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AllAfrica.com - Washington,USA
19 August 2007

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Nigeria: The Police in the Mid

The first law of good governance is good security across the land, for one and for all.

You cannot have one without the other. Security permeates everything else. It is the lifeblood of healthy nations as opposed to troubled geographical expressions. That this crucial arena has been honored more in the breach and the easy resort to hired escorts and private militias, speaks volumes to the mindset of those who have run this country in the past.

In this sense, there a hundred and one reasons why the poor salaries and other conditions of service of the Nigerian Police Force lower ranks the sort who are expected to go after armed robbers at 3am while others are asleep -ought to get Nigerians riled up. While we are at it, there ought to be a huge outcry over the insane corruption of the police chiefs who so brazenly stole Nigeria blind, leaving their men as extortionist on the highways. The sacrilege of the Baloguns and Ehinderos, and many before them, ought to be studied as examples of what in the old days called man inhumanity to his fellow men. That they could be so cavalier with national security was in line with the arrogance of the times.

There are signs here and there that the suffering in the land is finally getting attention in Abuja . One such was a curious outcome of an exchange during a recent courtesy call by the Minister for Abuja Federal Capital Territory, Dr. Aliyu Moddibo, on the Chief Judge of the territory. The judge in receiving the man on whom over two million people in Abuja depend for basic metropolitan assurances passionately urged him to pay attention to the plight of the police in all its ramifications. The wise justice knows so well what is common sense elsewhere that without a good police force, there can be no stable civil society. That progress depends on security and the policy ranks are the first line of defence in this basic necessity of civilized life.

The nation's current Number One Citizen seems the sort that would agree with this proposition. President Yar'Adua has enunciated a seven-point agenda that suggests he sees the burden of insecurity for what it is a basis for the transmogrification of every paper policy intention. He has repeatedly spoken of a desire to see Nigeria join the ranks of the top 20 global economies in the next 15 years. Like most of my informed compatriots, I think this is a rather tall order, give where we are and how fast other nations are moving. But very much aware of the historic context that led to the much-admired Asian miracles and what they were able to pull off in 20 years, suggests that nothing is impossible even as one is very much aware of the secure cultural identities of those long-standing societies, that made things possible. Polyglot Nigeria, existing along significant lines, still has long way to go.

Yet the task for committed leadership is not impossible: Nigerians really are not demanding much they just need the security and the enabling environment to thrive as individuals and groups. On a practical level, there is a Nigerian Dream that most people share a desire for material wealth, family the bigger and more extended the better (in-laws, a wife, maybe wives, children, many, everyone in a happy big tent, grateful to the paterfamilias); and commitment to a community of choice - this may be the village, a religious group, one's intimated significant affiliation.

Yet these dreams for working masses and rural dwellers, for civil servants and for ordinary middle class professionals. Just take the headlines this week alone on the gauntlet the average person has to weave through just to survive one more week in today's Nigeria: Soboma George, Port Harcourt militant chief, shot dead, Vanguard; Blood flows in Port Harcourt - Militant leader, 40 others killed in shoot-out - 4 soldiers killed -Nigerian Tribune; Lagos: Police kill 2 over N20 bribe -Daily Champion; Fraudsters forge, sell N10.6m share certificates, N85m land Punch; Police uncover N111m fraud cases, expose new tactics, Guardian; Yar'Adua to declare emergency on energy sector "Guardian; 12 suspected MASSOB member corpses found on Elenchele Island "Vanguard; MASSOB denies 12 bodies found at Elenchele Island were its members, eyewitness defer, "Guardian; Robbers terrorise Lagos residents "Guardian; Okiro parades six armed robbers "ThisDay; Police arrest 1,087 in Lagos "ThisDay; Guardian Editorial: Police roadblocks and Okiro's directive; IG parades six suspected killers of policemen "Punch; Niger: ICPC arrests judge, lawyer, policemen over bribery - Quizzes poly rector, registrar - Tribune; Human traffickers now sell victims organs - NAPTIP chief.

You have to believe that Nigeria today is a nation besieged "a nation that is again coming to the crossroads. The evidence overwhelmingly speaks for itself.

Indeed, a good criminologist could make an entire career just studying the forms and manifestations of what sociologists call deviance before and how what is so totally abhorrent elsewhere, has become an everyday reality in our land where people are happy enough to be managing. As almost everyone knows of course the issue is far more complex than that: crime is a product of an array of variables from unemployment and the gross inequality that empowers less than 1 per cent of Nigerians to own over 85 per cent of all liquid and fixed wealth. It is the product of the pressures for social mobility of the upward variety in a land without social security. What we are witnessing is the chickens coming home to roost as every single member of this 140 million national community also dreams of not just getting rich but living the good life "just as they see others do on Nollywood, not to speak of Hollywood.

The upshot, regardless of what the pastors and reverends and imams and the newly-visible rabbis preach about the hereafter being far better than this miserable vale of sorrows, Nigerians have shown again and again, that given the chance, they are not exactly in a hurry to die. When Zik said as much in 1989 when a committee of 25 proclaimed his glorious demise, his dyed-in-the-wool foes said he was a coward if he still sought to enjoy life after reaching 84. It is not on record that any one of them hanged themselves either.

Jokes aside, there is no question that Nigeria is a developing country beset at all levels and has been forever "if it's not one intractable dilemma, it's another. With the current kidnappings and shootings and killings in Port Harcourt and Niger Delta, with crime rampant in Lagos, Kano and elsewhere, the international community is again issuing warnings to avoid dysfunctional Nigeria where the potholes and crumbling aviation infrastructure, corrupt leaders and rioting religious fanatics used to be the main concern.

Aside from the genuinely offensive outrage of executive pilfering in which governors and other high officials steal shiploads of public funds, other forms of criminal deviance range from organized crime "the real Nigerian mafia (drugs, generators, petrol products, prostitution rings) to gangs of armed robbers and sundry desperadoes. You have rapists, pick pockets, Area boys everywhere going by assorted local names "assassins for hire. The far better known phenomenon of financial extortion based on online misrepresentations and to which equally criminal minded types overseas (their national media call them innocent) fall prey, is the much discussed 419 phenomenon which has now made its way into Wikepedia, the internet encyclopedia, as well as in law enforcement classes worldwide.

My concern here is with the average Nigerian, the sort I celebrated in my NYSC-era play of 1979 titled The Passing of the Loved Ngima as well as in my novel, Yesterday Was Silent, which as I have mentioned before in this column. Those works evinced a lamentation for the passing of the old Nigeria and the rise of self-willed moguls, comment, Hollywood-fixated actresses and dubious preachers able to mix Christianity and Islam into an unusual Nigerian brew "attracting willing devotees all the same. My 1991 play that premiered in New York, The Flycatcher's Identity had a furious debate segment drawn from characters in the novel, where the antagonists of left and right, along with weaker centrist types, battled each other in elevated language, on the meaning of being a Nigerian as the oil boom showed signs of becoming into a cultural doom, corrupting everything in its path.

Imagine the reality of the ordinary Nigerian "the segment of the population that should really be President Yar'Adua's concern. The Ngimas of this world are routinely beset by police extortions, ecological crimes based on corporate or official negligence (we should line up all 774 Local Government chairman and eyeball-to-eyeball, ask where they have been keeping the loot; better still, all former governors, on what happened to the Ecological Fund). The average Nigerian is daily harassed by an assortment of human rights violations that when he heard it said by the president that he represents the coming of the end of the old style muckraker elites, they wished they could believe him. They will wait to see.

The end result of a system that favors the privileged and humiliates the poor and unaffiliated is the roaming air of deviancy that you see all over the place, the hustle and bustle and easy resort to underhanded shenanigans in a land where merit is less than fully meaningful. We have in Nigeria a first rate crisis of cultural genocides and Value distortion that led to the strange beings we learnt to call cultists "undergrads all over the country who could invade classrooms and with AK47s mow down other youngsters sitting for exams.

Altogether the president's seven-Point Agenda is a good start in focusing the mind on long and short term goals, all of them worthy. But as the first 100 years roll by and Information Minister John Odey arranges a celebration, let me join others in reminding the president that ours is a nation that has already effectively lost 30 to 40-years on the road to joining the 20 top economies he speaks of. Nigeria does not have much time to wait to begin to plan how to tackle problems so obvious that they are common talk among friends swilling beer or akpeteshi or tomboriquor at any town square.

The old elite failed in ways large and small. The new elite can do better by being instrumentalist "in taking on specific challenges and tackling these to a conclusion. As a nation, Nigeria's preference for prevarication will no longer do. This should be the age of emergencies. In fact, I heartily welcome the president's declaration of emergency in the energy sector. That is a first step. He should borrow from what made other leaders before him, endeared in history, despite our ringing despair at things they did wrong. They had their fine points: the courage of Murtala Muhammed and the focus of PDP's determined foe Mohammed Buhari who truly came closest to cleaning up Nigeria with his war against indiscipline

Yar'Adua could do well with the internationalism of Olusegun Obasanjo, the technocracy of Awolowo, the big tent policy of Ahmadu Bello, the millenarian pan-Africanist vision of Azikiwe, the passion for the talakawa of Aminu Kano, and the quest for common citizenship of major and smaller groups exemplified in the careers of Tarka, Enahoro and Boro. He could cultivate the equanimity of Tafawa Balewa and the self-sacrifice of Ironsi who thought that maybe with his death, Nigerians could come together. From IBB to Abacha to Abubakar, there are lessons that discerning minds could grasp and utilize.

But whatever he does, Yar'Adua should see the enhancement of the police, the absolute QUADRUPLING of their miserable salaries, as key to the attainment of the other lofty goals he has been speaking of. There ought to be sign in every Executive Mansion that says, No Security, No Stability "No Stability, No Growth. And security starts with the police. I would urge the president to see his expand his seven-point agenda by encoding them and more into a seven-point emergency declaration: emergency over poverty and unemployment; over the rampart waves of crime "whether by politicians or by the roaming thugs who emerge from their hovels at night; emergency over the impaired healthcare system; another over the lackadaisical pace of attaining the much heralded millennium development goals.

There ought to be an education emergency "every kid in school. There must be one for due process in the courts and prison decongestion. There could be an emergency drive to beautify Nigeria with Abuja as a model.

There are larger issues at stake and I always like to draw attention to the global trends enveloping us even as waste time over nonessentials. No African alive today must rest easy at the implication that our continent is so backward that at present rates and in all vistas of life's vital arena, there's is no way we can catch up. These emergencies are but a modest start. The cultural turn-around will be even more difficult; but without a determined president willing to be both fair and tough, and able to career his parliament and traditional authorities along, we are bound to remain in the doldrums. Permanently,

To escape this curse, start with the police. I have not focused on their own indiscipline and corruption partly because the fish had rotted from the head. Turn it around a disciplined force is possible. First things first. Nigeria should start by paying them well and demanding professional services.

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Article sourced from

AllAfrica.com - Washington,USA19 August 2007

Nigeria: The Police in the Mid

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AllAfrica.com - Washington,USA
19 August 2007