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.
For instance, it emphasised on the case of an ex-detainee, Ifezina, who died in late 2005, several days after being released from the Garki Police Station in Abuja, where he endured prolonged torture that included the repeated insertion of un-sterilised needles into his urinary tract. Others leave police detention with injuries that maim them for life or condemn them to a life of physical destitution and ill-health. The body explained that there is no way of estimating the numbers of such people.
The report also touched on the Justice Goodluck Commission established by former President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005, to investigate the killing by the Police in Apo, Abuja, of six young persons falsely labeled as "armed robbers." It said that the commission documented overwhelming evidence of a Police Force widely seen to be "an unfriendly organisation whose officers are generally high-handed and abrasive, always using their position to take unfair advantage of people in order to extort money from them. There are currently about 360,000 personnel in the police and notwithstanding its large size, it has a centralised management, command and control structure, which lacks both the will and management capabilities to deliver policing resources to the points of need in the communities and thrives on diverting policing resources for private gain.
"There is a longstanding excessive hierarchical character of the Nigerian Police in which the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) single-handedly determines both policy and operational matters. The remuneration of police personnel, especially at the lower ranks, is below subsistence levels, leaving most of them in or on the margins of extreme poverty. The general welfare and living conditions of police personnel are inadequate. Police personnel thus carry out their functions chronically dehumanised by their own impoverishment. This contributes to the general climate of police abuses, especially police extortion, but does not excuse it," the report further stated.
The police have also been known as lacking the infrastructure for evidence-based policing. For instance, the entire forensic infrastructure of the NP comprises a comatose forensic laboratory in Oshodi, Lagos, and two "Government Chemists" in Lagos Island and Kaduna. Police personnel also lack the skills to preserve crime scenes or collect evidence from them. There are no facilities for storing or transporting evidence. Several State Directors of Public Prosecutions complained to NOPRIN that police personnel lack even the most basic skills in interrogation or recording of evidence. This too may contribute to habitual resort to unlawful "investigative" practices.
It has also been proved that some senior police personnel encourage third-degree policing, justify torture, and celebrate escalation in extra-judicial killings by their men as achievement. For example, in a media briefing on November 15, 2007, marking his 100 days in office, Okiro reported as his principal achievement the 'extra-judicial killing' of 785 persons labeled as "armed robbers" by the police.
In its July 2005 report, Rest in Pieces, a human rights watch "found the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment by the Police to be widespread and routine", including "brutal acts of torture, dozens of which resulted in death perpetrated by and with the knowledge of senior police officers." In its report submitted to the Federal Government in August 2005, the Justice Goodluck Commission of Inquiry into the 'Apo Police Killings' documented extensive evidence of a police force that had through "intimidation and oppression instilled fear into the residents", arguably creating what human rights watch had found to be "deeply engrained societal attitudes that accept police torture and other abuses as legitimate tools to combat crime."
In a 2006 report based on a mission to Nigeria, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Philip Alston, observed that torture was an intrinsic part of law enforcement methods in Nigeria and found a "largely unaccountable police force, a system that does little to deter police killings or deaths in custody, and impunity for those accused of associated misconduct." All four reports found widespread evidence of "sexual assault, oppression, unwarranted arrests, intimidation, extortion" by the Police.
Police personnel refer to detainees marked for execution as "rams" or "bush meat". The State Anti-robbery Squads (SARS) and Criminal Investigation Divisions (SCIDs) in all States, it said have acquired notoriety for wasting operations and torture. Certain locations are also well known to the public as sites of extra-judicial execution. The Police check-point at the Abuja Junction on the Abuja-Kaduna road is one such spot remarkable for its perennial stench of decomposing human remains. We found that there is an unwritten rule in Police formations in Nigeria that "confirmed" armed robbery suspects should be "escorted", sent on an "errand", or "transferred to Abuja", all euphemisms for summary execution. "Confirmation" is secured through torture.
According to the report, an Assistant Commissioner interviewed in the cause of research said armed robbers are "dealt with according to the law of Moses." He resisted any suggestion that it is for the courts to determine whether such crimes have been committed, and claimed the Police "have our way of making sure" that such persons have indeed committed the acts for which the Police exacts retribution.
The Lagos SCID in Yaba, better known as Panti Police Station, and the Adeniji-Adele Police Station in Lagos Island, according to investigation are particularly notorious for such violations. In Anambra State, the Ogidi Police Station, Area Command Police Station in Awka, and Central Police Station in Onitsha are similarly notorious. So also are the Dobeli and Area Command Police Stations in Yola, Adamawa State; Gabasawa and Tudun Wada Stations in Kaduna State; Gwagwarwa, No-Man's Land, and Zaria Road Police Stations in Kano; Mapo and Iyangaku Police Stations in Ibadan, Oyo State; and Katako and Nasarawa Police Stations in Jos, Plateau State are alleged culprits.
THISDAY was on various occasions at the Police Headquarters, Abuja to speak with the Force Public Relation Officer (FPRO), Agberegi Akpobegi but was not successful. However, some officers who do not want their names mentioned denied that some of the scenarios described by the human rights body do happen or occur. They however admitted that in a force with such number, there would definitely be some bad eggs in the midst and as such could not rule out isolated cases.
A police affairs analyst Eugene Eghagha told THISDAY that some of these criminalities definitely occur because the society gets the kind of police it deserves. He said the police are not properly equipped and kitted which has resulted in armed robbers decimating them because of their superior firepower. "How can you send out a policeman on the street to fight crime including armed robbery without bullet proof jacket and adequate gun and communication equipment? So the few that have gun will not hesitate to kill a robber who is with better gun when the policeman has and advantage to do so. You will also remember that these police personnel until now are not paid well and most cases they feel bitter why they should be out there in the cold and hot sun and thereby visit their frustration and anger to any unfortunate member of the society."
Already, there are plans to reorganise the police. Some of the measures for the reorganisation, administration, operations and control of the police as recommended by a presidential committee include staff auditing and rationalisation, which should be carried out by a reputable human resource management consultant as well as obtaining biometric data (fingerprints, photographs) of all officers and men for easy identification of all personnel with criminal records.
Other recommendations include the mandatory regular meeting of the Police Council to formulate and review policies so that the impact of the council will be felt. Such regular meetings will also afford the state governors the opportunity of making valuable inputs into the administration of the Nigeria Police, thereby giving them a sense of partnership and reducing the tendency to demand for the creation of state police or vigilante organisations. The committee further recommended that the Minister of Police Affairs should be a member of the Police Council.
The committee also recommended the insulation of the Nigeria Police from partisan politics. In this respect, it recommended that the appointment and removal of the Inspector-General of Police should be approved by two-thirds majority of the Senate on the recommendation of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This would free the IGP from undue political interference by partisan political office holders. To further insulate the IGP from political partisanship, his tenure of office, it suggested should be pegged at one term of four years without extension, irrespective of his age and length of service.
There was further recommendation that the Yar'Adua administration should publish the police White Paper and timetable for implementation of the recommendations of the Presidential (Danmadami) Committee on Police Reforms, especially as they apply to salaries, remuneration, appropriations, and management of Police funds; ensure the existence of effective and adequate health and life insurance to cover incidents of death, injury or permanent incapacitation of police personnel in line of duty.
Prioritising investment by creation of forensic capabilities for law enforcement in Nigeria was also recommended by the committee. For this purpose, the Federal Government should identify Nigerian universities with which the government can establish partnership in establishing forensic investigation laboratories to serve the needs of law enforcement in the country. It is believed that if government ensures that Police personnel are adequately protected in line of duty and the Police as an institution has adequate communications infrastructure for its work as well as other reforms, the police will in the future be better of.
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