Tag: Air Force

A poor boy in the hands of two Air Force cadets

I had thought of writing on the new electricity tariff approved for our electricity distribution companies (DISCOs) by the Federal Government today. Somehow, what you are reading pushed that forward. That may come up next week, God willing. What I am looking at today is  Citizen Dahiru Lawal and two air force cadets.

For me, Dahiru is one of the luckiest persons in 2015. Barely 48 hours to the new year, the poor boy had an encounter with two Nigeria Air Force cadets, Abdullahi Fahad and Peter O Solomon at the Mile 12 area of Lagos. Mile 12 has become more notorious not only for the presence of the market there but for the chaotic traffic situation that has become a regular feature of the place. But people in the area were treated to something bizarre when on Wednesday, last week, the two Air Force cadets locked up Dahiru in the boot of their car. But for the intervention of Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State, only God knows what would have been Dahiru’s fate by now. But my guess is, he might have passed on to the Great Beyond because there is a limit to how long a human being could stay alive while locked in the boot of a car after being dragged on the ground.

According to reports, the cadets said they put Dahiru in the car boot for trying to escape after breaking the windscreen of their car. “What happened is that the boy broke the windscreen in front of my car. When I stopped, I asked him to come, the boy ran away. We have to drag him back and put him in the boot”, Solomon said, when asked to narrate what happened. He added: “I kind of threatened his boss that he is working with and when his boss came and looked at what he did to me, that was when I put him inside the boot, but I did not lock the boot”.

Fahad more or less corroborated this story. He said he and his colleague were at Mile 12 after visiting a friend when they heard a sound on their windscreen and they saw Lawal attempting to escape … “We now ran inside the market and dragged him (Lawal) down. I was even asking for who he is working with because I wanted to see his oga since I know he cannot repair my damaged windscreen. I want to see the man he is working with so that we can settle everything with him. I now told my colleague that we should hand him over to Air Force Police at the Air force Base”, Fahad added.

Dahiru states his own side of the story. He said he mistakenly broke the windscreen with the load he was carrying and that he took to his heels for fear of what the cadets would do to him. “I ran into the market and they pursued me and caught me inside the market. They started beating me and dragged me to their car. The pleas of my boss and other people around fell on deaf ears. The policemen there, according to reports, also came to plead with them to open the boot but they insisted on taking me away and it was at this point that the convoy of the governor arrived to rescue me from the boot of the car where they kept me”, he said.

Why would the cadets want to take the boy to Air Force base when there were policemen around? Although the cadets claimed they did not lock the boot of the car after puting the boy in it (a claim Dahiru said was a lie), that, for me, is immaterial. Why put a human being in the boot of a car at all? Now, even if what they wanted to do was drive him to their Air Force base, would they still have left the boot open while driving to the place? How many people would break the windscreen of a military personnel’s car and wait, knowing full well the repercussion? This is not to justify what the boy had done, though. Despite being a boy, he already knew what to expect from the cadets after breaking their windscreen. Moreover, it does not seem to me that the boy deliberately broke the windscreen. Even when the boy’s boss arrived, there was little he could do seeing that the people that his boy offended were military men. If he said what they did not want to hear, he could end up receiving lashes of koboko (horse whip) and end up in the boot with his boy. So, the best he could do was plead with the cadets, realising that even the policemen around could not get the boy off the hook.

Indeed, this is where I am going. At the time the policemen on ground there intervened, the military men ought to have handed over the boy over to them, granted that they wanted their windscreen replaced (a not too illegitimate demand). But that is what due process and rule of law demands. It was wrong for them to contemplate taking the poor boy to their base because that could not have been a substitute for a police station. It was a civil matter which should be reported at the police station.

Apparently too, the policemen there were helpless because if they tried to insist on taking up the matter, things could go awry between them and the cadets on the one hand, and the cadets and onlookers on another. Before one could say Jack Robinson, the entire place would start boiling and we may begin to record casualties by way of deaths or injuries. Reinforcements would come from nearby military barracks upon mere speculation that some bloody policemen have manhandled two Air Force cadets. It was probably to avert this that the policemen there chose to plead with the cadets and when they saw their pleas were not heeded; they abandoned the boy to his fate.  Thank God for the governor’s convoy that was passing at the time. That is why I say Dahiru is a very lucky boy. If not, why did the governor arrive at the very point that the boy needed a superior authority to free him from those who were too powerful for those around to rescue him from?

The point is that some of our military officers need to learn how to relate with members of the public. In fairness to some of the officers, they are somewhat  courteous while dealing with civilians. But some of these boys joining the military have a different idea about what the institution is all about. They see their uniform as something that entitles them to bully others and cow people into submission. If mere cadets could put someone who broke their windscreen in the car boot, what punishment would they mete out to him if they were officers in the Air force? To even think that the cadets are from what many of us see as the elite arm of our military, the Nigerian Air Force! It is bad enough that in this case, the boy was at fault. But I have no doubt in my mind that if the case had been otherwise, the same cadets would want to bully their way through, perhaps without offering an apology to their victim.

Did it cross the minds of the cadets that Governor Ambode could have ordered them put in the boot of one of the cars in his convoy because he too had superior powers, even if this would have attracted condemnation later from some citizens? Yet, some would have seen the ‘punishment’ as a well deserved comeuppance for the cadets who did not realise that where their own power ends, someone else’s begins?

Our military authority must teach their officers and men how to deal with civilians. They must know that we are now in a democratic era and there is no room for raw or brute application of power or authority. In a sense, Dahiru is a Yoruba equivalent of ‘Ayorunbo’ (someone who has died and returned to earth). Reports said he was already gasping for breath when the governor arrived and ordered that he be freed. Thank God he is free indeed!