In the matter of Femi Owolabi, the journalist cruelly and needlessly tortured by policemen of the State Department of Criminal Investigations (SDCI), Yaba, The Punch has brought to the fore again the crisis bedeviling law enforcement in Nigeria. Mr Owolabi in company with about 30 club goers in Festac, Lagos had been arrested at random by policemen and subjected to degrading treatment. Though he eventually regained his freedom, the publication of the story prompted the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Solomon Arase, to order the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Fatai Owoseni, to conduct an investigation into the matter. On a weekly and sometimes daily basis, stories of cruel and degrading treatment inflicted on citizens by policemen, not to talk of extra-judicial killings, are published. These stories and the occasional punishment meted out to errant policemen have not curbed the malady. The malady, and the bad image it gives to Nigeria, will not be addressed until something deeply structural and fundamental has been done about policing in Nigeria.
The publication raises a few disturbing facts about the state of policing. Of the about 30 people Mr Owolabi reported were randomly arrested and tortured, the police claimed not to have the names of about 16 of them, including the chief complainant. So, how are police stations run? Unprofessionally, whimsically, without records, or with poor records? Has discipline so completely broken down in police stations, and has the camaraderie between officers and men so obfuscated the differences in rank that no one is really accountable to anyone? If the investigations ordered by the IGP are thorough, Mr Owoseni should be able to unearth exactly what happened to those arrested, how many were involved, and in particular, how Mr Owolabi’s name got missing from the list. The IGP will not come down to Lagos to do Mr Owoseni’s job for him. If he is thorough, Nigerians may begin to get clues as to how some missing persons supposedly arrested by the police disappear completely.
Second, and very crucially, given this story and many others like it, it appears the training of policemen is horribly defective. It is time to examine the curriculum of police training schools, and the quality and competence of the trainers. Do they have a proper understanding of the concept of citizenship? That concept may be warped in the United States because of racism; in Nigeria it is indefensible for policemen to engage in the barbarous practice of instinctive torture and brutality. Just like soldiers who in Lagos drive on BRT lanes, policemen give the impression they are above the law, and can lie expertly to cover their atrocities. They all give the impression that there is both no law in the country and, worse, no government. These horrifying practices are not difficult to curb if there is discipline and proper understanding of the concept of citizenship at the police, military and federal government levels. As a former Burkinabe leader, Thomas Sankara, once said, a soldier (in this case, a policeman) without political education is a potential criminal.
Both the IGP and the Lagos police commissioner have admittedly laboured to attend to the malfeasances of some of their incorrigible men, and many such offending policemen have been shown the way out of the force. But the better option is to reduce these malfeasances to the barest minimum. So far, little is being done beyond punishing those who can’t lie their way through their crimes or cover their atrocious tracks. If Mr Arase, himself a lawyer, hopes to leave a befitting legacy, if he does not wish to be undermined by errant policemen and officers, he must conduct a thorough shake-up of police operational guidelines. It will not be easy, for the police have ossified over the years as they sank deeper into impunity and undisciplined behaviour.
As a long-standing and qualified police officer, Mr Arase will recall that many times in the past, Amnesty International, the global human rights watchdog, had reported unhealthy practices in the Nigeria Police, chief of which were the routine and almost absent-minded use of torture, extra-judicial killings and indiscriminate misuse of detention and deliberate incrimination of suspects. The Nigeria Police story in fact appears to be that of a police establishment run riot. Every time Amnesty came out with a situation report, the police routinely challenged them and resorted to abuse. In their many responses to Amnesty reports, not only were police officers lying to themselves, there is hardly a Nigerian who doubts the damning reports. After all, dozens of cases are reported in the media virtually weekly. In 2009, Boko Haram leader, Mohammed Yusuf, was extra-judicially murdered in police custody, adding fuel to an already bad situation, and accentuating a crisis that has led to the killing of tens of thousands of people and destruction of properties worth billions.
If Mr Arase is not to leave office uncelebrated, he must do substantially well to affect the fortunes and image of the police. The Owolabi case presents him an opportunity to issue fresh guidelines to his officers. He must hold his officers accountable, and in turn his officers must hold their men most scrupulously accountable. The officers must banish the chumminess between them and their men, a relationship sometimes based unscrupulously on pecuniary considerations. It is in fact deeply mortifying that in a police establishment structured into sound and practical reporting layers of Deputy Inspector-General, Assistant Inspector-General, State Commissioner of Police, Area Commander, and Divisional Police Officer, it still needed the intervention of the IGP to tackle the errancy of policemen run amok in its Yaba department.
