At the dawn of the year 2009, one would not be withdrawing from the bank of ignorance, if one asserts that the actions, comportment and allegiance of Nigerian police is still rooted in the colonial metaphysic. As reiterated in one of my essays, (The ontology of Police dysfunctionality in Nigeria) the Nigerian Police was formed to fight against the enemies and opponents of the colonial administration; and implement the colonial agenda. To this end, it viewed the natives as the enemies of the colonial administration that should be tamed or trashed. The 1929 Aba women riots saw the Police being deployed to quell the riots. The 1949 Enugu Coal miners strike was met with deadly onslaught, as native miners on industrial action, met the speaking and business ends of the colonial police guns.
The vicissitudes of the independence did not give the police force the required impetus to evolve into a civil force that would function in a post-colonial society. It still wore the garbs of colonialism, like a drunken actor on his costume long after the drama was over. It still cherished its misconstruction of the populace as enemies of the administration. The only thing that has changed is the adjective “colonial”. The administration still remains. Though now with black faces in flowing Agbada. And it must be subserviently and fanatically served and defended against the people, as it has always been in colonial times. To this end, the Police ontologically view itself as an enemy of the Nigerian people. This accounts for why the culture of killing the citizens became entrenched in police culture in Nigeria. It accounts for why the police keeps their own version or construction of order and law most times to the detriment of the rule of law, and in utter violation of the constitution most times, all in service of the “administration”
This accounts for why the Police could be deployed by the “friends” or collaborators” of the “administration” to physically abduct, assault, and or kidnap a sitting governor because the digestion of the “administration” was constipated. This accounts for arbitrary arrests and donkey-years detention of suspects in violation of the Habeas Corpus principle as was provided in our laws and statutes books. This equally accounts for why the Police is used to violate the fundamental right to freedom of association and expression of certain Nigerians because the “administration” feels threatened by their associations and, or expressions.
With this crude dalliance with the “administration”, instead of obedience to the laws of the land, a supposed politically neutral institution was positioned to embrace the ephemeral political agenda of each administration or government of the day. To this end, the police establishment became susceptible to taking great liberties with the law and human rights, as they generally became conditioned to give all, including cutting legal, judicial and moral corners to serve persons instead of the law.
This could explain why an acclaimed fraudster and public enemy like Chris Ubah between 2003-2007 will get a retinue of policemen attending him; and state governors, local government area chairmen, party leader in the wards are assigned dozens of gun totting, policemen, who wear their brutality like a dress, to remind any would be assassin that, no trial awaits him, if he ever dares to try his art or ply his trade on the target they are following like flies on faeces. This equally explains why Police was aiding hoodlums and arsonists that torched the Anambra State Government House circa 2003. This explains why the Police will smash a political rally of the ANPP, and gas Chuba Okadigbo to death in the process, because Obasanjo who stole an election and sits on the saddle is afraid of a simple political rally of the opposition party. This explains why the Police will passively if not actively assist the murder of Bola Ige. The list is unfortunately endless. This equally explains why whenever the political class want to settle their petty vendetta; they readily employ unscrupulous police men as their hit men. James Danbaba, the erstwhile Lagos State Commissioner of Police is still on trial as an accessory to the murder of Kudirat Abiola.
The questions remain: why has the Nigerian Police failed woefully in its fundamental duties, and yet cuts down innocent Nigerians at will? Why has the Nigerian police recorded cataclysmal failure in countering the rising wave and incidence of crime in Nigeria, and have instead become a factory of crime and a purveyor of criminality; committing more crimes themselves than is normal? Can we allude this failure to grotesque incompetence, criminal negligence, institutional incapacity or what?
Well for a recap, the ontology of the Nigerian Police was deeply rooted in colonial exploitation and brutal repression of dissent. It was not fathered in a democratic ambient. The seeds of its birth were watered with oppression, brutal suppressions and hounding of alternative opinions. The Police according to the image and likeness of the colonialist was the arrow in their hands for hunting down and eviscerating opposition to their pillage, decimation, and total conquest of the African hinterland. Many freedom fighters were regular customers and guests of colonial police cells, as recompense for raising their voices against their oppression.
This metaphysic created a conceptual divide and categorizations, in which the police identified with the oppressors in the fight against the oppressed. At independence, this ghost was not exorcised. The conceptual schema subsisted and was deployed to good effect by the politicians who used police power to butcher and disembowel their political opponents. This evolutionary mutations in the repressive direction, etched this conceptual scheme into the mental, institutional and operational blueprint of the police force that the police still finds it absolutely difficult to put away its draconic and oppressive robes when it appeared on the amphitheatres of a democratic society. The goggles have been deeply burnt into its eyes that the Nigerian Police cannot envisage a life without its instruments of, or ability to brutalize, and violently put down whatever in their institutional blindness, they misconceive as threats to the masters who have purchased their allegiance.
The oppressive ethic adopted by the Police force at its birth created some kaleidoscope of illusions on the institutional thought pattern of the Nigerian Police. There exists this hollow and tragic thinking that with the force of arms and ammunitions, the degradations of torture and detention centres, the psychological terrorisms of advertising crude power and entrenched brutality, would all synchronize to reduce crime, and insure social peace and order. But facts of our daily experiences continue to confound our presumptions here. Nigeria remains a swindler paradise, a thief’s playground and the palace of gangsters. Buses are hijacked off Nigerian roads every day by armed robbers bearing sophisticated weapons that can challenge comparison and dwarf the Nigerian military arsenal. Homes are no longer burgled in the absence of the owners. They are now invaded by well armed robbers that can confound any commando unit. Husbands are now forced by robbers to witness the rape of their wives and daughters. Children are forced to witness the visitation of criminal sexual abominations on their mothers and sisters. Those who survive the robbers’ bullets are not spared the psychological searing of their delicate natures. Those whose heads received only stitches go on in perpetual thankfulness to their stars. The loss of property is not factored into the equation anymore, as any body who visits to commiserate with a robbery victim first offers thanks that the life of the victim was not lost, even if he lost his life-savings.
In the face of all these, Nigerians now create maximum security prisons in their homes with burglary proofs and other security gadgets that make Fort Knox or Sing Sing look like the juvenile antics of retarded kids. They elect now to wall in themselves both night and day whenever they are in the house to forestall being ambushed by surprise, whenever the armed robbers decides it is their turn. The question now in Nigeria is not if armed robbers will come, but when. Roads are not even safe. Drivers are forced at gun-point, off the wheels of their cars and dumped in the trunks of the same. Those who survive the suffocation that a car trunk amply promises, have the ordeal burnt into their minds for a long time to come. Banks are robbed with armed impunity, in commando style. Murder has become the order of the day. Governors have been waylaid by robbers on their way. Ministers have been murdered by armed men in their bedrooms. Political Party stalwarts have been slaughtered either in their houses, or on the road. Many Nigerians have seen men coming to their houses as visitors, only to do their guest in, dispatching him to heaven or to hell, for unexplainable reasons. Priests have been shot or butchered in their rectories and churches. Armed robbery and violent crime now recognizes neither boundaries nor sanctities in Nigeria anymore. Yet the Nigeria Police has not really been able to be on top of the situation. Many crimes have joined the class of eternal mysteries.
All theses are simply testaments to the fact that our security forces and apparatus of state owe and pay allegiance to the wrong pedestals. The allegiance should be to the laws of the land, and to the people who are the sovereigns of every democratic embrace. But unfortunately, time has proved that their allegiance and loyalties unfortunately lie either in their avarice or to the “administration”-meaning the incumbent government in power at any point in time in Nigeria. And since this is the case, this institution would always offer itself in defence or furtherance of tyranny, instead of helping to the emergence of a free, democratic society.
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