In George Orwell’s classic satire, Animal Farm; Napoleon crowned his usurpation of absolute power by deploying the “armed forces” of the dogs, whose allegiance he conscripted and deployed to the service of his impious ends. The Orwellian satirical mimicry of the extravagant falsehood, which communism perpetrates; hiding under revolutionary robes may not be exclusively resident in communism as an ideology or system of government. Since power vs force has been argued by some to be the hidden determinants of human behaviour (Hawkins, 2002), many closet tyrants even in democracies have in history being known to have attempted and even succeeded in personalizing the state security apparatus and either conscripting, or co-opting them to their rape of democratic principles and due process. An eminent example may be Adolf Hitler in Germany.
In political alchemies like this, there is always a conflict between loyalty to freedom and allegiance to parochial insularities represented by the whims of the august tyrant. The tyrant in Machiavellian style traditionally promulgates competing loyalties, and nourishes unhealthy rivalries among his forces to maintain an equilibrium, which only ensures his own survival, even if the state is hyper-galloping to hell. In this arena, loyalties are purchased with brutal advertisement of terror. And allegiance to mercenary heritage is drummed up in support of some illusionary visions of power advertised by tyranny.
Nigerian Political history has witnessed this in ample proportions. The hijack and personalization of the security forces as one would a private real estate, has time and again proven to be the norm instead of the exception. From Babangida’s deployment of the SSS and NSO for his personal vendetta, through Abacha’s deployment of the DMI as his personal assassination squad to Obasanjo’s use of the EFCC as his attack dog, Nigeria’s security forces have be burdened with the crises of allegiance. This crisis of allegiance is not the accidental result of an unforeseen event, which Nigeria just happened upon. It is the culmination of a process, with deep roots in the foundations of our nation.
The Nigeria Police force, for instance was conceived a congenitally deformed mongoloid, created to metamorphose into a monster of destructive proportions. It was a creature of the same colonial adulterous boardroom liaisons which sired the Nigerian state. It was designed and modelled on a core blueprint that revolves around colonial oppression. Its primal members were taken or chosen from among the natives at the fringes of the native societies; set apart, trained and equipped to further the colonial oppressive exploitation of the people. This explains its deployment in quelling the legitimate protestations, demonstrations, or uprisings of the colonized peoples. And since it has repeatedly proven impossible for an institution to ordinarily transcend the evolution trajectory commanded by its genetic blueprints; the conditions that gave it life; or the ontological grounds that conduced to its emergence, the Nigerian police has been unable; many years after the end of colonialism, to transform itself into a more civil institution, with a job detail, which transcends the colonial manuals.
Since no institution is impervious to the influence of its environment, it would require a revolution of seismic or tsunamic proportions to wake the Nigerian police and security forces from their slumber of anomie, since they were created to be dysfunctional in a democratic society. Colonialism was never a democracy. Its institutions were designed to serve an oppressive agenda. If those institutions are engrafted without reform, onto the body-politic of a democratic society, its dysfunctionality will not be neutralized as it is like a fish out of water.
Prior to the advent of the British colonialist in Nigeria, the various ethnic federations and their socio-geographic expressions as manifested in their village communities had a fundamental philosophy of existence bordering on the “I am because we are” metaphysic. This African philosophy of communal existence includes every member of the society as a custodian of the social felicity, order and progress of his community. Ndiigbo of Eastern Nigeria summarized this in a proverb “E be onye bi, ka o na awachi”- (It is one’s imperative to care for his residence).
This may pose some hermeneutical problems on the cultural level for many non-Africans. The colonialists never understood this. That was why in their crude attempts at social engineering, they sought to destroy these institutional safeguards hewn out of millennia of African life, culture and experience. They attempted to supplant it with their own models, which are not only alien, but specifically dysfunctional in the African context, as time and experience has continued to prove. In as much as blames could be heaped on colonial conceit, ignorance, superiority complex and geopolitical posturings for this attempted destruction of core African values and institutions; history reserves no understanding for African political scoundrels and ideological buccaneers, who till this day have continued to mismanage these illusions to maintain their hold on power.
If we are to plumb the Igbo weltanschaung further, one is confronted with the fact that in African villages and communities, one is his brother’s keeper. An Igbo proverb summarizes it by stating that one’s neighbour is one’s brother-Agbatobi onye bu nwanne nne ya. A misfortune visiting one member of the community is a tragedy visited on the whole community. This explains why in most African traditional settings, the ultimate misfortune is death. And in solidarity with his neighbour, who is his brother, no true African ventures out to other preoccupations, when his brother or neighbour is floored by misfortunes such as death. This solidarity is not only extended in times of tragedy. Joyful occasions calls out the community in solidarity to celebrate the life and joys of one of their own. This is the fundamental social metaphysic that attended African traditional life at its core. And this explains African approach to policing the safety, order and security of the community
To this end, every member of the African community pays attention to any threat(s) to the social cohesion represented by their peace and security. And once a person notices or identifies such threats, he makes it known to all and sundry and the society rises in defence of itself from the source of impending danger. That was the African way, which served Africa so very well, that she was comparatively a non-bloody society, when one juxtaposes it to the brutality that attended ancient, medieval and contemporary European history as well as ancient and medieval Roman history.
The African society was ruled by traditional, time-honoured, and holistic laws, ordinances and customs, which took cognizance of the physical, geographic, ecologic, human, social, psychological, economic, communitarian, individual, and religious dimensions of human life, and never by the crude advertisement and wielding of force, suppressive repressions, machiavellic machinations and blood-letting conquests. To this end, policing rose to become a community act. It, like every other African interactional or social reality embosomed, took cognizance of, and maintained a deep relational equilibrium to every other social variable and value. For instance, there exists a deep relationship between the African sense of communal ownership and the paucity of crime incidences in the African community. This is to the extent that once this relation was broken by the introduction of the vagaries of colonial socio-economic schemes, community policing desiccated and became notoriously inadequate to take care of the volatile lava of crimes and social instabilities, thrown up by this disruption of traditional social structures and schemes.
In traditional Africa, the capitalistic ethic is greatly diluted by social and human concerns. The traditional African here is like the proverbial snail that carries his house (shell) with him wherever he goes. This shell, house, or social baggage represents his heritage and attachments which he can never shake off, without compromising his being, personality and existence. He commits a social suicide whenever and if ever he succeeds in shaking off this social baggage of core traditional and ontologic values that inspired his birth and attended his existence. This explains why an African can never suffer to be buried outside the land of his ancestors. He would prefer to be carried home to rest with his forbears, as not to break that socio-metaphysical equation that seats him in communion with the living, the dead and the unborn of his traditional existential universe. This may be an aside to the direct issue we are tackling, but it gives us inkling into the motivations of African behaviour that attended his social evolution, which renders it almost impossible for certain imported conceptual schemes to totally uproot or replace his, and function in his world without adaptations.
In crime and Policing like we reiterated earlier, the social structure and system of existence reduces the incidence of crime to a very bare minimum. Here the capitalistic ethic comes to the fore again, as a scaffold. The capitalistic ethic, resource ownership, distribution and management structure of the African traditional society as seen in the Igbo social economy canonizes hard work on one hand and emphasizes the relatedness of human beings on the other. Here, the human person owes a duty to himself and his society to work hard to better himself and attain the heights of reckoning open to his abilities and calling. The society rewards him with the earned recognition. (“Nwata Kwuo aka, O soro ogaranya rie nri”)- Here hard work and enterprise becomes not only the key to unravelling his nature and ensuring his sustenance, it becomes the fulcrum upon which his existence and that of his social structure revolves. Sloth and laziness are rarities and exceptions, that have social opprobrium as it recompense in the Igbo community. He equally owes himself and his society the duty of not abandoning, but helping his less-privileged kith and kin. This could be seen in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where Okonkwo went to ask of the productive capital to start his own yam farm and life. The capital (here yam seedlings) was lent him, and he deployed his enterprise to actualizing his dreams and repaying the loan. Okonkwo equally had to take refuge with his maternal kinsmen when he inadvertently contravened the law and was banished to exile for seven years, the time required for the land to be appeased.
That a human being towers over and above the trappings and consequences of wealth is a cardinal Igbo philosophy, as could be seen in names like Maduka aku- the Human being is greater than wealth; Nduka aku-Life is Supreme over wealth; Nwa ka ego- The Child is great and above money, etc. These communitarian ethic made the individual an _expression of the whole community, but not greater than the community. One in need in this ambient is not abandoned to the extremes of wretchedness. The community has structures to absorb his incapacities and cater to his disadvantages and indispositions.
The canonization of hard work laced with a humanitarian and anthropocentric relational ethic created a social situation, which coupled with the cultural reinforcements of the Onye-aghana Nwanne-ya philosophy, renders crime or the tendencies thereto, an unnecessary and irrelevant pastime.
In Igbo society, why steal when you can gain your needs through hard work? Why covet your neighbour’s wife or goods, when your hard work, excellence, achievement and prowess can yield you both wealth and the attractive admiration of the village damsels? What are the attractions or enticements to laziness, when social opprobrium quarantines you and your chances to a leprous status in the consideration and esteem of the community?
The Africa traditional social ethic renders both laziness and crime a rarity in its considerations, through its network of social reinforcements, taboos, and recognitions. To this end, the seductions to laziness in traditional Africa are non-existent as one runs the risk of not attaining his basic Maslownian needs if he subscribes to laziness. Laziness does not insure your food, shelter, and clothing, and goes deeper to wound your belongingness to the community and the feelings of self-worth and esteem, as well as the sense of security, which that guarantees. Laziness and crime ostracises and estranges one from his community so much so that it is social suicide to contemplate it, let alone entertaining it. And in Africa, where one’s existence is tied to that of his community, it becomes really a suicidal option both in terms and in fact.
This is was why Policing in Africa, never evolved to the form it did in purely capitalistic climes, where material takes precedence over social forms and relations. Colonial predatory capitalism on the other hand, unfortunately bastardized these structures of social control. Africa and Africans were forcefully grafted onto an exploitive, competitive economic equation, where success for one means the decimation of his competitor; where the big fish has been genetically primed to have the fries for supper, to grow bigger.
This capitalism displaced the “Egbe-elu-Ugo belu”-live and let live approach to Igbo traditional transactional economics. Sharp capitalistic class distinctions rose with this displacement. The divides became far apart, with the poor on the one hand, and the rich on the other. Here as in most capitalistic situations, the poor became condemned to a life-long struggle to escape economically-imposed social disadvantages, while the rich were positioned by the power of wealth and position, to enjoy unrestricted access to the privileges and social recognition that wealth could purchase. As the days went by, the matrix of the social dynamics changed. The stratificational gulf continued to grow unbridgeable. The social conflicts associated with such sharp distinction arose. The fluid situational no-man’s land sucked up the non-competitive and the enfeebled.
With the conflicts, social frustrations were certain to set in. The poor were under pressure to configure ways of survival or grow extinct. Many chose the former path. Those who either because of biological or social consideration could not sell their labour, at the terms of this new order, started selling their bodies to underwrite their gastronomic survival. Those who either actually or perceptually had scores to settle with the system took to what was labelled crimes. Others sought succour in the Whiteman’s establishment, abandoning forever the traditional support systems that informed their lives up to that moment. The dynamics changed. Religion joined the broil, as it served to make positive psychological reinforcements available to the poor in heaven, to enable them bear the negative realities of their social situation here on earth with equanimity. Religion gave the poor a heavenly hope, for them not to rock the earthly boat. The poor worshipped an unseen God, with all the appurtenances that made Marx label it an opium of the masses; while the bourgeoisie garnered control of production factors and variables.
These two broad spectrums of reactions brewed an explosive mix of social uncertainty and perpetual threat of impending disequilibrium, in which the rich and powerful afraid of the rumblings and grumblings of the poor, sought to secure or protect the status quo or establishment, that would guarantee some stability to their holdings. Laws were created to this effect. And laws without sanctions lacked sting. Force was co-opted to give teeth to the laws. And this was established in the police force, which with time grew to gobble up other functions allied to this basis.
With the coming of the Whiteman and his colonial ambitions, Africans rose initially to welcome these strangers, like they use to welcome all strangers to their midst. But the strangers turned into usurping their land and holdings. At that the African rose in defence of their heritage. They were effectively massacred and slaughtered on so many fronts. And after the first wave of massacres, the conquest was complete. But conquering a people never essays to gag their minds. It neither secures their eternal subservience or security for the conqueror. To achieve these twin aims, treachery and perfidy was constructed and deployed to really tame the people and consummate the conquest. Men and scoundrels at the fringes of the African society were hired and employed to police those who formerly conferred them with insignificance. The Whiteman went for the n’er do wells, the rejects, the scoundrels, the rascals, and the deviants who were sent off the social system, and employed them to keep the people at bay and in check. Since majority of these men had grouses with their various societies, their services became indispensable. And since they knew their people well, they became invaluable assets to the conquerors; and traitors to their own people
The point remains that the imperial police force ontological rose from the rotten and exploitative ambience of the feudalistic establishment. The Nigerian police drank from the wells of this primeval ontology. This explains why Nigerians are still being treated as serfs of the ruling class, by their instrument, which is the Nigerian Police Force.
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