With Uche Nnadozie
When we were younger, policemen were respected or even feared. The sight of a police contingent in a community clearly upset the balance of that community. “Bad people” usually took to their heels. Parents and seniors ones did not hesitate to offer assistance to the August visitors. Interestingly it was not normal to find these police personnel bear lethal weapons. It was mostly batons, and then sometimes they came with hand chains. While the society has greatly changed, as crimes have taken a whole new characterisation; what used to be taken for granted has become something else. We used to have kidnapping as what it is- kid stealing. Today what we have as kidnapping has morphed into serious crime and banditry. Grand old men and women are now abducted for ransom. What started as a child’s play in the Niger Delta has become a national and cross-national organised crime that is threatening to collapse the country.
At the centre of this deadly kidnapping ravaging the country is money! The truth is, money is not just about paying ransom to kidnappers, it is mostly about insider deals within security agencies. Policemen, soldiers and other security personnel are involved in banditry in Zamfara, kidnapping around the country and Boko Haram terrorism.
Security agents are equally involved in oil theft or bunkering in the Niger Delta. They are part of the criminal cult wars in Rivers and militancy or armed robbery. That is the truth. Their suspected involvement in these crimes isn’t because of lack of reforms, rather it is the greed that has grown wings in our communities and politics.
These security personnel with privileged information and weapons cannot imagine not living large as politicians do. They see politicians and civil servants living large at the expense of the masses and they wonder why they can’t help themselves. By helping themselves we are left with the chaos we see today, period!
To be fair it is not as if the police should be left as they are now. What we must do therefore is to tinker with our fundamentals. Our public officials and civil servants should show restraint on how they steal our money with impunity. The police are watching that’s why they can’t secure all of us. That’s why we have to set up all manner of ad-hoc teams to try to solve these problems. Yet the problems are not abating. Today, our “Puff Adder” has lost its venom. Nevertheless, we can’t say because there is corruption, there is nothing we should give to the police. In previous articles, I have highlighted how underfunded our police is. They simply have not much money, even so, the little available is still not well utilised. It’s either someone is plotting a scheme to divert police funds or it is used for projects that are untenable. We have to envision a system to raise more funds to acquire more technology to aid police work. We need cameras on all major roads and bridges in Nigeria. We need cameras on all patrol vehicles. We need police cadres to apply their rules without let or hindrance. Dismiss any police officer that goes contrary to the rules. We need a strong and uncompromising X-Squad. There has to be a feedback mechanism to check what officers do on patrol.
Our intelligence system is all shades of faulty. Everywhere you go you find police advertising their AK-47s as if that’s the alpha and omega of weaponry. We used to have effective CID system. That system has now been bastardised. They are in cahoots with yahoo-yahoo boys most of the time and give out intelligence on when these fraudsters will be raided. How do we surmount the kind of crises on our hands with the kind of selfish police people we have presently? The same way some people argue that if state governors control the police commissioners via a state police structure then all will be fine. It’s funny to suggest a simplistic antidote to a complex problem. What has a governor having the right to sack or appoint a police commissioner has to do with controlling insecurity in their domains? So what do they use their security votes to do then? Is it the non-control of police that makes governors not to retire their security votes? This is escapist rhetoric and we don’t need that at this time.
While we do not have the kind of money we require to deal with the prevalence of threats we see, it has reached that point where we have to tell ourselves the truth. The truth is that we are not applying the rules governing the organisations we have created. Cronyism has eaten deep into us that we no longer bother about what is just and right. We look for means to exonerate our relation rather than let people be punished for their crimes. Then security officials themselves will rather extort bribe than follow through a process of remediation. When the whole system is rigged there is no amount of reforms that will work. I had suggested sometime in the past that community policing should be what it is. We should not just mouth it. We all have police stations around our communities, the police should know the people that live and work in the areas of their jurisdiction. They should do their own KYC, in this case, know your residents. It’s not difficult.
Police must patrol the areas they cover at least thrice a day and let every adult household have a number they can call in times of emergency. That’s community policing right there. One more thing, by that the community will take ownership of their police.
