As I sat on a plastic chair in the charge room of this police station, a small framed white signboard with green letterings hanging on a wall caught my attention. This won’t be the first time I would be seeing this inscription, I might have seen it over a thousand times in various police formations across the country. At the States’ Command Headquarters, the signs are much more prominent. At the Lagos Command Headquarters for instance, it is in a “40 sheet” bill board outside the gate.
On this particular day, perhaps out of boredom while waiting for a policeman in charge of a matter I was interested in, I read this particular one over and over again. Three of the lines are particularly curious: Bail is free, the Nigeria police is not a debt recovery agent and all forms of extortion by policemen are misconduct.
In the close to an hour that I sat there, I subconsciously turned these statements over and over in my brain and concluded that the direct opposite is the case in practice. The focus of this piece is on the second proclamation above, “The police is not a debt recovery agent”. This is a huge fallacy. It is apposite to state without fear of contradiction that over 90% of cases before the police at all levels of criminal investigation from the police post, division, area command, state and zonal to the force headquarters, including various investigation departments within the formations-DCB, Area Crime, Surveillance, X-squad, SIB, GI, SCIB, FIIB, FCID, FSARS, name it, are all involved in pure civil contractual matters involving money.
This seems now to be the most lucrative aspect of police investigative work. As a short cut to recovery of debts, shrewd policemen and lawyers contrive various methods of crafting criminal complaints or petitions to the various police authorities by creating a criminal element, such as threat to life or obtaining under false pretence.
Over a year ago, I have had to intervene in a matter at the Lagos Command headquarters involving two cousins. One lent some money from the other to do business which did not go according to projection leading to delay in repayment obligation. The petition to the commissioner of police was on threat to life. The matter was concluded upon undertaking on instalment basis.
In a recent matter also at the State Intelligence Bureau at the headquarters, a man who deposited money as rent for a building under construction had to resort to the police to recover his money due to delay in completing the works vide a petition for obtaining under false pretence against the builder. He was arrested, his car impounded, granted bail upon paying of the money and his car released upon paying the balance. Granted that most cases of obtaining under false pretence are grounded in purely civil transactions, the police must be circumspect in intervening in such matters to distinguish between civil breach of contract and criminal intentions to defraud. The lucrative aspect or appeal in police involvement in these matters is the 10% on recovered sum that comes to the police.
The police is not the only security agency involved in this practice; the Special Fraud Unit (SFU), EFCC, are specialists in debt recovery with similar modus. How society degenerated to this point is obvious. People prefer the short cut instead of the tortuous civil litigation process. Also worthy of note is the reprobate attitude of Nigerians. People are becoming more and more unfaithful to moral obligations flowing from simple understandings.
In a recent case that went as far as the Supreme Court, the apex court took a swipe at the police and other security agencies who abandon their core statutory mandate to engage in debt recovery and other civil matters.
This is judicial indictment on the security agencies who have allowed the attraction of the incentive of 10% revenue to derail their undertakings. The prohibition of this practice has statutory force. The next question is how do the heads of these agencies who receive complaints/petitions from the public ‘carefully scrutinise petitions’ before approval for investigations?
To address this challenge, it is recommended that zonal commanders, commissioners of state commands, area commanders and DPOs should create offices of special assistants on legal matters distinct from the state or zonal departments. Lawyers who are non serving police officers should be recruited in such offices and exclusively saddled with the responsibility of scrutinising petitions and recommending such as are deserving of further investigation. It is recommended that a state command engages between five and six, depending on the need; zonal commands, four, area commands, two and divisions, one reporting directly to the heads of such formations.
It is strongly believed that if this recommendation is implemented, these excesses will be curtailed and significantly reduce the plethora of suits against the police and other security agencies for fundamental right enforcement flooding the various courts presently and reassure the citizenry of the integrity of these organisations.
Legal Practitioner & Director,
Centre for Civil & Environmental Right Advocacy, Lagos.