The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Police reform

  • Making public-police partnership work

    The Report of the Presidential Committee on Police Reform (April, 2008) clearly articulates the basic parameters for the implementation of Community Policing in Nigeria. It states that, “There is need to adapt community policing to suit Nigeria’s peculiarities. Government should formulate a community policing Policy and Framework for the country, taking into account our cultural and political environment.” Recommendations from M.D. Yusuf’s Presidential Committee on Police Reform in 2008

    We have to look at other parts of the world when we are doing it. Sitting down in Abuja by an IGP and policing the remote parts of the country and being in charge of the welfare of all the policemen across the length and breadth of the country doesn’t seem to be working. Vice President Osinbajo calling for change of architecture of policing in 2017.

    The roll-out of the community policing programme is intended to enhance crime prevention and control, improve intelligence-gathering capabilities of the police and deliver quality and people-oriented policing. Osinbajo 2018.

    The Special Constables will be drawn from members of the community to serve as voluntary community police officers under the coordination of the Nigeria Police Force.”This new drive is in line with the expressed desire and directives of the President, His Excellency, Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR-Inspector-General of Police while announcing approval of Community Policing by President Buhari in April 2019.

    Recently, the Inspector-General of Police spoke at the inauguration of Police Community Relations Committee in Onitsha to urge citizens to participate in strengthening public-police cooperation in the fight against crime. In a manner reminiscent of the tendency of the country’s leaders to oversimplify problems, the IG called for building of more “recreation rooms, inspectors’ mess and canteens in the various police divisions, to encourage members of the public to interact with the police for greater tomorrow.” He also hyperbolically claimed that the public-police partnership is capable of helping Nigeria attain its vision of joining the 20 world’s biggest economies by 2020, claiming that there can be no meaningful socio-economic development without internal security, domestic peace, law and order.” All these claims by the IG would have been believable if the country’s police system has been designed to engender the flourishing of community policing.

    If there is to be a viable interaction between police and community, there must be a community to which the police and citizens belong. Is there such a community in Nigeria? From my extensive travels throughout the length and breadth of Nigeria, I have noticed, since the disappearance of local government policing, cases of alienation between the police and the community the former is paid to protect from crime. For example, I have met in Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri, and Sokoto police men and women who do not speak Hausa. They communicate with the members of the community they serve in pidgin, believing that listeners who do not understand English should understand Pidgin.

    The situation is the same in other parts of Nigeria. In the Yoruba region, many of the police in the states are non-Yoruba. They do not speak Yoruba and apparently do not have any interest in learning the language of the community they protect, in the same way that Yoruba policemen and women in Sokoto or Onitsha do not feel compelled to learn and speak Hausa or Igbo. I had an experience between Ibadan and Ife last year. I was stopped at the police check-point between Gbongan junction and Ipetumodu junction. There was a long queue of vehicles, mostly passenger buses and a crowd of police officers ‘interrogating drivers of the buses and other vehicles. I stopped and asked the officer that stopped me in Yoruba: “Se ko si ewu o?” (Hope there is no trouble?) The officer flared up and shouted back: “I have nothing to do with the goats in the buses being checked by my colleagues.” Without bothering to find out the native tongue of the officer, I knew that he had little knowledge of ewu  ( trouble or danger), which he confused with ewure (goat). I laughed and shook my head.

    “Oga, what are you shaking your head about,” the officer fired back. I told him I was shaking my head at Nigeria that posted a police officer to a community whose language the officer does not understand. “Why is that important Oga, this is Nigeria, and we are all Nigerians,” he retorted. I then asked him if my driver could park properly to allow for free flow of traffic so that we could talk about Nigeria. He was not interested in any street-side seminar. He waved me off and quickly stopped the car behind me. I still managed to tell him that his employer was endangering his life needlessly by posting him to a community whose cultural nuances he could not grasp because of language deficiency. He thanked me and waved me off in his rush to get to his next customer.

    This police officer on Ife Road is typical. Most men and women in the Nigeria Police (which the trustees of the system still prefer to call Nigeria Police Force) do not have any understanding of the culture they are paid to protect from crime. They operate on borrowed language and on the assumption that Nigeria is an English or Pidgin-speaking country. With close to 40% illiteracy in Nigeria, for the government to assume that everybody can communicate properly in English is erroneous. Even in the best of educational climes, citizens with primary school leaving certificates in Nigeria still do not have adequate social survival skills in English and this group includes most of the police men and women. But the guardians of the system have always known this, but this is the only kind of police system that can truly function as a Police Force-for suppressing indigenous people(s).

    Now, fifty years after political independence, as in colonial days, the police system in Nigeria is to enforce law and order, the same way that UN forces keep law and order in countries at war. Just as the soldiers sent to the Congo or Sudan do not have to speak any of the local languages in these places in order to perform their duty of keeping law and order, so are the men and women sent as police officers to various ethnic communities in Nigeria not expected to understand the people they are charged to protect. All they are charged to do is to keep law and order: stop, search, flog, or prosecute for any violations. I forget to add that in Nigeria, the police may keep law and order without taking any of these steps if the victim is willing to pay for a waiver.

    The search by the IG for a positive interaction between the police and the community must be well intentioned. But good intention may not be good enough. There is a need for a good structure that can sustain productive public or community-police relations. That structure may not exist if the police system is not changed to reflect the country’s reality.

    Now that President Mohammadu Buhari has approved the use of Community Policing, and the Inspector-General is also enthusiastic about this approval, the public eagerly awaits the Policy on Community Police in relation to the recommendation of the Presidential Committee on Reform of the Police in 2008: “There is the need to adapt community policing to suit Nigeria’s peculiarities. Government should formulate a community policing policy and framework for the country, taking into account our cultural and political environment.”

    Apart from paragraphs in italics, the body of this article was first published in this newspaper about one year ago.

  • Okorocha, Anyaoku, Ekweremadu seek police reform

    •My achievements, by IG Idris

    IMO State Governor Rochas Okorocha, former Commonwealth Secretary General Emeka Anyaoku, Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremmadu and other stakeholders in the Southeast have called for a reform in the management of the Police to cope with security challenges.

    The Imo governor particularly urged the police to engage in crime prevention rather than combating.

    Okorocha, in his speech at the Southeast Security Summit organised by the Inspector General Ibrahim Idris, noted that one of the major problems bedeviling the Force was indiscriminate promotions that did not take into cognisance of qualifications and competences.

    According to him, “this promotion by quota has not helped the Police, a situation where a police officer is promoted based on his region of origin instead of his capabilities cannot inspire commitment and hard-working.”

    Ekweremadu, who was represented by Senator Andy Uba, expressed concerns over the proliferation of small arms, saying over 60 per cent of arms manufactured in the country emanated from the Southeast zone.

    He urged the police to formulate tangible response to security challenges from the summit.

    Anyaoku said the security challenges could be defeated if patriotic actions were taken.

    Anyaoku, who was represented by the Chairman of Imo State Council of Traditional Rulers, Eze Samuel Ohiri, advocated for strong synergy among security agencies.

    President-General of Ohaneze Ndigbo Nnia Nwodo flayed the Federal Government for proscribing Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) as a terrorist organisation when it didn’t kill anybody.

    Nwodo said the Fulani herdsmen had unleashed enough mayhem on the people that was justifiable to proscribe them as a terrorist organisation.

    Idris, in his speech, said President Muhammadu Buhari had ordered him to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators of killings in Jos, Plateau State .He said: “The recent killings in Jos, Plateau State, where over 200 persons were said to have been killed, is a sad commentary in the history of our nation.”

    According to Idris, “myself in company of the President and the Minister of Interior have visited Plateau State and the President was categorical that the perpetrators of this dastardly act will be brought to book.

    “In line with the directive of Mr. President, the police have launched a high-powered investigation into the incident and I can with confidence inform you that no stone will be left unturned in getting to the root of the killings.”

    He said despite funding challenges confronting the police, under his watch, “the police had been effective and combated crimes, especially kidnappings and armed robberies”.

    He said community policing was crucial in tackling effectively the security challenges.

     

     

     

     

  • Towards police reform

    Towards police reform

    Citizens’ anger with SARS can be cited as one of many reasons to illustrate that current policing in the country is not working

    There is no way we can continue with the way we are going with policing now. . . For us to continue this old way of policing our country, I don’t think it can work and it is not working. We have to look at other parts of the world, how they are doing it
    -Vice President Yemi Osinbajo
    Community policing which demands effective police-public partnership and trust in crime prevention is the best form of policing…. Even among police personnel themselves, a research carried out in 14 states discovered that if community police strategy is adopted, it could assist to eradicate most of the challenges attributed to the traditional reactive police culture…. There is no debate about the efficacy of community policing model of internal security management
    -Solomon Arase, former IGP.

    The police force in Nigeria is back under citizens’ radar after several years of demands for decentralisation of policing in the country and mounting pontifications from various sections of the polity on the danger of decentralisation of the police to national unity. Theorists of central police as the only way to maintain public order in a federal system continue to pontificate that abuse of police power in states is bound to damage the nation’s unity. Recent cries about police brutality that is now represented by #EndSARS campaign is not exactly about which level of government should be saddled with day-to-day law enforcement, it is about the philosophy of policing as a pre-condition to what type of police system the country needs to stay safe and united. Relatedly, ex-IGP Arase’s call for police reform (though not related to #EndSARS initiative) also interrogates the vision that undergirds maintenance of public order in a postcolonial multinational federation.

    Those calling for an end to SARS base their view on incidence of brutality of this subunit of the Nigeria Police Force, especially the cruelty to humanity of suspects referred to this unit and the corruption that citizens fear to be evident in the special anti-robbery unit. It is intriguing that the police authority has moved faster than usual on reorganisation of the troubled police division. Whether the IGP has always known about the problems of SARS is the common question from citizens to the speed of response on immediate reorganisation of SARS. With the widespread complaints about various branches of SARS across the country, the normal thing to do is not to call for re-organisation before a public enquiry. Undue haste about re-organisation of SARS can give citizens the impression that there is something to cover up on this matter. What is good for citizens and the police force is for the public to know why a special anti-robbery squad should do anything to make citizens perceive it as a laboratory for criminality and human rights abuse.

    The timing of Mr. Arase’s advice on the need to develop and debate a national policy on policing may draw criticisms from those asking why would Arase be calling for a national policy long after he himself had missed opportunities to provide leadership for such initiative. What is more important is not the behaviour of our people in relation to the size or volume of power available to them while in office. If given the opportunity, ex-President Mugabe would be glad to tell the people of Zimbabwe new ways or styles of governing the country. Hindsight is always 20-20, more so among people used to power, particularly in post-colonial Africa. Ex-IGP Arase could have chosen to play the role of a sycophant for the rest of his life, seeing everything that the person in power does as exemplary. It is salutary that somebody who has once served as leader of the country’s police force has chosen to identify with citizens who believe that policing “is not working as it is,” to borrow the phrase from the Vice President.

    Citizens’ anger with SARS can be cited as one of many reasons to illustrate that current policing in the country is not working. But SARS just happens to be the scapegoat at this time, simply because some courageous citizens have chosen to express their anger about unwholesome behaviour of staff of the anti-robbery unit. It is not an exaggeration to say that just about every unit of the force does the wrong thing in its attempt to keep public order. This column had observed in the past that the police force has a flair for acting in manners reminiscent of a colonial police force, a force established as an alien group to repress citizens under the guise of maintaining order.

    Those who use the country’s inter-state highways should not be new to extreme forms of police lawlessness and lack of respect for citizens. Many of the police men on the highways that stop motorists to ask all manners of question do not have name tags. If you asked the average police man on a highway beat for his name tag, you are going to experience insults and terrorisation. I asked one three policemen recently between Ile-fe and Ifetedo for name tag only to be pulled to the curb to produce receipt for a ten-year old washer that caught his eyes at the back of the vehicle. Customs men between Ibadan and Ife (around Asejire) at least 100 miles from any air or sea port even take over citizens’ cars and drive them to ATM to withdraw money for them for having imported cars that the customs officers consider undervalued. It does not matter that such cars have been duly registered and have been using Nigerian roads for over five years.

    Worse still, I was pulled aside by two policemen without name tags and in slippers and T-shirts with no identification. Asking the two about their name tags or any form of identity was met by resistance: “We are a special anti-robbery police and are not supposed to have name tags or identity cards.” I was made to learn a lesson; I was delayed for failing to produce the papers given to me at the Customs when I imported the 2005 SUV with registration materials in my name and a driving licence to match. I am sure every Nigerian has his or her own story of oppression by the police, all in the name of “we are doing our duty to keep Nigeria safe.” God save you, if you are asked to open your car for the police to drive you to his station for whatever reasons. In how many democratic countries do police seize cars from citizens for traffic violation or failure to show current documents? Even the director of operations at DSS, Godwin Etang, said recently that armed robbers and cultists had been recruited into the security service and that many security service staff have been apprehended for selling arms assigned to them to criminals. How much more dysfunctional can things get?

    Apart from the assurance given by the vice president about the fast-approaching policy of community police, the National Assembly is also on record to have given a green light to establishment of community police in the country.  However, the recurrent question on many minds is why not have a reform of the entire police architecture? At a time that the country is in the middle of a nation-wide debate on restructuring of its governance architecture, it does not make sense to engage in selective reform of any of the country’s institutions. This is what restructuring is to achieve. From what citizens get from the media, community policing currently in discussion is largely one that is designed in the image of the existing police force, centrally controlled.

    Now that various regions of the country seem preoccupied with discussion of restructuring is a good time for the police force and many other national institutions to hold off on self-reform and allow citizens to negotiate new models of governance. What if the choice of citizens is to borrow the Japanese model of policing? The police in Japan is not answerable to the executive. It is independent of the executive as much as the judiciary is. What if states or regions prefer such model to panel beating of the existing police force?

    A community police that is divorced from states and is answerable only to the existing central police force is not likely to work, as it is also likely to be managed by an institution that is too distant from citizens. Meanwhile, the government can commence fact-finding about SARS through public enquiry that precedes reorganisation of the special unit that has become a major source of worry for citizens. An inquiry into allegations levelled against SARS is good for growing democracy and enriching trust between citizens and sensitive governance institutions. Leaving investigation of SARS in the hands of the same agency that superintends SARS is likely to becloud objectivity.

  • Group supports IGP on Police Reform Bill

    The Police Assistance Committee of Nigeria (PAC) has lent its support to a call by the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, on the National Assembly to pass the Nigeria Police Force Reform Trust Fund Bill stalled since 2008 which, it believes, if passed into law, would bring rapid and comprehensive development into the police force.

    The IG, who spoke at a National Security Summit held in Abuja recently, lamented that due to non-passage of the Police Reform Bill, the Nigeria Police Force had over the years been grappling with fundamental challenges like underfunding, manpower shortfall and lack of retraining of personnel which tend to impede the force’s optimal performance.

    In a statement issued in Lagos after a two-day security workshop held for its state coordinators and exco-members, comprising chief security officers (CSOs) of public and private establishments, the PAC Director-General, Dr Martins John Oni, buttressed the position of the IG that the Nigeria Police Force needed to recruit no fewer than 155,000 additional policemen into the rank and file of the police force to meet the United Nations Standard of one police man to 400 citizens to be able to tackle security challenges in the country.

    The PAC boss also commended the efforts of the IG since the inception of the present administration in June 2016 which had tried to change the public perception of the force while policing the country with integrity and ensuring that the rule of law prevails in all their actions and activities.

    The organization pledged that its members nationwide would continue to assist the police force and other security agencies in the area of information dissemination and intelligence gathering to enhance their operation in the prevention and combating of crime.

     

  • FG targets N1.5trn for police reforms

    FG targets N1.5trn for police reforms

    President Goodluck Jonathan said the Federal Government would spend N1.5 trillion in the next five years to reform the Nigeria Police Force.
    The News Agency of Nigeria reports that Jonathan made this known at a two-day retreat on “Sustaining Nigeria Police Reforms,” in Makurdi on Thursday.
    The event was organised by the Police Service Commission in conjunction with the Benue Government.
    Represented by Senator Bala Mohammed, the Minister of the FCT, Jonathan said government was committed to building the capacity of the police force in the country through ongoing reforms.
    Jonathan said that 60 per cent of the money would be provided by government, while the remaining 40 per cent would come from the private sector, including non-governmental organisations.
    He assured that the Federal Government was committed to equipping the police for enhanced performance.
    The president urged the commission to build a police force that was impeccable and committed to ensuring the security of all Nigerians.
    He said the Federal Government had accepted the recommendations of Governor Peter Obi’s committee on the police and would soon issue a white paper on it.
    He advised participants at the retreat to contribute meaningfully to the topics, noting that such recommendations might help the government to tackle rising cases of insurgency in the country.
    Benue State Governor, Gabriel Suswam, in his remark, said the police had to imbibe the discipline of being accountable to the elected representatives of the people.
    Suswam said that by being accountable, the police would consult widely with the people through their representatives to reflect their views on police reforms.
    The governor said reforms that never reflected the views of the people would be disregarded.
    He called on the police to redouble their efforts in providing security to the people, especially as the country moves closer to elections.
    Suswam condemned agitations for state police, pointing out that the country is not ripe enough to have state police.