19 May 2008
opinion
Lagos — As the President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua administration is set to mark its first year anniversary and drawing from available indices, Davidson Iriekpen writes on the culture of impunity by the police in the face of the administration's much-touted rule of law. Is anything different from successive governments?
Wahab Oba is the current chairman of the Lagos chapter of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ). Recently Oba in company of three other journalists from the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) were arrested, abused and detained for no just cause.
Narrating his ordeal in the hands of the policemen, Oba said they were at a restaurant, about 30 metres to his house and in the precinct of the state television having a chat when suddenly men of the force stormed the place. He said they were shooting sporadically into the air and ordering everybody to lie down or they would shoot them. He said that all attempts by him and his colleagues to introduce themselves were rebuffed by the officers who bundled them into a waiting danfo bus and driven to the Area C Police Station where they were detained for hours. He said the officers who arrested were reeking with alcohol.
The travail of the NUJ chairman and colleagues is not a peculiar one. There are thousands of Nigerians today languishing in police custody and prisons picked up randomly by the police on flimsy excuses. Some were arrested and detained indefinitely while taking a walk in their neigbourhood. Others while on errand or through raid on the neigbourhood. These days, it's common knowledge to see people spend upward of six years in detention without trial for nothing and without the knowledge of the relations of their whereabout. This is how terrible the Nigeria Police could be. And this is one of the reasons for prison congestion in the country today, analysts said.
Police abuses have continued uninterrupted since the debut of civilian government in 1999 with the police, military, and elected officials committing serious and persistent human rights abuses against Nigerian other citizens. The lack of political will to improve the country's poor human rights situation and ensure accountability for abuses not only threatens to undermine the fragile gains made since the end of military rule but also poses daunting challenges to holding credible and violence-free elections.
The Nigeria police and other security forces have continued to be implicated in widespread acts of torture, ill-treatment, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary arrests, and property destruction. Added to these, the processes meant to bring accountability have continued to be crippled by corruption, inefficiency, political influence, and an underlying culture of impunity. Those responsible for Nigeria's worst abuses have evaded meaningful sanctions.
In his report in 2006, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak accused the Nigeria Police of widespread human rights violations, telling the UN Human Rights Council that Nigerian Police routinely tortured suspects during investigations. Nowak also deplored Nigeria's unsanitary and overcrowded detention facilities, saying that some prisoners even lacked food and water.
Last February, Amnesty International (AI) accused Nigeria Police and Prisons of systematically violating the rights of suspects and inmates. It also accused the police of secretly executing suspects, saying that the executed suspects were generally tried without representation and were not given any opportunity to appeal their convictions. Impunity from prosecution remains the biggest single obstacle to ending abuses such as these.
Former president, Olusegun Obasanjo's public acknowledgment in August 2005 that Nigerian Police officers committed murder and torture did not translate during 2006 into any significant effort to hold members of the security forces accountable for past or on-going crimes, in which their involvement is alleged. The pathetic case of one Samson Adekoya who was last seen by members of his family in police custody at Special Armed Robbery Squad (SARS) cell, Lagos State Commissioner's office, GRA, Ikeja on February 18, 2008, is one good example.
On February 13, police from Gowon Estate post went to Adekoya's house in Agege and, failing to meet him, arrested his pregnant wife. Adekoya later reported at Gowon Estate Police Station on February 14, following police invitation. He was later the same day transferred to SARS, Ikeja. Between the said date of detention and February 18, Adekoya was visited and seen in police custody (at SARS) by one of his wives, Mrs. Abidemi Adekoya, while his brother, Adewale Adekoya was only allowed to speak to him by telephone with the help of the IPO Supol Jimoh aka "Yago".
It was however reported that by February 18, Abidemi (the detainee's wife) was totally barred from seeing her husband (the detainee) for reasons that were neither disclosed by the IPO, nor were perceivable from the circumstance. Upon further inquiry by the detainee's brother (Adewale Adekoya) on February 26, the IPO Supol Jimoh allegedly informed him that the detainee was rushed to the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja over an ailment that could neither be named nor described by the police.
But the more engaging anomaly was that, in addition to Supol Jimoh's refusal and/or failure to give specific account of the ailment and location of the detainee's admission at LASUTH, Ikeja, he expressly advised members of the Adekoya family against making attempts at locating him (Adekoya) at the said hospital or at the mortuary. In fact, Yago expressly described any such search as a futile exercise. As advised and foretold by Yago, the family's search at the LASUTH between February 27 and March 3, 2008 proved abortive as there was no record of admissions bearing Adekoya's identity between the time of his arrest and disappearance from police (SARS) custody.
An independent investigation launched by Access to Justice, a civil rights group based in Lagos at the LASUTH registry and the morgue confirmed that no person of Adekoya's identity or description was either on sick record at the hospital or in preservative custody at the morgue at the material time in question.
Following this development, the civil rights group by its letter dated May 5, 2008, petitioned the Lagos State Commissioner of Police for necessary inquiry and accountability. Presently, the group has commenced legal action against the Lagos State Police Command through the prerogative writ of Habeas Corpus at the Lagos Division of the Federal High Court, for the production of "the missing Samson Adekoya in court, or for an accurate report of his where-about, among other relieves."
Within the Lagos axis alone, every year appears to record its own fair dosage of victims who are accused, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced and executed on one spot - the police station or traffic check-point. The culture of impunity associated with these killings has soared from military rule to Obasanjo's government and now to Yar'Adua's. There is a chilling practice of alleged "midnight-interrogation" by the police, where they illegally terminate the lives of persons detained in their custodial facilities. Reports from ex-inmates of SARS (Monitoring Unit) Cell, at the Ikeja GRA, narrates the practice of calling out specific inmates at about midnight for interrogation. Information indicates that many of those called-out for interrogation never returned to the cell.
Wnvestigation by THISDAY reveals the case involving one Osondu Obiajulu and his seven-month old son, Master Chukwudi Obiajulu. The pathetic and harrowing experience of Obiajulu and his infant son occurred on May 30, 2000 at No '52 Makoko Road, Yaba, Lagos when a team of mobile policemen who reportedly, were on the trail of prostitutes in the area, opened fire indiscriminately within the precincts of the Obiajulu's residence. In the wake of the random explosions from their rifles, Obiajulu's wife, Juliana who was dressing up after a bath in their one room apartment slumped on the bed, bleeding profusely from a bullet wound which tore through her jaw to the brain.
Following alarm raised by Osondu and his neighbours, the culprit police officers took to their heels. In the aftermath of inquiries and apprehension of the culprit officer (one Sergeant Matthew Morontonu), events following his arraignment under a criminal charge at the Yaba Magisterial District of Lagos State proved to be a loud mockery of the nation's criminal justice system. By what appeared like a deliberate frustration of the case by police authorities, both the suspect (Sgt Morontonu) and the IPO were transferred out of Lagos State. While the police prosecution at the Yaba Magistrate Court tardily allowed the case file to slip out of the court's dockets, Obiajulu haplessly backed-off from the matter after three years of fruitless attempts at securing prosecution of the killer of his wife.
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