3 February 2008
opinion
Lagos — In its effort to see that the country has a functional and effective police, an independent body concerned with the present state of decay in the force has come out with a report on the monumental corruption, indiscipline and criminality in the system. It recommends how a dream Nigeria Police would emerge. With the report, Roland Ogbonnaya writes on the findings and way forward
Mr. Timothy Oresanya, a businessman develops goose pimples any time he has any thing to do with the police. This state of mind or attitude to the police came out of a past encounter or experience he had with the people who are constitutionally empowered to protect the citizenry. Some few years ago, Oresanya shared a block of flats with his landlord in the Gbagada area of Lagos.
While on one of his business trips abroad, Oresanya's apartment was burgled by unknown persons and his valuable properties carted away. On his return, he called in the police to unravel the crime. While the investigation was going on, Oresanya found one of the missing properties-a laptop with his landlords son. On interrogation, the youngman confessed that his father gave him the computer. For the police, the landlord should now be a suspect and was subsequently arrested.
Unknown to Oresanya, his landlord is a known criminal within the police circle and has a way of collaborating with the police and getting himself out of their web. The businessman was further shocked when the landlord who was earlier detained by the police came out and had the case turned against him. He was not only detained in police cell for weeks, he was tortured and asked to eat his words to let the landlord of the hooks. For Oresanya, this is enough to despise the police for life.
For the family of Mr. Benjamin Chikezie, the mention of the police sends shivers down their spine and evokes high sense of trauma. Their 30 year-old son, Chimezie, who does a second hand spare parts business in Ikeja was driving along Awolowo way on top speed one Saturday afternoon when a column of police on road block tried to stop him, but could not. They shot at his Honda car and in the process killed the young man.
In an attempt to cover up their criminal track, the police deposited the body at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), then a general hospital with a tag that identified him as a robber. The family was scandalised that the police after killing their innocent son, now went ahead to label him an armed robber and insisted so. These and more are some of the atrocities some men of the Nigeria police engage in, dragging the force name into the mud.
There have been allegations of police killing detained robbers in their custody and dumping the bodies in shallow graves, connive with agents to extort money from individuals or communities amongst other criminal atrocities. Some of men in black (some wear other colours of uniform) have been accused of being armed robbers, while others have been proved to be double agents to the police and the men of the underworld.
Network on Police Reform in Nigeria (NOPRIN), an organisation that monitors the performance and activities of the police in the country in a report last December confirmed that the Nigeria Police (NP) has become "criminalised" and therefore called on President Umaru Yar'Adua to take urgent measures to fulfill his inauguration day promise to strengthen the police and effectively guarantee public safety and security.
In an 18-page progress report on its year-long monitoring of over 400 Police Stations in 14 states and Abuja-the Federal Capital Territory- and made available to THISDAY, NOPRIN, claimed that Police personnel involvement in killing, torture, extortion and rape have become routine in Nigeria because the police shields its personnel from legal consequences from unlawful conduct. The report concludes that "the NP is now a danger to public safety and security and the conduct of its personnel could be the cause of a major public health and mortality emergency on a national scale."
Established in 2000, NOPRIN is a coalition of 41 leading human rights organisations that advocate for the reform of law enforcement to guarantee public safety and security in Nigeria. It said that NP have a reputation for chilling brutality as personnel of the Police Mobile, a para-military wing of the force, are better known as "Kill-and-go," a reference to their reputation for bloody operations that leave a lot of death and destruction in their wake.
According to the report, thousands of detainees are killed annually in encounters with the police; hundreds of detainees die outside police custody from injuries sustained during police torture; custodial conditions in police cells cause and spread infectious diseases, while a growing incidence of allegations of rape by police personnel raise the risk of trauma injuries to the victims as well as the spread of HIV-AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
The report claimed that "a police officer attached to the Police in Ikeja, Lagos State, described their practice of raping professional sex workers, claiming that 'this is one of the fringe benefits attached to night patrol'." NOPRIN also reported "an unusually high incidence of insanity and psychiatric ailments" among Police personnel which is connected with the routine practices of torture and extra-judicial executions that these personnel have to carry out.
Dr. Lydia Umar, NOPRIN's chairwoman, observed that "Police abuses have become a public health problem. Any infection that kills and disables people in the numbers or at the rate that our police kill and disable will be declared a public health emergency." She recalled on November 15, 2007, Inspector General of Police, Mike Okiro then on acting capacity, announced that the Police killed 785 alleged "armed robbers" in his first one hundred days in office as Police chief, representing an average daily killing rate of nearly eight persons.
Okiro's predecessors, Tafa Balogun, announced in 2004 that the police killed 7,198 alleged "armed robbers" in encounters from 2000 to the end of February 2004, including 2,025 in 2002, and 3,100 in 2003. Balogun's successor as Inspector-General of Police, Sunday Ehindero, however, claimed in July 2006, that the Police killed only 2,402 during the same period.
"Ehindero somehow manages to make 4,796 killings vanish. Balogun and Ehindero cannot both have been correct. One of them was less than candid with Nigerians. Nigerians deserve to know and Yar'Adua owes it to Nigerians to find out and tells us," Nwanevu said. He however found it difficult to reconcile when four days after the IG's statement, on November 19, President Yar'Adua, who had staked the credibility of both himself and his government on adherence to the rule of law, confirmed Mr. Okiro as substantive Police chief.
With this, NOPRIN coordinator, Emeka Nwanevu said "Yar'Adua's commitment to the rule of law rings hollow as long as his administration takes no steps to bring an end to the epidemic of police killings and other abuses in Nigeria. What use is the rule of law if it cannot guarantee the right to life? A Police that kills this number of people cannot guarantee public safety."
The body further said that the heightened fear of violent crime in Nigeria has been fuelled by the easy availability of guns for political violence, vigilantes, militancy in the oil-rich Niger Delta, and a succession of unsolved high-profile assassinations.
At his inauguration on May 29, 2007, Yar'Adua had pledged that his "government is determined to strengthen the capacity of law enforcement agencies, especially the police. The state must fulfill its constitutional responsibility of protecting life and property." In anticipation of the transition to the new government, and to inform strengthening of the institutions and infrastructure for public safety and security in Nigeria, NOPRIN launched a project in January same year to monitor Police conduct.
The evidence from NOPRIN's monitoring of police practices covering over 400 police stations in 14 states of Nigeria found a police institution whose work has been criminalised. Police personnel kill, torture, extort, and commit rape, safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely to suffer consequences for such misconduct.
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