By Sunny Awhefeada
Nigeria ranks quite high on the list of troubled spots in the world. Our troubles are legion and they are largely self-inflicted. We have, since the end of the civil war in 1970, embarked on an endless sojourn of self-subversion. The factors that led to that tragic war were occasioned by deeds that were intended to correct what some thought were the things that were wrong with Nigeria in her early years of independence. The civil war was precipitated by two bloody coups within the same year. The first coup set out to redress what the plotters saw as the incipient undoing of Nigeria. The outcome was a disaster.
The second coup was retaliatory and the outcome was even more disastrous. Then the civil war which claimed over a million lives followed and took its toll on the nation for thirty months. Looking back, for those who should know, the coups of 1966, and the subsequent ones that followed, were unnecessary and whatever Nigeria is going through today are among the tragic consequences of those coups and the war through which Nigeria lost her soul. My grandmother often lamented that children born after the civil war were particularly stubborn and nothing compared to those of the preceding era in character. Listening to older folks, the impression one gets about the period before the war was that of sanity, order and other ideals which enable the evolution of a stable society.
The irony of the undoing of Nigeria rests on the ugly reality that state institutions which should ensure the existence of law and order and by extension social stability have constituted themselves into agencies of instability and chaos. This has been the case with the Nigeria Police Force. There is probably nothing new anybody will say about the abysmal moral degeneracy of the police in Nigeria. What is there to say is that Nigerians should cry out again and again whenever they experience police barbarism and brutality. This is a duty we owe ourselves. Nigerians are right now going through a lot as a result of the economic crisis that has pauperized and pulverized them. The attenuating experiences of poverty, hunger and psychological distress now assail the majority of our people to the extent that they have become the living-dead. Added to these is police dehumanization of the citizenry to the point of disillusionment. A sensitive police force would listen keenly and hear the disenchanting rumblings of the people. What the police should make of such rumblings is to do an honest self-appraisal and come out with a clear picture of what its fate would be in the hands of the people if the tables turned tomorrow. And the answer should not be farfetched. If the police had a memory, the ENDSARS riots of October 2020, barely three years ago should serve as a pointer to where it stands with the people.
The ENDSARS incident was the product of youth disillusionment with a police force that chose to criminalize and dehumanize every youth it encountered. It was a mass movement against the perpetuation of criminality in uniform. Prior to the riot, as it is now, the police force appeared like an institution for scoundrels whose only training during the process of recruitment was on how to extort, dehumanize and kill helpless citizens. The police would mount illegal roadblocks, extort, beat and even shoot innocent people and then flee the scene. These tendencies stopped for about six months following the outrage generated by the ENDSARS incident. For a while the police fled the roads and let the citizens be. Unfortunately, the citizens have not been properly organized to sustain the gains of civil disobedience. So, gradually, the police crept back surreptitiously and they have taken over our roads and streets again, subjecting the people to experiences worse and harsher than what armed robbers would do.
Every newly appointed Inspector General of Police often issues sterile directives to policemen to stop corruption, dismantle road blocks, respect the people and other such talks that merely constitute lip service. The police get worse with every new boss. The police orchestrate lawlessness on our roads, our streets, people’s homes and of course police stations are like the lion’s den. The youth have become endangered targets for the police. Towns hosting tertiary institutions are often raided in the guise of looking for criminals, but what the police actually do is to arrest mostly innocent people torture and extort them and their families. A recent trip between two university towns showed how terrible the situation has become. The trip which is a distance of less than fifty kilometers had a police check point at every half a kilometer and there were instances when you stop at a check point and look back and you will sight the last check point.
The police at all the check points violated their code of conduct. Their choice of words was coarse. They cocked their guns and pointed them menacingly at moving vehicles. They insisted on going through the mobile phones of young passengers and on one occasion, one of the policemen put his gun to the head of a passenger claiming the latter eyed him in a rude manner. This act, putting a gun to a passenger’s head, angered an elderly man who dared the policeman and called his bluff. What followed was a rowdy scene and some passengers threatened they would record the scene saying that the police can go ahead to shoot all of them if they wanted to. This incident repeated itself at four other check points as the young people resolved that they have had enough and would not keep quiet anymore. They insisted on recording each scene, making calls to people and insist on being taken to the nearest Area Command. Their resistance paid off as the police at the four check points where these took place gave way after little grandstanding.
That the Nigeria Police Force is the most reviled public institution in Nigeria is not in doubt. Every passenger had tomes of stories to tell about the more than many transgressions of the police. The police motto of “the police is your friend” flies in the face of logic. The police force is Nigeria’s number one public enemy. The police in Nigeria have acted against their own functions which are: the prevention and detection of crime; apprehension of offenders; preservation of law and order, and the protection of life and property. A kind and generous evaluation of these four functions will not earn the police more than 30%. And truly the police force as an institution has failed. It is the failure of the police that has led to the proliferation of arms bearing non-state actors in our society. All around us are hunters, vigilantes and other assortment of quasi-security personal gallivanting with guns and playing the role of the police. Unfortunately, they also behave like the police and are extorting and shooting the people. The unbridled lawlessness of the police has also become an identifiable character of other armed services in Nigeria.
The police will become the people’s police once the people want them to be so. So far, Nigerians have not been organized for a cause and this is the reason ENDSARS failed. The civil society, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, the media and other stakeholders must come together and device strategies of evolving a police with a human face. This should be part of the citizens’ agenda for a new Nigeria. Nevertheless, despite the sickening rot in the Nigeria Police Force, there are still good men and women in their rank and file. Sadly, they are very few, almost insignificant and I salute them.
