Tag: #EndSARS

SOCIAL revolutions are made of this. It often starts with a germ of an idea or a grievance. It often gets started by one person or a handful; then it begins to spread and multiply – not unlike germs –until it infects nigh everyone for good or ill. It then takes a life of its own and grabs the entire society by the scruff, setting it off on a rollercoaster. Again, for good or for ill.

This surmises the activities of the ENDSARS movement in Nigeria in the last one year. Conceived by a young man Segun Awosanya and some colleagues sometime around November 2017 as a social media advocacy, its HashtagENDSARS has taken a life of its own in what seems like an epic fight against a leviathan.

It is an internet campaign against a special branch of the Nigeria police known as the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Like all units of police across the world, SARS is meant to be an elite squad imbued with specialist training, kitted and fitted for the most extreme assignments.

They are the blue-eyed boys of any army or law enforcement agency. The men and women are rigged up for any eventuality – for rapid response in crisis situations, armed robberies, hold-outs and all other task requiring intelligence, grit and nerves.

But Nigeria’s SARS set up 18 years ago has gone bunkers so to speak. It has become a heap of mess, the very opposite of every noble thought and conception that undergirds the establishment of a special crime-bursting team. Well, not unlike everything else in Nigeria, one can wager that the entire police establishment may have forgotten the raison d’etre of SARS.

It has become a dirty, ragtag squad which hardly was kitted with regulation uniform. All they had was worn AK47 rifles. Some would don grimy T-shirts and flip-flops. They looked haggard and hungry and they would litter the streets like dirt. All glory of a special arm of the law had left them. They had morphed into a special branch of impunity and lawlessness. They are hardly trained apparently and it seemed that criminal elements had seized the squad.

All they seem to have upstairs is a brazen inclination to extort the citizenry by intimidation. And with the force of the gun, they commit criminalities in broad daylight even criminals would shy from. Some have wagered that SARS had become a fundraising machine for the force.

So it was that SARs had become a horrific aberration unto the very society it purports to protect, upsetting it, maiming, killing… so it was that if a woman finds her husband with another woman, she could procure SARS to teach the cheating husband a lesson – for a small fee. Just any one who had a small change and who knows where to find SARS could get its services: landlord versus tenant, debtor versus creditor even conductor and passenger, SARS is on hand to meddle and peddle their guns on the cheap.

They would never have nametags on as they are required by law and when they do, they would conceal them. They carry out coroner’s inquest on dead victims without the knowledge of victim’s families. It was outlawry unleashed; a civil terror squad let loose on the citizens.

Then they began to pick on young men and women; the nerds who back their laptops on their back as if they were babies; the millennials who live by their laptops. SARS would accost them and brand them of internets criminals also known as yahoo-yahoo boys. They would not only browse through their system they would seize their laptops and make them pay to have them back.

Soon it became the trend to seize innocent passers-by and make them pay to regain their freedom. They would lead their victims to ATM terminals and at gun-point, make them empty their accounts as some form of ransom. Again, not unlike what armed robbers are wont to do these days. In a number of cases, SARS operatives have shot their unarmed victims to death. These wayward ways, wantonness excessive use of force and brazen impunity gave vent to the campaign to banish SARs outright.

What started as a hashtag on the internet has spun into a spiral of actions and activities. Apart from street protests in Abuja and Lagos, there is a Presidential Panel on SARS Reform which has been travelling across the country on public hearings. There has been a public hearing by the Senate and another public hearing by the National Human Rights Commission.

The Inspector General of Police apparently deafened by the uproar, initiated some reform of his own. He appointed a more senior officer to take charge of the branch. He also ordered that SARS team must be properly kitted in regulation uniform when on duty. The police hierarchy it seems has been forced to embark on all sorts of reforms no matter how perfunctory they may seem.

But because, the police had started out being in denial, it seems they may not be able to do much on their own.

At the beginning of the campaign, the police had branded the activists criminals even in the face of damning atrocities committed by its men. The police have also threatened that there would be an upsurge of crime if the SARS were banished. The police even accused the group of being politically motivated.

But there seems to be no letting up by the HashtagENDSARS group. Leading his group to the National Assembly late last year, Segun Awosanya had told Premium Times that: “The federal SARS has become overpopulated by people who have no regards for human life or dignity of the citizens…their grievous activities have gone for too long and we can no longer hope that the police leadership can effect any change.”

There is indeed some change but then there are still pockets of impunity around us. The campaign marches on, seeking to re-invent our special branch.