The Nation Newspaper

Tag: COP

  • The cop who loves power

    Their relationship has never been cordial and it is all the fault of the police. Despite the press doing everything to make things work between them, the police have never returned the gesture. Because of their phobia for the press, the police hate to see reporters’ faces. At public functions, they shoo reporters and photographers away like hen. On some occasions, they beat them black and blue for allegedly breaking protocol.

    It seems it is a global phenomenon, but that of Nigeria surpasses all. It appears that playing God is part of police job. Their job is to prevent crime, but they take delight in preventing reporters from doing their job. But when did reporting become a crime? Whether under military or democratic rule, the press has always been at the mercy of the police and other security agencies. It was so bad under the military which came up with decrees to cripple the press. There was Decree 4 under the Buhari junta under which Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson were jailed for reporting the truth in 1984.

    Eleven years earlier, a reporter, Minere Amakiri, was giving 24 strokes of the cane and his head shaved by then Commander Alfred Diete-Spiff, then governor of Rivers State, for his report on a teachers’ strike, which fell on the governor’s birthday. You can see how the press has been treated over the years. It has not fared better under democratic government. Under the Jonathan administration, Ubale Musa of Radio Deutsche Welle, was expelled from the Presidential Villa, Abuja, for asking visiting Chadian President Idris Deby a question on the Boko Haram menace. Tell me, what is a reporter’s job if not to ask questions? We thought we had seen the last of such irrational actions until what happened again at the Villa on Monday.

    What his predecessor, the late Gordon Obua, Chief Security Officer (CSO) to former President Goodluck Jonathan,  did to Musa, President Muhammadu Buhari’s CSO, Bashir Abubakar, has done to Olalekan Adetayo of The PUNCH. Abubakar asked that Adetayo be marched out of the Villa and never to return. He took the action without recourse to his principal or the president’s media aides. That is the way they treat the press. He did not even consider it appropriate to sound out his colleagues before taking his ill-advised decision. He was simply power sottish and decided to show off. Abubakar has stirred up the hornet’s nest and he will surely be bitten. He has started what he cannot finish. He should ask those before him how they ended up after such rash decisions.

    What did Adetayo do to warrant his expulsion? According to reports, the CSO was aggrieved by the Sunday PUNCH, April 23 lead story which touched on the president’s health. He was also not happy with the reporter’s Saturday, April 22 article titled : ‘’Seat of power’s event centres going into extinction’’. I do not know how our security agents think. They see themselves as more patriotic than other Nigerians because they serve in the security agencies. They forget that patriotism is not defined by the job you do but by what you do to lift your country. A policeman is not patriotic because he has the power to stop a reporter who he considers a ‘security threat’ from doing his job at the Villa or any other place for that matter.

    Who defines what is national security where there is an apparent threat? Is it the police officer who is in charge of security in the Presidency? Or should it be the court? National security is a nebulous term which could be used and is used by overzealous security operatives to deprive people of their rights and freedom. Though Abubakar did not say so, his action spoke louder than words. By his action, he implied that Adetayo had breached national security with his reports. According to Adetayo’s account of his meeting with the CSO, Abubakar said the reports portrayed the president as incapacitated. He then reportedly added the clincher : the reports had to do with the politics of 2019. Oh, my God, what is the business of a cop with power politics?

    By that statement, the public should know where Abubakar is coming from. He did not do what he did because Adetayo committed any offence, he did it because he thought he was protecting the political interest of his principal. He was afraid that the reports could convey the impression that the president may not be fit to seek reelection in 2019. What is his business with that? His is to protect the president and not to be interested in his eligibility or otherwise of seeking reelection. If the president decides not to run in 2019, will that stop Abubakar from being a policeman? His excessive show of power does not portray him as a good officer. Officers do not behave like that. Abubakar did not think deeply before he expelled Adetayo from the Villa. It seemed he had been waiting for an opportunity to do just that.

    But, he would not get away with it. Adetayo will see his back at the Villa eventually and that is not a curse. Did the late Obua not expel Musa from the Villa? Is Musa not back at the Villa today? So shall Adetayo return. It is heartening to see the president’s media aides  weighing into the matter and promising an amicable resolution of the case. ‘’We were not consulted in the media office by the CSO before he expelled The PUNCH reporter. President Buhari is committed to press freedom. An amicable solution would be found to The PUNCH reporter’s matter. President Buhari does not intend to muzzle the media in anyway’’, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity Femi Adesina wrote on his Twitter handle. The earlier the matter is resolved the better so that these security men can be put in their place.

     

    Se-ru-ba-won

    The name conjures fear. It is the Yoruba word for creating fear in people. This was the nickname of former Osun State Governor Isiaka Adetunji Adeleke, who died on Sunday. Since his death, Ede, his hometown, has known no peace because of his supporters’ belief that he was poisoned. The late Adeleke was a charismatic politician; a grassroots person, who felt at home with the mighty and the low. The hoi polloi loved him because he was close to them. He did not consider it beneath him to wine and dine with them. He always touched base with them. At the naming of their children, he was there; at their freedom, he was there; at their graduation, he was there; at their housewarming, he was there. You name the event, he was always there to tell his people that he was for them and they for him. His death has shown how popular he was with the people. His death sparked violence because his people found it hard to believe that Serubawon could die just like that hours  after some of them interacted with him at a party on Saturday. What killed Adeleke? Did he die of natural cause? Or was he poisoned as alleged by his supporters? To lay the matter to rest, the Osun State Government and the Adeleke family should make public his autopsy report. My heart goes out to his family. May he find rest in the Lord’s bosom.

  • The good cop who lost it

    The good cop who lost it

    Many Rivers State policemen are unlikely to forget February 11,2014 . That was the day they gathered at the expansive Command Headquarters in Port Harcourt to “pull out”   a chief some of them hailed as a damn good officer and a kind man.

    In the city, there was joy that the curtain had been drawn on an era of anxiety and confusion, when the line between policing and politicking became indecipherable.

    It was a mixed farewell indeed for Mbu Joseph Mbu, the former Commissioner of Police whose tenure had the distinction of being the most controversial ever in the history of the state.

    A master of drama, he can never be caught being sober. He does not pretend to be imbued with the reflective ability of a philosopher. Nor is he capable of expounding a progressive vision of a leader who knows the delicate nature of his job – in the eyes of many who were confronted with the ambivalence of an officer loved by his men and despised by many of those he was paid to protect.

    Presumptive and cocky, he huffs and puffs like an elephant in the jungle. He is boisterous and easily excited. Not for him the finesse and refinement of an officer who is proud of his epaulettes. He is proud and excessively discourteous, always willing to pick up a quarrel, ignite a fight and slug it out like a motor park tout. Cantankerous.

    But all that have changed – courtesy of last week’s tremor that hit the police, a momentous event that passed quietly like an orphan’s birthday, except for the whimpering of some officers who alleged that they were unfairly treated. A generation of Assistant Inspectors-General of Police – 21 in all – got the push to pave the way for Acting Inspector-General  Ibrahim Idris’ ascension to the seat.

    Among them is Mbu – I am sure you remember him – who long  after dropping the rank of Commissioner of Police for Assistant Inspector-General was still widely described with his old beat as former Rivers State Commissioner of Police.

    Deliberate inexactitude? Mischief? It is neither here nor there. But Mbu’s tour of duty in Rivers State will take a long while to forget, especially by those who were at the receiving end of his belligerence.

    He got caught up in – some insisted that he actually joined willingly to feather his own nest – the bitter struggle for power between the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the ruling party at the centre. Mbu would not tolerate any opposition to the PDP –led Federal Government, which was desperate to “capture” the state. When the Save Rivers Movement, a group backing then Governor Rotimi Amaechi organised a rally, Mbu sent his men to smash the gathering. When the protesters stood their ground, his men fired rubber bullets at them. Many were injured. Among them was Senator Magnus Abe, who was flown to Britain for treatment.

    When eight lawmakers in a 32-man House of Assembly launched a seditious attempt to impeach Amaechi, their hands were strengthened by the police. A fight broke out. Heads were smashed. By the time it was all over, those who failed in their nefarious bid to torpedo the governor became the complainant as the police grabbed those who foiled the bid.

    In no time, the political crisis in Rivers State dissolved into a battle over Mbu’s future. Amaechi and his sympathisers insisted that he must go. The then aspirant and now Governor Nyesom Wike led the touch-not-Mbu crowd. Rallies jammed rallies. Cudgel-for-cudgel, both sides battled to outdo each other.  The Senate deliberated on the matter and set up a committee that visited Rivers State. Mbu told them that he was just doing his job professionally.

    Then fate supervened. The tension could not be contained any longer. Mbu was moved to Abuja. He, however, remained cloaked in controversy. The leopard won’t just change its spots. He banned public rallies and dared the Bring BackOurGirls protesters campaigning for the rescue of the Chibok girls to march on the Presidential Villa. “My death threat worked,” he said gleefully after a blistering criticism of his threat.

    Nor were reporters spared of his maniacal tendencies. He invited an AIT reporter, Amaechi Anakwe (no relation of the Minister of Transportation), for describing him as “controversial”. The poor fellow was detained and charged to court even as many felt he was charitable to have described Mbu as “controversial”. He was that and more – going by his conduct – they insisted.

    As the last general elections drew close, the police – apparently in connivance with the Dr Goodluck Jonathan Villa – moved some officers round. Mbu was posted to Zone II, comprising Lagos and Ogun states. Reason: the PDP was eager to add Lagos to its shelf of trophies in an ambitious move to strengthen its vacuous claim to being Africa’s biggest party, as if size – not sense is all that matters.

    On arrival at his new posting, Mbu served notice that an interesting season was on the way. He said if a policeman was killed in the line of duty, he would ensure that 20 persons got killed in vengeance.

    Apparently in love with obfuscation, Mbu mixed up his concept of discipline with his belief in the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye. He told Ogun State Command officers: “If you love this job, the number one commandment is discipline. That’s why I said ‘don’t touch my policeman’. If you shoot my policeman, I will shoot 20 of you. I will shoot a hundred of you.”

    He preached hatred and spiced it up with violence. His messages were blood curdling . “Anybody who fires you, fire back in self-defence,” Mbu told his men, adding: “But don’t fire first.”

    Mbu later claimed to have been misquoted. He said he was simply advising his men not to be cowardly but to be guided by the Force Order 28 on the use of firearms. So much for honesty and integrity.

    To many, Mbu was vaulted onto that hubristic pedestal by sheer ambition. He would have loved to become the Inspector-General of Police. In that grim encounter with the Ogun State Command officers, he spoke of “being in a critical period, a period that this (sic) all our ranks are now shaky; either you’re promoted or you retain it or you’re demoted or you’re dismissed.” “So, it’s left for you to choose which one is better for you. For me, I want to maintain my rank and I want my rank to be increased (sic). I want to go up and be at the top.”

    Poor man. Now he must have realised the futility of a blind ambition, pursued blindly and lost blindly; never to be attained. What manner of IGP would Mbu have been?

    Mbu’s transfer to Abuja did not soften his stand on Amaechi. He told the man who took over from him at the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) of how he, a lion, tamed the leopard of Port Harcourt. In his usually obfuscatory manner, he said: “I advise you to carry the senior officers along in your administration.” But that was not his thought as he went on to say: “It is only a lion that can tame a leopard. I tamed the leopard in Port Harcourt. Each time he remembers my face, he would remember I tamed him.”

    To Amaechi, the innuendo was as clear as daylight. Not one to run away from a fight, Amaechi replied Mbu, calling him “a puppet who completely lacks the steel and strength of a character of a lion, and is rather a shameless, corrupt puppet and toothless attack dog of a woman”. No prize for guessing who the woman puppeteer was, dear reader.

    The likes of Mbu have given room to the police being the subject of deriding jokes, such as this that once appeared on this page:   “In an effort to determine the top crime fighting agency in Nigeria, the President narrowed the field to three finalists: DSS, Army and Police. The three contenders were given the task of catching a rabbit that was released into the forest. The SSS went in, placing informants all over the place. They questioned all plants and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigation, the DSS concluded that rabbits do not exist. The army went into the forest. After two weeks without a capture, they burnt the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit. They made no apologies. The rabbit deserved it.

    “The police went into the forest. They came out two hours later with a badly beaten hyena. The hyena was yelling: `Okay, okay; I agree! I’m a rabbit! I’m a rabbit!`”

    Mbu should put all behind him and settle down to write his memoirs. Among others, he should try as he has always done to debunk the allegation that he deployed what his admirers described as his remarkable skills of a “grade one officer” in the selfish service of greedy politicians and their pompous wives. How about this for a title: “The good policeman who lost his way.”

  • Cop kills self, two others in Yobe

    A police constable in Yobe State(name withheld) has allegedly shot two of his colleagues dead.

    The incident which took place at the Nangere Police Division in the state was reported to have occurred in the early hours of Friday.

    Eyewitness said the Police Constable shot two other Inspectors at close range following a disagreement on a homicide case that was brought to the station.

    “He shot himself after killing the two other inspectors at the station,” the eyewitness said.

    The Police commissioner in the state Zanna Ibrahim told our correspondent on phone that he was on his way to Nangere to get details of the incident.

    ” I am right now on my way to Nangere to get first hand information of what really happen. I will get back to you on my return to Damaturu.”

    Nangere is 118km from Damaturu, the state capital.

  • A top cop and tales of sleaze

    A top cop and tales of sleaze

    How I wish I were playing the proverbial fly-on-the-wall when President Muhammadu Buhari received a delegation from the Ministry of Police Affairs and the Police Service Commission  the other day in Abuja and warned his visitors that it was “totally unacceptable” for applicants to pay bribes, as was the case in the past, before being recruited.

    Media reports have it that the President told his visitors that the police board must be above board and eschew every form of extortion or underhand dealing in the coming recruitment of 10,000 officers.

    I would have scanned every muscle on the face of Mike Okiro, the chairman of the Police  Service Commission, as Buhari delivered that poignant charge.  For it was under Okiro’s watch as inspector-general of police that a recruitment scandal broke.

    Taking unconscionable advantage of desperate job-seekers, the police charged a fee of N2,000 per applicant, presumably for handling and processing.  To be fair to the police, it has to be stated that other government ministries, departments and agencies were also charging application fees.

    The practice was illegal through and through and the police, more than any other institution, should have known that.  But that was not the most troubling aspect of the matter.

    The police authorities said N1.6billion from the N2 billion realised from the application fee had gone into paying the consultancy fees to an IT company identified only as Bharmos Ventures Nigeria Limited, widely believed to be a front. The names and identities of its owners were never disclosed.

    Nor was this again the most troubling aspect of it all.

    The most troubling aspect, as I saw it, was that in this digital age, the Nigeria Police Force lacked the capacity or the will to develop a computer programme to handle a procedure as elementary as recruitment, and instead outsourced the task, at a price that should have gone into making life better for its ill-paid, ill-clad and ill-housed personnel.

    Nigerians have long been conditioned to expect nothing but the worst from their rulers and leaders. Hence, on any given day, damning allegations of sleaze proliferate about them even in the more responsible newspapers.  In the less discriminating newspapers and the misnamed social media, the public gets little more than a steady diet of actual sleaze and rumours of sleaze, at the centre of which are the men and the women we have been conditioned to regard as persons of great consequence.

    This may well be the case with Mike Okiro

    Still, few in the attentive audience can have failed to notice what appears to be an affinity between former police Inspector-General Mike Okiro and allegations of sleaze since his days as the top cop to the present, quite apart from his uncanny capacity for multi-tasking long before that term entered popular usage.

    Only such a facility could have explained how Okiro hounded former EFCC chair Nuhu Ribadu out of the anti-corruption agency so as to get him off the back of sleaze grandmaster James Ibori, now serving time in a British jail with his wife and his mistress and his lawyer; how he worked tirelessly to ensure a PDP victory under the most improbable circumstances; how he chased contracts for his pipe-laying company, raked up huge non-performing loans for his many businesses, and how he cranked  out a book on policing in a democratic Nigeria –  all this while holding down a full-time job as a senior police officer.

    For these and other services, Okiro was at his retirement rewarded with an appointment as chair of the Police Service Commission by former President Jonathan Goodluck, a position he holds to this day, and the capacity in which he was received by Buhari and handed a terse admonition.

    Just several days later, that curious affinity between Okiro and allegations of sleaze surfaced again, big-time, and in copious detail.

    Aaron Kaase, an official of Okiro’s Police Service Commission, had filed a petition with the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICRC) linking Okiro to acts most unbecoming, following which ICPC operatives had grilled him and several officials of the Commission in their Abuja offices and thereafter granted him “administrative bail”.

    In the complaint, Kaase asserted that Okiro had obtained N350 million, purportedly for the training of PSC staff due to be deployed to monitor the performance of the police in the 2015 general elections.  Of the prospective trainees, 500 were to be selected from PSC staff in Abuja, 200 from Kano PSC staff, another 200 from PSC Lagos staff, for a total 900.

    Based on Okiro’s projection, the Bureau for Public Procurement (BPE) had duly cleared the project and approved payments to designated contractors in the following amounts:  N95.3 million for training the 500 Abuja participants, N93.5 million for training  the 200 Kano participants and N85 million for training the 200 Lagos participants.

    I must digress again, for the last time.  Why is Lagos, our Lagos, always being short-changed at every point?

    To return to what is now likely to be a significant entry in the annals of official sleaze in Nigeria, actual or rumoured, Kaase stated that the entire staff of the PSC number no more than 400.  It is his contention that Okiro misled the BPE into approving a dodgy disbursement of N275 million out of the N350 million the Commission had obtained from the National Security Adviser.

    How Kaase arrived at his figure for the dodgy disbursement is not clear. But there is no imputation in his deposition, and none in this space, that Okiro personally profited from it.

    It is, however, instructive that, at the end of its investigations, the ICPC directed Okiro to remit the sum of N133 million to the Federal Government, being the difference between the N350 million the PSC obtained from the National Security for training 900 staffers nationwide, and the N217 million it actually expended in training 391 staffers in Abuja.

    The deposition goes personal when Kaase asserts that back in 2013, Okiro obtained N4.6 million for a first-class airline ticket for a trip to the United States that he never made, and that he routinely used fronts to collect allowances from the PSC at various times.

    In what seems to establish a pattern, Kaase charged in his deposition that Okiro collected travel grants for two conferences scheduled for the same time frame in Orlando, Florida, in the United States, and Dublin, in the Irish Republic, but attended only the latter meeting.

    The ICPC’s report does not dispute the fact.  But instead of taking a dim view of it, the Commission recommends that Okiro return the grant for the Florida conference only if the Federal Government rejects his offer to apply it to another conference coming up in October.

    Meanwhile, Kaase has been suspended from his duties in the press and public relations department of the ICPC , allegedly for leaking his deposition to the media.

    Compared with the trillions being casually tossed round in recent and ongoing allegations of Jonathan-era sleaze, the figures Kaase cited in his deposition amount to no more than a pickpocket’s haul on a good day.

    But what counts is the principle, not the sum.  And the principle here is that the chair of the Police Service Commission should live and be seen to live above the merest suspicion of impropriety, financial or otherwise.

    The cumulative evidence suggests powerfully that Okiro has not done so.  If he does not know it, his friends must tell him that his continuing tenure as chair of the Police Service Commission is incompatible with the temper and tenor of these times.

  • Honour for a cop

    It was honour for whom honour is due recently when  the Police Public Relations Officer, Ogun State Command of the Nigeria Police Force(NPF), Prince Olumuyiwa Adejobi was conferred with the Most Outstanding Police Public Relations Officer in Nigeria.

    The Award  his second in recent times was conferred on him on a Sunday at the Sky Pavilion, Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, by Adlack Multi Concept, Abeokuta – based media and entertainment organisation, during its 4th edition of the ACE (Awards Celebrating Excellence) 2014.

    In conferring the award, Mr Kolapo Fadeyi, Secretary, ACE Award, said it was done in recognition of Adejobi’s contribution  to the “development of the nation, his selfless service to humanity, diligence and outstanding pedigree among professional colleagues” especially the manner he deploys public relations to bear on effective crime fighting and prevention as well as bringing quality public goodwill to Police Command in Ogun State.

  • A cop’s advice

    A cop’s advice

    “Don’t try to secure other communities. Just secure your own community and there will be peace everywhere,” said Bayelsa State Commissioner of Police Hilary Opara at a meeting with some communities on how to curb kidnappers.

    Like most states in the Niger Delta, Bayelsa has been battling kidnapping. It became serious recently with the kidnap of a relative of President Goodluck Jonathan.

    I believe there is a lot of sense in the advice of the police chief. If every community can monitor their own area very well, criminally-minded individuals around will be easy preys for the law enforcement agencies to catch. But, if communities look the other way round when their sons and daughters engage in nefarious activities, the world will be the worst for it.

    Law enforcement officers are not magicians. Without the people giving them information, they can never crack any case. They need the cooperation of all. Governments at all levels, be it local, state or federal, must give them all they require to do their work. A situation where they are given operational vehicles but no provisions for maintenance and others will continue to make a mess of our security agencies.

    Kidnapping has not only embarrassed us. It has ridiculed us before the world and the Niger Delta has played a leading role in the kidnap of foreigners and citizens alike for ransom. We must stop it and the best way to go about it is to heed Opara’s advice. Do not cover the bad boys. Expose them so that the law can grab them. They are not spirits. They live among us and we can help make our communities better by revealing the face of the evil doers so that they can be confined to where they truly belong: the dungeon.

  • Widow wants killer cop arrested

    Widow wants killer cop arrested

    The widow of Anthony Obisike, who was killed by a policeman in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, has petitioned the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) and the Police Service Commission.

    The alleged killer cop was a member of the Anti Terrorist Squad.

    The incident occurred in 2012.

    Mrs. Obisike said her husband was allegedly shot by the squad at Etche junction by Eleme flyover in Port Harcourt.

    She said police investigation identified the shooter as one of the policemen in the squad.

    She said: “The officers that rode in the bus include Ocheni Ihiabe, Ogban Kanu, Joseph Udele, Abraham Agande, Daniel Ayuba, Darlington Ukachukwu, Onunghakpo Benson, Uwgwo Uche, Emmanuel Zork, Peter Junior and Atanfut.

    “Since the incident that led to the death of my husband, the police have not arrested the officers accused of the crime. The police authority knows the officers behind the killing but failed to prosecute them.

    “I am presently suffering, with the children my husband left behind.”

    She urged the Inspector- General of Police to order the arrest of those behind the death of my husband and to ensure that justice is done.”

    Police Public Relations Officer Mrs. Angela Agabe said she did not know anything about the petition but promised to find out and get back to our reporter.