allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Rights Abuses . . . Police Culture of Impunity (Page 1 of 3)

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.

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