Governor Babatunde Fashola also expressed surprise about the incident: “We need to be bold, audacious and show we understand what the people feel. Innovation, perseverance and industry will lead us.”
Even though many people believe that Abubakar and Fashola are doing great jobs to fight increasing crimes in the state, they appear to have scratched the challenges facing the police force on the surface while trying to explain what led to the Sunday robbery. From the emotional reasoning of the police boss, one could say he lacks the current mindset of his men, the poor knowledge of the society where the police operate, the poor understanding of their responsibility to the society and the low morale of his men. Does Abubakar pretend not to know that many of his men today believe that our great nation is not worth dying for? And that his men need to do extra jobs in order to sustain their families?
If he is still in doubt, the IGP should ask the Delta State commissioner of police about his experience with his men sometime ago. The Delta State police boss had to pay an official visit to the state complex housing some state high courts. In their usual manner, the state police boss’ guards were shooting sporadically in the air, apparently to scare deadly criminals off their boss. But some mobile police orderlies attached to some state judges were said to have abandoned their guns and the judges they were supposed to be protecting and entered the nearby bush, when they heard the powerful sound of their colleagues’ guns, thinking that armed robbers were about to invade the premises. According to the report, many of the affected policemen, who later found out that no armed robber was after them, never returned to their duty posts till date. For them, the judges were not worth dying for; their lives mattered most.
Just as a few people are still wondering whether this story narrated by a Delta State high court judge to newsmen is true or not, let me also share the experience of one of my colleagues, an Abuja-based journalist. He was travelling from Kaduna to Abuja, and before he got to Suleja town – about 28 kilometres before Abuja - he was flagged down by a policeman at one of the many checkpoints that used to characterise the Kaduna/Abuja expressway.
First, the policeman, with the rank of a sergeant asked the journalist to produce his vehicle documents, which he quickly did. Thereafter, the journalist was requested to identify himself and he immediately brought out his identification card, telling the policeman that he was a journalist. The policeman looked at the identification card and the journalist with shock and immediately alerted his colleagues with him at the checkpoint by shouting in his local language what was later translated to mean “Come and see a fake journalist. He says he is a journalist but he has no NTA identification card.”
For that policeman, only those working with the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) are journalists. But for the intervention of his colleagues who laughed at him over his huge ignorance, he wanted to arrest this journalist for impersonation.
The police sergeant is just one of the many products of the Nigeria Police Force that are today charged with the enormous responsibility of intelligence gathering, policing, arresting, detaining suspects, and detecting and preventing crime in the country. They are the people whom Abubakar wants to use to fight the deadly and well equipped criminals in the country, especially in Lagos.
I do not want to believe that the IGP is not aware of “the political unsteadiness, prolonged military rule, widespread insecurity, ethnic and religious conflicts and corruption” that have negatively influenced the police force and its everyday job of policing the nation. And this could be attributed to the inability of our police to effectively maintain law and order – as evidenced by the glaring cases of armed robbery and the Sunday incident in Lagos. I do not also think many Nigerians doubt that the police force today are ill-equipped to perform their functions well and in compliance with the rule of law. Even the “big men” they are visibly mobilised in large numbers during ceremonial occasions to protect and assigned to guard their homes and offices, are no longer safe in their hands.
Let’s get serious: these policemen and women of today cannot effectively fight crimes in a complex nation like Nigeria, where scientific methods of committing crimes are being invented on a daily basis. And experts have identified many factors responsible for it. They include inadequate manpower, in terms of quantity but most especially quality; inadequate funding; poor crime and operational information management, including inaccurate recording and collation, poor storage and retrieval; inadequate analysis and infrequent publication of criminal statistics; poor remuneration and general conditions of service.
Our policemen will continue to sleep on duty until indiscipline and involvement in crime or collusion with criminals and a lack of integrity among other things are tackled by the police authorities and the federal government. Our policemen and women will continue to run away from armed robbers for fear of being killed until they are better equipped and paid living wages. They will continue to fight over N20 note at various checkpoints until corruption is tackled squarely within the system. Their morale will continue to be low until they are rest assured that their families would be taken care of if they died while carrying out their official assignments.
The police are humans; they buy things from the same markets with us; their children need all the good things of life like so many of us. If they have their way, they will also want their children to attend some of the best primary, secondary and higher institutions in the world like many Nigerians.
Still on Ethiopia
Last week on this page, I narrated how a young woman tried to frustrate me in my several attempts to get an Ethiopian visa to travel to Addis Ababa to attend a pan-media international conference kicking off tomorrow, after presenting all the necessary requirements. She asked me on Monday, to come for it this morning, against the 24 hours that are required to get the visa. I hope she will not deny me the visa, in spite of the assurance by a very friendly Ethiopian ambassador to Nigeria on Monday that I would get the visa.
However, in an attempt to narrate my experience in the hand of the visa lady last week and her poor treatment of visa applicants, I later realised that I went too far by allowing my emotion and the perceived sin of an Ethiopian to run a not-too-tasteful general commentary about “a great country like Ethiopia”. I had received over 50 responses both on the LEADERSHIP website and my e-mail address with over 96 per cent of them protesting my judgement. I admit I went too far and consequently tender an unreserved apology to my readers and the good people of Ethiopia.
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