of social unconcern to mutate into a fearful, dysfunctional monster; pervasively and omni-dimensionally corrupt, venomously murderous, and endowed with a superlatively insatiable appetite to inflict pain and abuse on the human rights and fundamental freedom of Nigerians. So much so that the Nigerian civilian has become a perpetual martyr to police brutality, while the Police reclines into a new slave driver and a rapist of the peace and decent social sensibilities of the Nigerian public.

As the military exited the stage, with their infamous reputation, the police honed their notoriety to razor sharpness. It was truly seen for what it has become; namely a population of functionally depraved murderers, superlatively allergic to human rights. We now see this establishment for what it is: namely, an ontologically deficient conglomeration of sadists and barbarians, who delight in creating hell for the civil Nigerian population. In fact, the further their image stank, the more the impunity they impose on their crimes. The Police then became a government approved armed robbery gang, a citadel of torture, vicious frame-ups and extortion, as well as a den of ill-motivated, sometimes demented officers and men, who carry their jobs as crucifixion crosses.


The Trajectory of Sadism

With the July, 27th 2005 publication of the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, “Rest in Pieces”: Police Torture and Deaths in Custody in Nigeria, which comprehensively exposed the rottenness of the Nigerian Police Force, the whole world was availed a microscopic peep into the wretched festival of intimidation, brutalization, and butchery generously brewed, brutally packaged, and liberally dished-out to the ordinary Nigerian, by the officers and men of the Nigerian Police force. At this publication, the world was for the first time, granted a front-seat invite to mentally witness, and then appraise; shock allowing; the constants, which sadly constitute the furniture of the daily life of the common man in the streets of Nigeria. The whole world was invited to come and watch, as a dog (the Nigeria police) commits the abomination of consuming the bone kept in its custody. With that publication, a population of sadists and first class barbarians came out of their closets for the umpteenth time, to haunt our unconcern and conspiratorial acquiescence.

The report, a 76-paged study based on over 50 interviews with victims and witnesses of torture, clinically distilled and documented brutal acts of torture and ill-treatment in police custody, dozens of which resulted in death. This report attested to the canonization of torture by the Police. The report boldly stated that across Nigeria, both senior and low-level police officers routinely commit, or order the torture and mistreatment of criminal suspects. Over and above that the report portrayed the fact, that the life of an ordinary Nigeria is not worth the price of peanuts in the computations of a Nigerian policeman, while the human dignity of the ordinary Nigerian is a non-existent embellishment of the Statutes books, designed to be respected only in the breach, by policemen.

This publication, which attracted the wooden apologetics of a response, from the Minister of information, Mr. Frank Nweke Jr., essayed to expose what ordinary Nigerians have known all along: namely that the Nigerian Police Force is not only a nest of killers, but a sophisticated citadel of corruption, variously manned by cold-blooded murderers. This institution statutorily charged with the maintenance of law and order across the country, embraced a retrogressive metamorphosis, which saw it configuring itself into a notorious synonym for corruption and grotesque incompetence; noted for its arrant desecration of every rational canon of civilized conduct.

The report among other things raised the questions of why a Federal minister, and the government he serves, should involve themselves or deploy the weight and authority of their office to peddle lies and the kind of cant which dresses us in the robes of unserious- ness in the comity of nation.. We have always been shocked by the readiness of the Obasanjo’s government to husband disingenuous falsehoods and misrepresentation of facts in a world witnessing such a radical democratization and liberalization of information, that nothing can literally be hidden anymore. This attitude spells and consolidates the kind of crude ineptitude that has been the waterloo of serious reforms in various sectors of the Nigerian socio-economic and political life. Most dangerously, with leads like this, the uninformed is left no option but to go on a voyage purveying these misrepresentations as facts in the most possible way. This dimension of it is beef for another table.

Since facts refuse to be intimidated out of existence, the corrupt opulence of police brutality and other damning observations contained in the report was graphically and most recently collaborated. On the 8th of June, 2005, in Abuja, the Federal Capital of Nigeria: a team of police men massacred 5 young men and a woman, in what has come to be known as the “Apo Six” saga, with high velocity bullets, in cold blood: for the simple reason that one of the victims- the girl, spurned the amorous advances of the commanding Police officer. This was a perfect celebration of police rottenness, and a proof of the fact that Nigerians are living not only in the shadows of torture, but also in the valleys of death. Even the political and administrative ostriches littering the country with their irrelevance, who bury their heads in the sand, feigning ignorance of such high level and celebrated decadence of the Police, were shocked off their pretences.

Nigerians have known of many of their relatives, friends and neighbours, who have been labelled as armed robbers and summarily executed by the police, without recourse to judicial adjudication. Many Nigerians have known of Policemen who conspired and collaborated with robbers to rob, rape and dispossess them of their properties and sometimes lives. We have known of George Iyamu and his likes that collaborated with notorious robbers to deny us of our peace and quiet. We have known of Tafa Balogun and his likes, who presided over avaricious establishments, within this institution created to fight those very crimes. We know of many others who leased out their service weapons, guns and bullets to armed robbers for a fee, or for some percentage of the lucre and loot. We know of some policemen who have shot and killed unarmed and innocent Nigerians for failure to yield 20 naira bribe at many a police check point. We know of Policemen who have conspired and raped women in their custody, without rhyme or reason simply to satisfy their phallic insecurities, and diseased will-to- domination. In fact, the litany of Police sins against the Nigerian people is inexhaustible. It towers above and confounds reason.

The brazenness of Police perpetrated indiscretions has eroded every confidence in this institution and whatever they claim to represent in the eyes of the Nigerian people. An ordinary Nigerian will readily equate the Police to government approved armed robbers.


All Hail the Nigerian Police Man!

All over the world, and across all spectrums of civilized considerations, the safest and the most trusted of persons to ask questions, or for directions, when one runs or stands the risk of losing his way, bearing, or orientation in any major city or street intersection, is a police man. And with an engaging attention indicative of competence, humanity, and job satisfaction, one is sent on his way with the right bearings, served with a generous helping of smiles and courtesy. This is the experience that expectedly greets one in a circle of civilized conduct.

But when and once the assessment dial swirls to the typical Nigerian Policeman, all hell is let loose. Clad in what seems to be eternally unkempt costume, he arrantly represents antagonism, uncertainty, and deep-seated resentment. His face speedily invites nauseating revulsion. Written most times across his brow is an unwelcoming emptiness that threatens and defeats any meaningful encounter even before it starts. This may explain why Nigerians themselves readily take to their heels on sighting a policeman in their vicinity. This is because the policeman not only means trouble, but is trouble personified. His presence advertises repugnance and suggests gross inconvenience.

Most times, with eyes blazing like a marijuana-addicted junkie, and a vision blurred by consolidated disdain for civility, the Nigerian Policeman emits a subtle and unconscious message of unwelcome and repugnance. His first gaze normally paralyses further attempts at communication, as he inundates and ravages your auditory faculties with barked commands that are summaries of uncouthness, once he perceives that his victim is of a low station. But if a man of high social station happens by, he converts himself into a cheerleader, to scream the praises of what he thinks this man represents, in the expectancy of some monetary recompense, no matter how denigrating that sounds. You could see him in such situations helping the “big” man to break or bend the law, or legitimize his other indiscretions, like chasing other road users out of the way, so that the big man, he cheerleads for, could escape the notorious Nigerian hold-up, caused mostly by bad roads and compounded by Police check points, on those stretches that had a semblance of being most punctuated by potholes.

The typical Nigerian policeman most times advertises his neotonic fixations and attachment to ego massage, by extraordinarily displaying that he has the power of life and death over you, the moment you come in contact with him. Woe betides you if you perchance find yourself on the opposite side of the law. Once you fall into the orbits of his power, by being named a suspect, or by being as is always the case, a victim of their arbitrary arrests, he proceeds most times with the self-conceit of a grand inquisitor or imperial slave-master, to terrorize and brutalize your psyche into submitting to immediate manumission, which consists of paying some instant bribes. When this fails, the alternative, which may liberally be tinkered to include degradation, abuse, torture, detention and other sundry abuses is set in motion. This is only when you enjoy the status of a suspect. The law has not even being considered as applicable to whatever you think your case is. And this is at the torture centre that is euphemistically called Police Stations. To that end, when a Nigeria Police man commands you to follow him to the station, or asks you to report to the station, it is simply a mandatory invitation to come for torture, or risk being carried to it, if you resist. This accounts for why so many Nigerians dread going to the Police Stations, and will elect to pay any amount of bribe to avert this searing experience. It equally explains why so many others resist arrests and would prefer to fight it out with the officer if they can, and run away or go on voluntary exile if they cannot.

It is common knowledge that anyone who had the temerity to question the impunity of a police officer in Nigeria runs the risk of being physically abused, shot at, or even framed up as an armed robber. Asserting your rights before a Nigerian police officer is an invitation to cosmetic surgery, if your face ever survives the visits of crude blows, pummelling, and punches that would grace or greet its impudence.

Most recently, the world was shocked into disbelief, when the Nigerian Police served us a menu of murderous connivance and bestial falsehood. The Police shot and killed the Apo Six and went further to dress them in the borrowed robes of their diseased imaginations as armed robbers; planting guns beside them to pass them off as hoodlums. But for luck that ran out on them, they would have succeeded, like the succeeded in killing and framing up Aviation Captain Jerry Agbeyegbe.


Abandon Hope All Who Enter Here!

Dante Alighieri the great Italian Renaissance poet, in the very first lines of his great poem “Inferno” urged anyone who ever bags the misfortune of going to hell, to abandon hope. This is because; hell constitutes an eternity of hopelessness. Conjugated against the backdrop of the Nigerian police and its relations with an accused person or a suspect, every one who falls into the Police net, should abandon his dignity. The police will most surely divest him of it in the most painful and humiliating of manners.

Every arrest of a suspect is a money-spinner for the IPO-Investigative Police Officer, the DPO-The Divisional Police Officer of the Station or precinct in question as well as other detectives and constables that had a hand in effecting the arrest.

At his arrest, a suspect begins what tantamount to a medieval inquisitorial trial by ordeal. Arrests by the Nigerian Police, is effected with a high measure of eminent crudity and unrefined brutality. The suspect is dressed in such ignominy by the arresting officers, that onlookers are compelled to view a person, whose supposed odium attracted such display of inquisitorial force laced with brutality, already as a condemned criminal. He is most times brutally subdued with a festival of punches and kicks, before being handcuffed on suspicion of crimes as little as pocket-picking, even when evidence that he constitutes a threat to the arresting officers, or that he would resist arrest is clearly not there. He is forced to hitch a free ride to the Police Station, most degradingly, in the trunk of a smoky, environmentally unfriendly and derelict jalopy that pretends to be a Police car, where he is dumped and curls up like a piece of human waste, exposed to the ridicule of both human wickedness and the inclemency of the elements.

At every stage of the grim process, verbal abuse of the suspect is in abundant attendance. Before he gets to the Police Station, his body, frame and looks would have arrived at a chilling similarity, with, if not transcending that of Mel Gibson’s Jesus at Golgotha. The menu of brutality served on a suspect during his arrest by the Nigerian Police is such that any jury that watches the saga, before listening to the pleas and submissions, will vote to convict the suspect on the strength of that alone. This is because, the police posts the kind of comportment, which forces a conclusion that the police are either uniformed assassins, or that the suspect is not worthy of life. And since it defies the imagination to view a team of about Five Policemen as possessed of equal levels of bile and the same amounts of unreason, the jury could be hoodwinked by stupefied imagination, which cannot grasp that such levels of demented brutality could be officially condoned, without good reasons.

Arriving at the Police Station, the normal procedure would have been to record the particulars of a suspect, read him rights and present him with options open to him, in relation to his rights to legal representation. But in the Nigerian context, as soon as the suspect is freighted to the Police Station in the boot of a car, he is as a matter of standard practice, which violates every canon of decency, stripped naked to the briefs, dispossessed of his valuables like watches, purse, jewels, and money; presumably for safekeeping; before being pushed into a rectangular man-hole called a cell. His protestations and wailings of his innocence are met with verbal abuses like “Shut up there, you criminal”! “You be thief” “Your face looks like those rogues wey dey shoot police”. “Na today you go talk true, thief”, and so and so forth. With a bleeding body and a broken psyche, the suspect is malleable pawn in the police extortionate chessboard.

If the suspect is so unintelligent as not to shut up, he inadvertently invites a furtherance of his abuse, which may now take more of a physical dimension.. Police boots fly at his face and torso to make him “co-operate”, as they say in Police parlance. When and where this donation of beatings could not do the job of softening him up as to keep his dirty trap shut, the police men actively invite and co-opt the labours of the old inmates in this direction. The old inmates continue their own extortion racket where the Policemen stopped, sometimes with active connivance and collaboration with the Policemen. They further extort money from our hapless suspect, blackmailing him to pay up, if he is to forestall further pounding, which the Police version was merely a crude prologue. The Police and the old inmates play such a ping pong with this new arrival in a fashion reminiscent of the political ping pong between two political arch-enemies, Pilate and Herod, with Jesus standing in the middle and being kicked around for the simple crime of being innocent. Amply humiliated by being stripped naked, beaten into pulp by the police and his fellow inmates, the suspect is now well disposed to graduate to the next ladder in police extortionate transaction with him.

One must bear in mind, that during all this, bail is not even discussed. This is the first 24 hours of arrest. Habeas Corpus exists only in the Statute Books. The suspect will spend as many months as is required to conclude “investigation”- which for the Nigerian police, is nothing but an investigation into the maximum amount that could be extorted or squeezed out of him. The hapless suspect most times does not even know what his rights are. He is most times not aware of the accusations against him. The Police does not even inform him of his crime let alone his right to remain silent if he so wishes. He is not even provided the services of a legal adviser. He is busy nursing a broken lip or a swollen eye, generously garnished with stinging body pain all over his frame, courtesy of the massive beatings he received from the police and their agents, to worry about a lawyer. He is now a malleable goose, well disposed to laying some bribe for the policemen.

At this juncture, the police subtly approach and present him with the offer to bail himself, or get someone to take him on bail. The police at this stage start talking turkey. Money is the point at issue. The stage is normally set rolling at a very bloated and intimidating amount, which the suspect is expected to haggle and come down to a sum that the police considers appropriate to reasonably grease the palms of all interests concerned. The offence one is accused of plays a great role in the amount of money on offer. Cases of armed robbery normally start out at N300, 000 naira. “Wandering”, (which for the Nigerian Police means being out at night or being found on the streets or in a drinking parlour or around any social outlet after 8pm at night) attracts between 50,000 and 20,000 per suspect. This comparative low tariff in the case of “wandering” is attributable to the economy of scale. This is because the police arbitrarily arrests and harvests a handsome number of “wanderers” every night in major Nigerian cities like Enugu, where the State Government, by draconic executive fiat, imposed a 7am-7pm curfew on commercial motorcycle operators. Then the haggling begins. If the suspect has the money on him, he pays up to save himself further manhandling and his family the stress and opprobrium of having a suspected criminal for a son. When this guy has no money on him, the police move the next pawn on the chessboard. They go hunting for his relatives, who when the show up, are asked to go and buy paper, pen and file jacket, with which the statement of the suspect is taken. The police cannot even provide the paper and pen or file jacket to take the statement of a suspect. It has to be extorted out of the suspect or his relatives.

When the stakes are high and suspect refuses to write a statement, the police always resort to either of two options. They craft one for him and force him to sign, with heavy doses of physical and mental intimidation, or they dictate for him what to write as his crime. Resistance to any of these two options equals an invitation to further torture. In this situation, he runs a risk of being out rightly tortured into confessing to a crime, committed even before he was born. If he in any way proves himself a tough nut to crack, he has unwittingly signed his death warrant, as the police will seek all ways of “escorting” him at the least opportunity. Escorting is a notorious word used by the Nigerian Police to denote their extra judicial execution of suspects in their custody, without reverting to the courts. Many suspects held in Police custody have been given gifts of fractured limbs, broken jaws, subdued spirits and stained reputations. Many have had their penises tortured and pierced with needles and broomsticks, and or their finger and toe nails forcefully dragged out of their skins. Many others have had their skin crudely tattooed with cigarette burns.

The fact despite government pseudo-apologetics to the contrary remains that the Nigerian Police factors as the greatest abuser of the human rights of Nigerians. An attendance at a police treatment of a suspect in Nigeria is akin to a surreal movie starring the Gestapo, Nazi Camp commanders, and the Stasi in a race on who could invent more brutality, with the least economy. The suspect is stripped naked of all humanity. His dignity is so very degraded, and trampled upon by the policemen, as to warrant convulsive revulsion. It beats the imagination for example to behold a policeman wielding whips and swinging same on unarmed citizens, at the threshold of the 21st century. Where whips fail to satisfy their sadism, they readily supplemented the dosage of pain, by deploying their boots; kicking, cursing and dehumanizing the taxpayers, whose sweat and labour insures job security for the police.

It is equally blood-chilling and represents the worst evisceration of good sense and human dignity, to see the Nigerian Police, making a media festival off suspects to gains some cheap political capital. Suspects are routinely paraded before the media, as a matter of course, by the Police. This is done in utter disregard for the fundamental rights of these people to a free and fair trial which such media hullabaloo jeopardises and prejudices. The right to fair trial as provided for in the Universal Declaration of Human rights to which Nigeria is a signatory, and which was ratified in article 36 of the 1999 Nigerian constitution incorporates the presumption of innocence until proven guilty principle, which the law accords the accused to forestall placing an onerous burden of proof on him, which may jeopardize his defence. But the Police routinely violate this constitutional provision, jeopardize and wound the integrity of the accused even before his trial starts. The journalists can report crimes and do stories on the suspects. But civility frowns at the compromise and impugning of peoples character, represented by this police violation of the fundamental right of a person to privacy, dignity and integrity.

In fact, Nigerians know a lot more!

Need we talk of Nigerians who reported genuine cases of criminal offence to the police, only for the police to report these Nigerians to the criminals and robbers who they complained against? Your guess is as good as mine. Many of these Nigerians never survived the second visitation of those thieves with police informants. Need we talk of Nigerians in emergency situations, who called the Police for help, only to be told to come with their vehicles to carry the police men that will come to their rescue?. Many Nigerians have lost hope in the Police as the guarantee of their security. They now place their security in the hands of God. This accounts for the kind of religious stickers that adorn the doors and car bumpers of many Nigerians. One is confronted with door stickers screaming warnings to potential burglars, like: Keep off, Angels on Guard!, The Lord is my Shepherd! No weapons fashioned against me shall prosper! I am surrounded by Holy Ghost fire! Etc. This incidentally is never a sign of piety or religion, but a sign of desperation. Nigerians have nobody to complain to. They have simply taken their case to God. But the crazy thing is that they pay their taxes not to God, but to the government. Yet they take their civil and social complaints to God, to whom they paid no tax to that effect.

The Police hierarchy in most times self-defeatist efforts to dry-clean their soiled image, waste scarce funds sponsoring media advertorials with funny slogans like: “The Police is your Friend”. But the bearing, and comportment of the common police man in the streets post a disconnect between the reality and the slogan. It contradicts and rips that affectation to shreds, proving the slogans as of mere cosmetic and apparitional import. The obvious flamboyance of Police brutality, the odium generated by their unspeakable corruption and the scandalous rascality of the officers and men of this institution have always risen, and will forever rise to torpedo any image-reconstruction attempt, embarked upon by it. This is because, ancient African folk wisdom knows that what informs the malodorous stench of the shrew is resident in its genes, and can never be attributed to the articificialities or the accidentals of its existence. The rottenness of the Nigerian police is native to its original ontology or the metaphysic of its establishment. Any attempt to salvage the Nigerian Police force must overthrow this metaphysic that has coagulated into a mainstream thought pattern and occupational culture within this establishment.


Conceived a Mongoloid

The Nigerian Police force was conceived a congenitally deformed mongoloid. It was created to metamorphose into a monster of destructive proportions. It was a creature of the same colonial adulterous boardroom liaisons, which sired the Nigeria state. It was designed and modelled on a core blueprint that revolves around colonial oppression. Its primal members were taken or chosen from among the natives at the fringes of the native societies, set apart, trained and equipped to further the colonial oppressive exploitation of the people. This explains its deployment in quelling the protestations, demonstrations or uprisings in the colonies. And since history has repeatedly proved that it is almost impossible for an institution to transcend the evolutionary trajectory commanded by its genetic blueprints, the climes that gave it life and suck, or the ontological grounds that conduced to its emergence, the Nigerian Police has been unable, many years after the end of colonialism, to transform itself into a more civilized institution, with a job detail that transcends the colonial manuals.

Since no body is impervious to its environment. It requires a revolution of seismic or tsunamic proportions for one to confect pastries of felicity from dough of decadence. The Nigerian Police was born to be dysfunctional, just like the Nigerian nation was created to be an albatross that will self-destruct. Both creatures, namely the Nigerian State and the Nigerian police have been mutually cross-pollinating each other with their loads of dysfunctionality, hence their advanced level of symbiotic decay.

Prior to the advent of the British colonial masters, the various ethnic federations and their socio-geographic expressions as manifested in their village communities had a fundamental philosophy of existence, which bordered on “I am because we are”. This African philosophy of communal existence ordains every member of the society to be a custodian of the social felicity, order and progress. This is what many non-Africans have failed to understand about Africa. And in their crude attempts at social engineering, the colonialist sought to destroy these institutional safeguards hewed out of millennia of African life, culture, and experience. They attempted to supplant it with their own models which are not only alien, but specifically dysfunctional to the African situation, as time and experience has continued to prove.

In as much as I do blame colonial conceit, ignorance and strategic geopolitical posturing for this attempt at the destruction of a core African value, I reserve no understanding, for the African ideological buccaneers and political scoundrels, who continued to mismanage these illusions to maintain their hold on power, instead of developing their lands for posterity.

In African villages and communities, one is one’s brother’s keeper. An Igbo proverb summarizes it by stating that one’s neighbour is one’s brother-Agbatobi onye bu nwanne nne ya. A misfortune visiting one member of the community is a tragedy visited on the whole community. This explains why in most African traditional settings, the ultimate misfortune is death. And in solidarity with his neighbour, who is his brother, no true African ventures out to other preoccupations, when his brother or neighbour is floored by misfortunes such as death. This solidarity is not only extended in times of tragedy. Joyful occasions calls out the community in solidarity to celebrate the life and joys of one of their own. This is the fundamental social metaphysic that attended African traditional life at its core. And this explains African approach to policing the safety, order and security of the community.

To this end, every member of the African community pays attention to any threat(s) to the social cohesion represented by their peace and security. And once a person notices or identifies such threats, he makes it known to all and sundry and the society rises in defence of itself from the source of impending danger. That was the African way, which served Africa so very well, that she was comparatively a non-bloody society, when one juxtaposes it to the brutality that attended ancient, medieval and contemporary European history as well as ancient and medieval Roman history.

The African society was ruled by traditional, time-honoured, and holistic laws, ordinances and customs, which took cognizance of the physical, geographic, ecologic, human, social, psychological, economic, communitarian, individual, and religious dimensions of human life, and never by the crude advertisement and wielding of force, suppressive repressions, machiavellic machinations and blood-letting conquests. To this end, policing rose to become a community act. It, like every other African interactional or social reality embosomed, took cognizance of, and maintained a deep relational equilibrium to every other social variable and value. For instance, there exists a deep relationship between the African sense of communal ownership and the paucity of crime incidences in the African community. To the extent that once this relationship was broken by the introduction and the vagaries of European socio-economic schemes, community policing desiccated and became notoriously inadequate to take care of the volatile lava of crimes and social instabilities, thrown up by this volcanic disruption of the traditional social structures.

In traditional Africa, the capitalistic ethic is greatly diluted by social and human concerns. The traditional African here is like the proverbial snail that carries his house (shell) with him wherever he goes. This shell, house or social baggage represents his heritage and attachments which he can never shake off, without compromising his being, personality and existence. He commits a social suicide whenever and if ever he succeeds in shaking off this social baggage of core traditional and ontologic values that inspired his birth and attended his existence. This explains why an Africa can never suffer to be buried outside the land of his ancestors. He would prefer to be carried home to rest with his forbears, as not to break that socio-metaphysical equation that seats him in communion with the living, the dead and the unborn of his traditional existential universe. This may be an aside to the direct issue we are tackling, but it gives us inkling into the motivations of African behaviour that attended his social evolution, which renders it almost impossible for certain imported or alien conceptual schemes to take root and function in his world.

In crime and Policing like we reiterated earlier, the social structure and system of existence reduces the incidence of crime to a very bare minimum. Here the capitalistic ethic comes to the fore again, as a scaffold. The capitalistic ethic, resource ownership, distribution and management structure of the African traditional society as seen in the Igbo social economy canonizes hard work on one hand and emphasizes the relatedness of human beings on the other. Here, the human person owes a duty to himself and his society to work hard to better himself and attain the heights of reckoning open to his abilities and calling. The society rewards him with the earned recognition. Here hard work and enterprise becomes not only the key to unravelling his nature and ensuring his sustenance, it becomes the fulcrum upon which his existence and that of his social structure revolves. Sloth and laziness are rarities and exceptions, that have social opprobrium as it recompense in the Igbo community. He equally owes himself and his society the duty of not abandoning, but helping his less-privileged kith and kin. This could be seen in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where Okonkwo went to ask of the productive capital to start his own yam farm and life. The capital (here yam seedlings) was lent him, and he deployed his enterprise to actualizing his dreams and repaying the loan. Okonkwo equally had to take refugee in with his maternal kinsmen when he inadvertently contravened the law and was banished to exile.

That a human being towers over and above the trappings and consequences of wealth is a cardinal Igbo philosophy, as could be seen in names like Maduka aku- the Human being is greater as wealth; Nduka aku-Life is Supreme over wealth; Nwa ka ego- The Child is great and above money, etc. These communitarian ethic made the individual an _expression of the whole community, but not greater than the community. One in need in this ambient is not abandoned to the extremes of wretchedness. The community has structures to absorb his incapacities and cater to his disadvantage and indispositions.

The canonization of hard work laced with a humanitarian and anthropocentric relational ethic created a social situation, which coupled with the cultural reinforcements of the Onye-aghana Nwanne-ya philosophy, renders crimes or the tendencies to it, an unnecessary and irrelevant pastime.

In Igbo society, why steal when you can gain your needs through hard work? Why covet your neighbour’s wife or goods, when your hard work, excellence, achievement and prowess can yield you both wealth and the attractive admiration of the village damsels? What are the attractions or enticements to laziness, when social opprobrium quarantines you and your chances to a leprous status in the consideration and esteem of the community?

The Africa traditional social ethic renders both laziness and crime a rarity in its considerations, through its network of social reinforcements, taboos, and recognitions. To this end, the seductions to laziness in traditional Africa are non-existent as one runs the risk of not attaining his basic Maslownian needs if he subscribes to laziness. Laziness does not insure your food, shelter, and clothing, and goes deeper to wound your belongingness to the community and the feelings of self-worth and esteem, as well as the sense of security, which that guarantees. Laziness and crime ostracises and estranges one from his community so much so that it is social suicide to contemplate it, let alone entertaining it. And in Africa, where one’s existence is tied to that of his community, it becomes really a suicidal option both in terms and in fact. This is was why Policing in Africa, never evolved to the form it did in purely capitalistic climes, where material takes precedence over social forms and relations.

Colonial predatory capitalism on the other hand, unfortunately bastardized these structures of social control. Africa and Africans were forcefully grafted onto an exploitive, competitive economic equation, where success for one means the decimation of his competitor; where the big fish has been genetically primed to have the fries for supper, to grow bigger. This capitalism displaced the Egbe-elu-Ugo belu-live and let live approach to Igbo traditional transactional economics. Sharp capitalistic class distinctions rose with this displacement. The divides became far apart, with the poor on the one hand, and the rich on the other. Here as in most capitalistic situations, the poor became condemned to a life-long struggle to escape economically-imposed social disadvantages, while the rich were positioned by the power of wealth and position, to enjoy unrestricted access to the privileges and social recognition that wealth could purchase. As the days went by, the matrix of the social dynamics changed. The stratificational gulf continued to grow unbridgeable. The social conflicts associated with such sharp distinction arose. The fluid situational no-man’s land sucked up the non-competitive and the enfeebled.

With the conflicts, social frustrations were certain to set in. The poor were under pressure to configure ways of survival or grow extinct. Many chose the former path. Those who either because of biological or social consideration could not sell their labour, at the terms of this new order, started selling their bodies to underwrite their gastronomic survival. Those who either actually or perceptually had scores to settle with the system took to what was labelled crimes. Others sought succour in the Whiteman’s establishment, abandoning forever the traditional support systems that informed their lives up to that moment. The dynamics changed. Religion joined the broil, as it served to make positive psychological reinforcements available to the poor in heaven, to enable them bear the negative realities of their social situation here on earth with equanimity. Religion gave the poor a heavenly hope, for them not to rock the earthly boat. They poor worshipped an unseen God, while the bourgeoisie garnered control of production factors and variables.

These two broad spectrums of reactions brewed an explosive mix of social uncertainty and perpetual threat of impending disequilibrium, in which the rich and powerful afraid of the rumblings and grumblings of the poor, sought to secure or protect the status quo or establishment, that would guarantee some stability to their holdings. Laws were created to this effect. And laws without sanctions lacked sting. Force was co-opted to give teeth to the laws. And this was established in the police force, which with time grew to gobble up other functions allied to this basis.

With the coming of the Whiteman and his colonial ambitions, Africans rose initially to welcome these strangers, like they use to welcome all strangers to their midst. But the strangers turned into usurping their land and holdings. At that the African rose in defence of their heritage. They were effectively massacred and slaughtered on so many fronts by the vampiric avarice of the colonialists. And after the first wave of massacres, the conquest was complete. But conquering a people never essays to gag their minds. It neither secures their eternal subservience or security for the conqueror. To achieve these twin aims, treachery and perfidy was constructed and deployed to really tame the people and consummate the conquest. Men and scoundrels at the fringes of the African society were hired and employed to police those who formerly conferred them with insignificance. The Whiteman went for the n’er do wells, the rejects, the scoundrels, the rascals, and the deviants who were sent off the social system, and employed them to keep the people at bay and in check. Since majority of these men had grouses with their various societies, their services became indispensable. And since they knew their people well, they became invaluable assets to the conquerors and traitors to their people.

We have to know that the imperial police force ontological rose from the rotten and exploitative ambience of the feudalistic establishment. The Nigerian police drank from the wells of this primeval ontology. This explains why Nigerians are still being treated as serfs of the ruling class, by their instrument, which is the Nigerian Police Force.


Official Denials versus Factual Evidence of Rottenness!

The Obasanjo’s government, through its Minister of Information, Mr. Frank Nweke Jr., based one of its critiques of, and disagreement with the Human Rights Watch Report “Rest in Pieces” on the frivolous inconsequence, “that the report had not given detailed accounts of the persons who are alleging that they have been brutalised by the Nigeria Police” (See: Thisdayonline, http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=23965). By this the presidency is surmising that such a sensitive report, would have entertained the tomfoolery of divulging or ratting on the sources of its information, in a country that has not be able to solve the mysterious murder of its chief law officer.

Well, we are going to present the presidency with factual evidence, as well as names of victims of police brutality in Nigeria. We are equally going to refute with factual information, which are all public knowledge, which the presidency, that is an absentee-landlord, may have skipped over, as it jumped and junketed around the world, inadvertently begging the IMF and Paris Club to defraud Nigeria.

First and foremost, Bola Ige was shot and killed in cold blood in his apartment by “unknown” assassins who came from planet Jupiter. I hope the government knew about it. This guy was a Minister of Justice and attorney general of the Federation in the PDP government of Obasanjo. His security details were nowhere in sight, when the bullets were redesigning his body for the grave. They were not even within sight or earshot. Yet till date, no-one has been convicted of the murder, or of dereliction of duty, that necessitated his death. This situation conduces itself to only two constructions; namely, either the government had a hand in this guy’s death or the government ordered and approved it. Today Bola Ige has been interred with his bones: his memory only transverse the considerations of the government, as a hushed footnote.

Secondly, Marshall Harry was gunned down and sent to heaven or to hell, by “unknown” assassins in his home. The Police are yet to come up with the killers of this guy. They will never come up with it because they know the killers, and can only find them, if they looked in mirror. What about Chris Ngige? I will resist the temptation to classify him as a diminutive political fraud, who rode on PDP’s gangsterism to power in Anambra State. This guy could not beat the PDP thieves, instead of merely joining them; he joined them and beat them at their own games. So they sought for his head. The Police was detailed to kidnap him, slap the living daylight out of him, and lock him up in a toilet. Even if he is not a governor, does the Police have any right to manhandle a citizen?

The list is endless. The government’s critique of the HRW report is a wooden apologetics in defence of the fact that the ruling party harbours a nest of killers, which co-opted the police in its unholy crusades against its opponents as well as innocent Nigerian citizens.


The Face of the Nigerian Police Today

Any random opinion poll in the streets of Nigeria today, will definitely reveal the Nigerian police as the most hated public institution after the PDP. But their bad publicity pre-dates that of PDP, which is a new gang of old political rapists and execu-thieves.

The Nigerian Police Force today has no face except this image of an omni-dimensionally corrupt, grossly incompetent, inefficient, dysfunctional crop of men, widely despised by the populace, and yet consolidating that image by their avid propensity to consult the most scandalous of comportment. This Force, armed with a history of congenital brutality has been famous for its consultation of violence and brutality as standard fare, in its operational relations with the populace.

We need not talk about the integrity of the men who man this institution. Many of them are dormant criminals and murderers in the most proximate potency. Some majority of them are in the thraldom of a uniform-complex, which psychologically bolsters them, with some fluid audacity to advertise and emphasize might, instead of right and service. This uniform-complex hides an inferiority complex screaming to be ventilated. And their lack of self-esteem is mirrored in their inability to manage the mercurial interface between power management, authority exercise, and right conduct. Because their uniform imbues them with certain aura of authority, they are so very fluid in abusing and exploiting this to achieve unholy ends.


The Fundamental Metaphysic of Policing in Nigeria Enroute to Reforms

The Nigerian Police was formed to fight against the enemies and opponents of the colonial administration. At its inception, it viewed the natives as the enemies of the colonial administration that should be tamed or trashed. The 1929 Aba women riots saw the Police being deployed to quell the riots. The 1949 Enugu Coal miners strike was met with deadly onslaught, as native miners on industrial action, met the speaking and business ends of the colonial police guns.

The vicissitudes of the independence did not give the police force the required impetus to evolve into a civil force that would function in a post-colonial society. It still wore the garbs of colonialism, like a drunken actor on his costume long after the drama was over. It still cherished its misconstruction of the populace as enemies of the administration. The only thing that has changed is the adjective “colonial”. The administration still remains. Though now with black faces in flowing Agbada. And it must be subserviently and fanatically served and defended against the people, as it has always been in colonial times. To this end, the Police ontologically view itself as an enemy of the Nigerian people. This accounts for why the culture of killing the citizens became entrenched in police culture in Nigeria. It accounts for why the police keeps their own version or construction of order and law most times to the detriment of the rule of law, and in utter violation of the constitution most times, all in service of the administration.

This accounts for why the Police was used by the “administration” to physically abduct, and or kidnap a sitting governor because the digestion of the “administration” was constipated. This accounts for arbitrary arrests and donkey-years detention of suspects in violation of the Habeas Corpus principle as was provided in our laws and statutes books. This equally accounts for why the Police is used to violate the fundamental right to freedom of association and _expression of certain Nigerians because the “administration” feels threatened by their association and, or expressions.

With this crude dalliance with the “administration”, instead of obedience to the laws of the land, a supposed politically neutral institution was positioned to embrace the ephemeral political agenda of each administration or government of the day. To this end, the police establishment became susceptible to taking great liberties with the law and human rights, as they generally became conditioned to give in all, including cutting legal, judicial and moral corners to serve persons instead of the law. This is why an acclaimed fraudster and public enemy like Chris Ubah will get a retinue of policemen attending him, and state governors, local government area chairmen, party leader in the wards are assigned dozens of gun totting, policemen, who wear their brutality like a dress, to remind any would be assassin that, no trial awaits him, if he ever dares to try his art or ply his trade on the target they are following like flies on faeces. This equally explains why Police was aiding hoodlums and arsonists that torched the Anambra State Government House. This explains why the Police will smash a political rally of the ANPP, and kill Chuba Okadigbo in the process, because Obasanjo who stole an election and sits on the saddle is afraid of a simple political rally of the opposition party. This explains why the Police will passively if not actively assist the murder of Bola Ige. The list is unfortunately nauseating and endless. This is equally why when the political class want to settle their vendetta; they readily employ unscrupulous police men. James Danbaba, the erstwhile Lagos State Commissioner of Police is still on trial as an accessory to the murder of Kudirat Abiola


Rooted in a Colonial Repressive Metaphysic!

In traditional Africa, policing was a community exercise. It was so very perfect and effective. It served the needs of the community. Today it took the Nigerian police until the tenure of Tafa Balogun to realise the time-honoured truth of the traditional African wisdom, that community policing is the most efficient way of battling crime (Which the police has done a lot to compound) in Nigeria.


The ontology of the Nigerian Police was deeply rooted in colonial exploitation and brutal repression of dissent. It was not fathered in a democratic ambient. The seeds of its birth were watered with oppression, brutal suppressions and hounding of alternative opinions. The Police according to the image and likeness of the colonialist was the arrow in their hands for hunting down and eviscerating opposition to their pillage, decimation, and total conquest of the African hinterland. Many freedom fighters were regular customers of colonial police cells, as recompense for raising their voices.

This metaphysic created a conceptual divide and categorizations, in which the police identified with the oppressors in the fight against the oppressed. At independence, this ghost was not exorcised. The conceptual schema subsisted and was deployed to good effect by the politicians who used police power to butcher and disembowel their political opponents. This evolutionary mutations in the repressive direction, etched this conceptual scheme into mental, institutional and operational blueprint of the police force that the police still finds it absolutely difficult to put away its draconic and oppressive robes when it appeared on the amphitheatres of a democratic society. The goggles have been deeply burnt into its eyes that the Nigerian Police cannot envisage a life without its instruments of, or ability, to brutalize and violently put down whatever in their institutional blindness, they misconceive as threats.

The oppressive ethic adopted by the Police force at its birth created some kaleidoscope of illusions on the institutional thought pattern of the Nigerian Police. There exists this hollow and tragic thinking that with the force of arms and ammunitions, the degradations of torture and detention centres, the psychological terrorisms of advertising crude power and entrenched brutality, would all synchronize to reduce crime, and insure social peace and order. But facts of our daily experiences continue to confound our presumptions here. Nigeria remains a swindler paradise, a thief’s playground and the palace of gangsters. Luxurious buses are hijacked off Nigerian roads every day by armed robbers bearing sophisticated weapons that can challenge comparison and dwarf the Nigerian military arsenal. Homes are no longer burgled in the absence of the owners. They are now invaded by well armed robbers that can confound any commando unit. Husbands are now forced by robbers to witness the rape of their wives and daughters. Children are forced to witness the visitation of criminal sexual abominations on their mothers and sisters. Those who survive the robbers’ bullets are not spared the psychological searing of their delicate natures. Those whose heads received only stitches go on in perpetual thankfulness to their stars. The loss of property is not factored in the equation anymore, as any body who visits to commiserate with a robbery victim first offers thanks that the life of the victim was not lost, even if he lost his life-savings. Nigerians now create maximum security prisons in their homes with burglary proofs and other security gadgets that make Fort Knox or Sing Sing look like the juvenile antics of retarded kids. They elect now to wall in themselves both night and day whenever they are in the house to forestall being ambushed by surprise, whenever the armed robbers decides it is their turn.

The question now in Nigeria is not if armed robbers will come, but when. Roads are not even safe. Drivers are forced at gun-point, off the wheels of their cars and dumped in the trunks of the same. Those who survive the suffocation that a car trunk amply promises, have the ordeal burnt into their minds for a long time to come. Banks are robbed with armed impunity, in commando style. Murder has become the order of the day. Governors have been waylaid by robbers on their way. Ministers have been murdered by armed men in their bedrooms. Political Party stalwarts have been slaughtered either in their houses, or on the road. Many Nigerians have seen men coming to their houses as visitors, only to do their guest in, dispatching him to heaven or to hell, for unexplainable reasons. Priests have been shot or butchered in their rectories and churches. Armed robbery and violent crime now recognizes neither boundaries nor sanctities in Nigeria anymore. Yet the Nigeria Police has not really been able to be on top of the situation. Many crimes have joined the class of eternal mysteries.

Why has the Nigerian Police failed woefully in its fundamental duties, and yet cuts down innocent Nigerians at will? Why has the Nigerian police recorded cataclysmal failure in countering the rising wave and incidence of crime in Nigeria, and have instead become a factory of crime and a purveyor of criminality; committing more crimes themselves than is normal? Can we allude this failure to grotesque incompetence, criminal negligence, institutional incapacity or what?


Police and the Nigerian Society

I will tell you why the Nigerian police have failed to make any head in the battle against crime. Basically, our society is now crime infested because there exists no hope on the horizon for majority of Nigerians. The economy is retrogressing daily. Despite the huge earnings from our oil in recent times, the people are still to feel the effect of these gains. Rather, they are living on the edge like the finance minister, Okonjo Iweala stated. So why is crime on the rise in Nigeria? The answer is economic frustration. As poverty triplicates, crime is bound to multiply. That is the universal crime theory. That is one. But the Nigeria version of crime stupefies all methods. This is because it is compounded with social decay and ethical insensitivity.

The liberalization of economic frustration and excruciating poverty pushes many people to the peripheries of crimes. In this regard, the Nigerian society prepares the crime, while the individual commits it. This economic frustration diffuses and percolates into all sectors and ramifications of our national life. The police institution is not spared. The dyes of economic frustration eat away morals and corrode the sensitivity to laws. The Police men are parts of the social structure ravaged by poverty.

Every society on the highway to decay tolerates mediocrity and licences impunity. Values are generously desecrated. Norms are gratuitously raped of meaning and significance. Conventions are compromised out of existence. Rules are so amorphously corrugated that they can never be bent. They are broken with pomp and pageantry. The young are left with no role models, save that offered by authors of impunity and crookedness. The capricious whims of the powerful are legislated through the advertisement and agency of raw might, into law. Here, honest labour becomes the exclusive province of fools and weaklings. The fluid space between sanity and the obverse is so blurred that mad men are kings, while the seemingly sane subserviently serve their insane caprices. The strong criminalizes his way to stupendously ill-gotten wealth that compels social recognition and excuses his means. He receives high seats in the comity of the depraved, the hypocritical and the enfeebled that saturate and environ his social embrace, with their miserable existences. This laxity in norms revert society to a jungle. In this situation, the society’s doom becomes sealed. It becomes a stinking cadaver and enjoys a rapid decadence. It confects and bakes itself into a lifeless coagulation of insignificant lives and misery united by their common misfortune and self-inflicted disadvantage.

A society gets to this point when it kills its saints and canonizes its sinners. A society signs its death warrant and that of all that is good, true and beautiful, when it feeds on its heroes and sugar-coats its deviants with unearned positions and status. A society sanctions its own decimation, when it licenses the deconstruction of its core values by the forces of greed, avarice and impunity. It opens itself up to destruction, when crimes are celebrated and respect for the law and other core values are treated with disdain and scorn, by those who are supposed to be the custodians of the sacred mores of every social embrace.

In a dying society, crime is patronized with the extremes of incivility. Either the criminal is celebrated or he becomes an honoured recipient of jungle justice. No midway is entertained here. He is either feted or fired. Yes fired. And real fire at that. In Nigeria, the criminal gets either of the two. Either he is feted and feasted or he is fired and roasted. For example, any Nigerian thief who wants to survive and legitimize his thievery must steal large amounts of holdings as to banish hunger and deprivation from his personal universe. The impunity he must deploy to that end must be so intimidating as to command some awesome power. In this regard, the thief will naturally be invited for negotiation and he would be begged to return a quarter of his loot to the owners, and he will be allowed to keep the rest. He can even kidnap a governor without the heavens falling. The more audacity he displays in his impunity, the more doors he can open in the corridors of power in the land. This explains why a Chris Ubah, Asari Dokubo et al, could get presidential invitation, and handshakes. In the case of a real big thief, he metamorphoses into a philanthropist and a political godfather. Ibrahim Babangida is a perfect example of this. When he dies without consolidating his thievery like Abacha did, his dynasty is selectively mapped out for special harassment, because the guy who celebrated the impunity that hijacked the commonweal, is no longer there to face his detractor squarely. This is the treatment for the very big thieves.

A Nigerian should never be a petty thief if he loves his life and his name. This is because the government hates competition. If he goes for petty thievery like shoplifting or pick pocketing, and he gets caught, sorry for his soul, which would certainly commence its journey to hell at the exact moment of his apprehension. Unfortunately, such a thief would not live to learn by bitter experience that the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, is only there to decorate the statute books. If he survives a barbecue from the mob, he would certainly get a bullet and an unmarked grave, from his government approved counterparts, armed, equipped and licensed to kill and steal with black uniforms. I am happy that I have resisted every temptation to call the Nigerian Police a nest of killers or a crude conglomeration of brutal vampires. At least, they do not qualify for that, because they have bested Dracula in vampirism and dusted Caligula in brutality. Their savagery and crudity is simply legendary. So this institution is a class act in spilling blood. This bunch of gun-totting extortionists had no innocence to lose, like the kids marooned on William Golding’s Island of the Lord of the Flies.

The raison d’etre of the Nigerian Police was conceived in oppression and brutal suppression of freedom and self determination. The colonial masters deployed a force of conscripted illiterates and psychological liliputs, to police and suppress the legitimate concerns and aspirations of their brothers, who bore the excruciating weight of colonial oppression. And since men with low self esteem and inferiority complex are the quickest to, and the most brutal in advertising and making a show of their non-existent power and influence, these men went about and in most cases overstepped the boundaries of their legitimate charges in their zeal to prove their loyalty to their paymasters as well as their new high status to their civilian brothers.

There is a 99 % chance in Nigeria that a thief is almost always caught by the people and not the police. And to this end, the people who know the way that the criminal justice system works in Nigeria never learnt the discipline of reining in their impatience and blood lust. The apprehended junior crook is sent on a stony or on a fiery path to hell. He is either pelted with stones laced with the furious anger and fiery impatience of the people, or he gets a necklace made of an old used tyre with libations of petrol, round his neck, which would accompany him on his fiery journey to hell. After this fiery gift, he looks and smells like a barbecue gone awry, which he really becomes after that baptism of ferocious fire, ignited by bottled anger, frustration and vengeance.


Curtains

Policing could be a noble profession. Our Policemen could do better. We have many fine and ethically sensitive gentlemen in the Nigerian police ranks. But the bad eggs have succeeded in imprinting their notoriety on the whole institution. This is on the individual level. To this end, the reforms we envisage should essay to recruit men, university graduates who have passed the discipline of controlled education, into the police ranks. Psychological tests to determine the suitability of these candidates to manage the interface between their personal egos and their responsibilities, should be a mandatory recruitment procedure. Any abuse of their charges by any policeman should face the full weight of the law to act as deterrent to others who may contemplate such irresponsibilities.

On the institutional level, there should be a program of continuing reformation within the institution. Regular refresher courses on civics and human rights are imperative here. The institutional ontology of this force, which hitherto celebrates incompetence and views civilians as bloody enemies, should be radically overhauled to accommodate a humanistic work ethic, where respect for the fundamental freedoms of the citizens reigns supreme. The Police force must be radically re-engineered to torpedo the present metaphysic of impunity that it consults.

The officers and men must be well remunerated as to allow no room for dalliance with gastronomic emergencies, which may seduce them into abandoning their charges in obedience to their acute needs and wants. This is where the government drags the greatest responsibility. The conditions of service of these policemen is so degradingly inhuman, that one wonders what else to expect from men, who are tortured by their circumstances, when dealing with fellow victims.

We may not have a great many suggestions to proffer. But this would have achieved its aims, when it redirects attention to the terrible situation of the Nigerian Police in any soul.

Alluta Continua!