Monday
May 3, 2010 |
Remember that some older columns are available
in PDF)
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When Nigerians think about the
disappointments of their perpetually infantile nation, they often focus
narrowly on rigged elections and the abuses of their gluttonous public
officials. These are, without question, serious symptoms of dysfunction.
Even so, I fear that we neglect to zero in on the way that police (and
often military) brutality serves to remind Nigerians that they are serfs
in their own country.
Any Nigerian who has had an unwelcome encounter with the Nigerian police
– and that, I suspect, is most of us – can tell you that the experience
is akin to being besieged by a horde of rabid hyena.
I know. More than twenty years ago, I was arrested in Onitsha (along
with two of my journalist friends) just because we stood up for a young
man who was slapped by a police officer – and then ordered to sit down
on the wet ground (it had rained heavily). What was the young man’s
offense?
We were all in the same bus (headed for Awka) when the police flagged it
down and asked the driver to come down. The young man leaned out of the
window and beckoned to one of the officers. “My father died,” he
explained to the officers, “and I’m coming from Kano to go and make
arrangements for his burial.” He then begged the officer to let us go.
“Shut up!” barked the officer, smacking him on the face.
“Why do you have to slap me?” the passenger asked.
“You want to know why?” the officer fumed. “Oya, come down!” As soon as
the man got down, the officer pointed to the wet earth. “Quick, quick,
sit down!” the officer instructed.
Outraged by this senseless humiliation of an innocent citizen, I asked
the passenger not to sit in the wetness.
My intervention earned the officers’ ire. They decreed that I alight
from the bus. When my two colleagues tried to reason with the officers,
they, too, were dragged down. One of my colleagues began to scribble the
name of one of the officers on a piece of paper. Another officer ran
from behind and, with the butt of his gun, dealt a blow at my
colleague’s hand, knocking down his pen and paper. With his boot, the
officer then smashed both the pen and paper into the soggy earth.
At this point, the officers were so infuriated that they ordered other
passengers in the vehicle to get down and look for other buses. Then
they herded my two colleagues, the smacked man and me onto the bus.
Three officers hopped in as well, and the driver was commanded to turn
around and head for a police camp in a remote part of Onitsha. As we
drove there, the three officers cursed and threatened us. He promised
that, once at their camp, we’d be so beaten up that our mothers would
not recognize us.
In the end, we had a lucky – “narrow” – escape. We were marched before a
senior officer who sat on a stump in the early afternoon heat, his eyes
bloodshot, attending to a large bottle of Guinness Stout. Our captors
then proceeded to tell him a series of lies. They said they’d stopped
our vehicle for a simple routine check, but that we then boasted that we
were journalists, that we knew all the big men in the country, and that
no police officer dared question our driver.
“Bastards!” screamed the senior officer, fixing his fiery eyes on us.
But the officer must have sensed a calm in us, and so asked us to tell
our own side of things. After we did, he asked if we were really
journalists. We produced our ID cards – we were all members of the
editorial board of National Concord. Shaken, the senior officer scolded
his subordinates. He told them that we could write all of them, himself
included, out of their jobs. He apologized to us, asked our hitherto
exuberant arresters to apologize, and sent us on our way.
For us, it was an ambivalent moment. What if we were not journalists?
What if we had not been “arraigned” before an officer who had a fear of
the written word?
Since then, I’ve had many more run-ins with the police. In 2002, five
police officers held me up at Oshodi for close to two hours. I was
driving to a meeting at a newspaper house where I then wrote a weekly
column – and ran into a terrible traffic snag at Oshodi. I was already
on edge, trying to navigate between hordes of pedestrians crossing the
highway, a colony of “okada” motorcyclists who respect no traffic rules,
and other motorists when, suddenly, an officer stepped in front of my
car and demanded that I pull up to the curb. After inspecting the
documents of the Honda, he then told me he suspected the car was stolen.
The car belonged to my father-in-law, and I knew he was not a thief. But
the officer was not impressed. He accused me of being a thief – “since
you’re operating a stolen vehicle.”
I asked to be taken to a police station if he believed I’d stolen the
car. Instead of doing so, he and his four colleagues took turns painting
the most dreadful portrait of what would happen to me if they took me to
the station. I remained unrepentant: “If you think I stole this car,” I
told them, “you have a duty to arrest me and take me to your station.”
The officers had a different game and outcome in mind. After detaining
me at Oshodi for an hour and forty minutes, the most senior officer made
his proposal. “Oya,” he said to me, “give us some money and go.” In a
voice that tried to belie my anger, I told him that I would not part
with a kobo of my money. “You accuse me of stealing a car, and you think
I’d reward you with a bribe?”
The officer looked me up and down, his contempt raw and on the surface.
Turning to his colleagues, he pointed to his head and said in a mocking
tone, “Dis one dey craze. Make we leave am.”
Many – perhaps, most – other Nigerians have their own versions of horror
stories with rogue police officers.
A headline in a Next edition of April 30 read: “Policemen brutalize
Tribune reporter in Ondo”. The report is harrowing: “The Ondo State
correspondent of the Nigerian Tribune, Yinka Oladoyinbo was Wednesday
evening assaulted by men of the Okuta Elerinla Police Station, Akure,
Ondo State, who thoroughly beat him up and detained him at the police
station for four hours.” The fifteen officers who took part in the
operation “dragged Mr. Oladoyinbo from his car and forcefully handcuffed
him.” They also “dragged [him] on the floor before he was bundled into a
police Hilux van.”
The Next report disclosed that the policemen “acted in a commando
manner.” As they mauled the reporter, the officers “threatened to shoot
any person who intervened”. Why was this citizen subjected to
vigilante-like beating? The policemen, Next reported, “claimed that
their Station Officer, Ayodeji Oyeyemi, was molested in the area.”
Current police Inspector General Ogbonna Onovo must serve notice to his
subordinates that their job specification does not include assaulting
Nigerian citizens at will. He should dismiss the officers who took part
in beating Mr. Oladoyinbo.
Nigerians are daily beset by criminals – corrupt government officials
who grow fat on public funds, armed robbers and scam gurus. There’s a
lot of work for a well-trained, professionally sound police force to do.
Unfortunately, the Nigerian police have established a reputation for
incompetence, for harassing law-abiding citizens whilst letting
criminals thrive, and for sheer brutality.
Mr. Onovo should outline measures to weed trigger-happy men from the
police, to make service conditions more attractive, and to radically
retrain officers to give them a deep sense of what’s meant by law
enforcement.
