Tag: Mohammed abubakar

THE Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar, has created a hobgoblin out of the clamour for state police. Marking his second year in office, Mr Abubakar strongly declaimed upon the subject of state police without offering a single tangible opinion in support of the campaign to fundamentally restructure the country’s unitary form of security. Barometer was not present when the IGP gave an interview to the police in-house magazine, Chief Detective, wherein he offered the censorious, one-sided argument that Nigeria was not mature enough for state policing. But it is safe to say that he made his points perhaps with the customary sang-froid that has become his trademark.

It is now clear that the IGP is unalterably opposed to state police. He thinks it could undermine the peace, stability and even unity of the country. But he is merely preying on our fears, absolutely unmindful of the damage unitary policing has caused such a huge, culturally variegated and religiously diverse country. He premised his opposition on this strange dubiety: “We are not yet ripe for state police. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be state police; we are not yet ripe for it. I’ll cite several examples. Check countries which are operating the state police. How many years of independence? Take Britain, take the United States, and take any European country that you can call. We are talking of 2,000 years in the United States. How old are we? Do they have the challenges we have? Do they have the issue of where you come from? Do they have the challenges of ‘I was born in Lagos, but I’m not a Lagosian?’ Do they have the religious crises that we have? I’m a Muslim, you’re a Christian? Do they have the level of tribal differences in the states that I’m Ijaw, you’re Itsekiri, you’re Igbo, or you’re Eka-Igbo?”

This writer has been a solid supporter of Mr Abubakar. But he is appalled by the airiness with which he made his argument. The US is of course not 2000 years old, and perhaps the newspapers which quoted him made a typographical error. However, one of the main problems with Nigeria, whether in terms of safety and security, or even politically, is our inability to take into cognisance our differences as a factor in designing structures and solutions for our peaceful and progressive cohabitation. Nigeria does not have to have similar challenges with a country or group of countries before it applies the same successful methods. We can apply different or same strategies like any other country irrespective of similarities or differences in challenges.

Mr Abubakar gives the impression, for instance, that on a hypothetical tomorrow, the country could evolve to such a level that a person’s ethnic background would be irrelevant in his political calculations. State policing, he insinuated, would have to wait for that glorious morning. But any cursory ethnological study of the countries of his example would reveal that Nigeria could never hope to be like the US in its founding, nor hope to adapt more than the principles and values that have shaped that country’s existence, such as justice and fairness. Mr Abubakar virtually gives the impression, in spite of tons of facts to the contrary, that the Nigeria Police Force is a veritable instrument of Nigerian unity. He exaggerates very profoundly, as the extra-judicial murder of Boko Haram leader, Mohammed Yusuf, shows, and as the anomie fuelled by the police in Rivers also illustrates to our collective dismay.

There are indeed many who would argue that had the leadership of the police over the years summoned the character needed to police intelligently along fair and just lines, the security problems assailing us, not to talk of the campaigns against unitary policing, would not be as strident as they have become. Mr Abubakar’s views are doubtless cogent, firm and unambiguous, even beguiling, but they are not quite as informed as his remarkable conviction indicates. In fact, if anything, they are dangerously and retrogressively improper.