This has got to be the worst time to be a police officer in Nigeria.
Not that there was ever a best time or even a good time for that matter, for members of the force have always been poorly trained, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-equipped, ill-used, and poorly paid into the bargain. Four months after television pictures of the hovels in which they are trained and housed were beamed to a horrified national audience, the conditions remain unchanged.
In the field, they lack the communication gear and the mobility that may spell the difference not merely between operational success and failure, but even more crucially between life and death for the officers themselves and those they are trying to protect.
It has long been a standard joke that when beleaguered citizens finally reach the nearest police station with frantic calls that their homes are under attack by armed robbers. the desk officer asks calmly whether the caller can send a vehicle down to convey police team to the scene.
Sometimes, you even have to supply the stationery for filing a complaint at the police station.
When it comes to firepower, the police are no match for the hoodlums they are supposed to rein in. I am told that there is a location near FESTAC Town where stolen luxury cars are parked until they can be ferried across the border to be sold off. Geo-positioning technology has traced many a stolen vehicle to that site. But it is so heavily protected by guards packing the most lethal munitions that it is for all practical purposes a no-go area, even for the fearsome mobile police.
Colossal sums of money raised in the name of the police and purportedly for the well-being of its officers end up in private pockets, and the police cannot even vigorously prosecute the arch-swindler behind the scheme. Their pension funds are embezzled with impunity by the very people who are supposed to keep them in safe and profitable custody.
As things stand, Nigeria must be the only country where you can swindle the police and suffer no consequences.
But that is not the worst part. The worst part is that wearing the uniform of the Nigeria police gets more fraught with each passing day.
In what seemed to signal a resumption of the insurgency in the oil-producing delta, the police have been prime targets and casualties. In one incident scarcely two months ago, 12 police officers on patrol – I used the term loosely, in the American sense, to get round the sexism inherent in “policemen” and “policewomen” – were ambushed, dispossessed of their weapons, killed, stripped of their uniforms, and buried in shallow graves.
Exactly a week ago, Boko Haram militants attacked Bama, in Borno State, setting alight the police station and the prison. They also attacked the military barracks. By the time they had competed their grisly errand, 55 persons lay dead, among them 22 police officers and 14 prison officials.
The next day, in Elakyo, near Lafia, the Nasarawa State capital, operatives of a little-known cult identified as Ombatse ambushed a contingent of security officials on a mission to arrest their leader. Early reports said as many as 90 members of the team had been killed. At this writing, some 30 police officers have been certified dead; their remains were mutilated in an orgy of bestiality, and then burned. The cultists are said to be holding roughly the same number of police officers hostage in a secret location.
Every adult Nigerian probably has his or her own “police story”. More often than not, it is a story of shakedowns, extortion, arbitrariness, of grovelling ingratiation before those they perceive as persons of substance, and of more than occasional casual resort to deadly violence against unarmed civilians.
But in an exact sense, our police officers are victims thrice over.
They are victims of the successive governments since independence that have assigned them the task of maintaining law and order without providing the necessary tools to carry it out, without training them adequately, without providing decent housing, without paying them reasonable wages, and without guaranteeing that at the end of their service, they will be paid their entitlements without fuss.
They are victims of the corruption that flows from the very top and permeates every layer of the police establishment.
And yet, whenever there is talk of “reorganising” the police, the government falls back on a long line of police chiefs who contributed in no small way to its underdevelopment, the very people believed to have diverted official resources to serve private ends, or who conveniently looked elsewhere as the resources were being diverted.
Tafa Balogun grew obscenely rich even as police officers had to pay bribes to get their official uniforms. Senior police chiefs were part and parcel of the so-called Police Equipment Fund that was a cover for pillage of public resources and private donations on a scale almost beyond belief. They were silent, funereally silent, while the Police Pension Fund was being systematically looted.
While serving as full-time Inspector-General of Police, Mike Okiro reportedly ran on the side a construction company that routinely took loans from the banks and put in bids for government contracts. If he had invested more time and attention in projects designed to uplift the police force than he did in scheming with James Ibori, the career thief and former Delta State governor now serving time in a London prison, to hound Nuhu Ribadu out of the EFCC and the police and subsequently into exile, the establishment he once headed would probably not be in its present parlous state.
And yet, Okiro is the person the Jonathan Administration has tapped to head the Police Service Commission, in the undistinguished company of persons re-appointed to the board despite their record of culpable negligence during their previous tour.
These, surely, cannot be agents of the transformation Dr Jonathan claims to be promoting.
The police are also victims, finally, of a society that cares little for law and even less for order; a society wedded to the belief that you can always bribe or buy your way out of every infraction of the law.
Meanwhile, the Minister of Police Affairs, Caleb Olubolade, has not summoned the decency to hand in his resignation, nor President Jonathan the will to sack him.
In the end, each society gets the kind of police force it deserves. We will never get the perfect society, and we will never get the perfect police force. But unless and until our police officers are substantially empowered to operate as citizens with a stake in the scheme of things rather than as alienated victims of a pernicious system, their woes will continue, and so will the nation’s.
