According to this report from the impressive new media outlet NEXT, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole announced =N=1.28 trillion will be spent over four years to reform the Nigerian Police Force. At today's exchange rate, (=N=147.25 to $1.00) it would be about $8.7 billion over four years; for simplicity lets say $2.2 billion a year for the next four years.
Politicians all over the world usually make these sorts of declarations with only vague allusions as to where the money will come from. Speaker Bankole kept with global practice, saying only that the Federal, State and Local Governments will jointly fund the initiative. No word on what cuts will be made to spending on other line items to free up the funds to increase spending on the police. No word on how the fall in federal revenues caused by the global credit crunch (and the consequent drop in the price for crude) will affect the budgeting for the police reform initiative. And nothing was said about whether the state and local governments had agreed to this plan, or if they even knew the Speaker planned to commit their allocation to this project.
Don't misunderstand me. I am all for police reform. But money is not the core problem with the Nigerian Police Force, and if we do not address the core issue first, then money spent on "reform" will go down the drain with no substantive return on investment .... other than new vehicles and new guns operated by the same old ineffective police -- something we have seen repeatedly in the past.
It is simple, really, not at all complex. We Nigerians pretend our "problems" (as such) are somehow unique, special, magical or different from the human norm. We talk of "the Nigerian factor" as if there is something about us that is different. The truth is, there is an underlying "normality" to our problems, which, if acknowledged, would set us on the path toward fixing what are really straightforward issues.
The problems of the Nigerian Police Force (and the armed forces) arise from the interplay between rational self-interest (or "vested" interests), and the unchecked, unaccountable exercise of governmental power. Basically, the way the unreformed police force functions suits the strategic interests of those with the most ability to reform it. Conversely, those with the most to gain from reforming the police force (i.e. the majority of the citizenry) have the least ability to push for it.
It goes back to the past, when the "modern" Nigerian police were founded during the colonial era. The colonial police (and army) were not created to protect the people against crime or unlawful government actions. The purpose of the colonial police (and army) was to protect an illegitimate system of government against the people, and to enforce said government's decisions on the people. The allowed the colonial administration to rule without caring about whether the citizens approved of what it was doing or not. If the imperial regime wanted forced labour, or to impose a tax that the citizens did not approve of, they sent their police to intimidate citizens into compliance; and sent in the army if disobedience became excessive.
Fast forward to the half-century of the Indepeendence Era, and the police force (and the armed forces) have not really been reformed and restructured for a very simple reason -- in their current forms, they are useful to whomever happens to be in government at any given moment, useful in much the same way as they were to the colonial government.
I could go through a long historical narrative, starting with the First Republic and the use of the regional police forces by the post-Independence political parties, but it would be so much shorter if I direct your attention to Fourth Republic godfathers like Chris Uba and the late Lamidi Adedibu. First of all, their activities would be impossible if we had an effective police force, as much of what they do is against the law. But more importantly, the police serve as a tool for these political bosses, not as a hindrance.
Chris Uba, who had no de jure constitutional/legal authority over the police, nevertheless ordered a State Police Commissioner to kidnap a sitting State Governor, as part of a sequence of crime and conspiracy that included fraud, bribery, theft, kidnapping, extortion, racketeering and Heaven knows how many other felonies. The late Lamidi Adedibu had state police block "disloyal" state assemblymen from entering the State Assembly building, and ensured that the police stood by and watched while his thugs beat up unionists peacefully protesting agains the uneccesary political wahala in their state. On the national level, the disgrace that was the 2007 elections would have been near impossible if the police force were effective; and again the police (and lets face it, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission) were used to facilitate the electoral manipulations rather than to stop it.
The unreformed police force is useful to both civilian-led administrations, and to diarchies led by generals. In either case, there is an opposition that protests against the misuse and mismanagement of the police, but when that opposition gets into office, they too find it beneficial to misuse and mismanage the police. Olusegun Obasanjo is a case in point; whenever he is not in government, he is the standard-bearer for good governance (and was a victim of the late Sani Abacha's misuse of the criminal justice system), but when he was in government in the 1970s and 2000s, he exploited the broken system to the hilt and did nothing of note to reform it.
We the people are the ones who need an effective police force, but since we have NEVER had proper democracy (and with it the ability to set the course of government policy, albeit indirectly), there has been no interest in police reform. Speaker Bankole is not the first senior politician to make a fancy speech about reforming the police force, but he is a senior member of the Peoples Democratic Party, a party with much to lose if Nigeria ever acquired a functional criminal justice system. The Fourth Republic has been a story of assassinations, disregard and breach of the constitution, fraudulent elections, corrupt practices, violation of citizen rights, anti-democratic "godfather" politics, and so many other illegalities. If the politicians reformed the police, the result would be the arrest of many of the politicians!
Reform runs contrary to the political interests of the dominant force in Nigerian politics, so at best money will be appropriated in quantity, spent in quantity, but deliberately spent in such a way as to achieve little substantive effect. At which point the politicians, intellectuals and commentators will start talking as if there is something special about Nigeria that makes good plans fail .... when there was no good plan to begin with, just a scheme to distract people while nothing was done.
Indeed, when citizens begin to get angry about rising crime and vice, our leaders are quick to do everything except reform the police. Under diarchies led by generals, the governments just created task forces with silly names like "Operation Sweep"; since the task forces were drawn from the unreformed police force, they operated in the same ineffective way. In the Fourth Republic, led by civilians, a new sort of distraction emerged, the creation of variations of external quasi-police-like entities that are politically loyal to the person of the sitting governor. Entities like the Hisbah, the Bakassi Boys, the Odua Peoples Congress were marketed as being our last, best hope in the war on crime and vice, but we the citizens had (and have) no demoocratic control over these entities -- with predictable consequences. I would love to see an independent tribunal investigate these quasi-police, but that will never happen because the men with the power to constitute such a probe have a vested interest in making sure no such probe ever happens. We do know that in the Niger-Delta region, the pseudo-police funded by the various governors metamorphosed into a fusion between criminal syndicate and low intensity insurgency that still has mysterious and shadowy ties with senior political figures in the Niger-Delta and far away in Abuja.
The sad thing is these distractions are effective, and gain the praise of a cross section of citizens. And when enough time passes that we move into the medium-term (not even the long-term) and citizens realize that not much has really changed, some start to think there is something specifically wrong with Nigeria .... or that a succeeding regime has failed to continue the "reforms" of the prior regime. Look beneath the surface people! Ask yourself, when have we ever really sat down and reformed the police? Never. We never have. That is why the status quo persists.
As long as it remains in the vested interest of the political classes (be they politician or militician), there will be no substantive reform of the police. It does not mater how much money they profess to spend; our governments are masters at spending large sums of money without actually "doing" anything.
Change will only come when we have elections that actually reflect what the people want, and that actually choose the type of leadership the people want. The latest fiasco in Ekiti is proof that nothing has changed since 2007, or frankly since 1960, when it comes to substantive democracy.
We the people are the ones with a vested interest in proper law enforcement. Unlike the rich and powerful, we cannot afford private security forces and vicious dogs. And we lack the ability to pick up the phone to call a Police Commissioner to take care of our problems. Frankly, we are scared of the police, as they have a tendency to shoot "stray bullets" at innopportune moments, leading to our deaths. We fear arrest, because we would be detained in inhumane conditions and subject to harsh treatment even if we have actually committed no crime.
Oddly enough, the Nigerian Police Force, unreformed as it may be, is still a vital part of our polity and society. When communal violence breaks out, citizens seek refuge in police and army barracks. We look to these men in uniform to protect us, and to a certain extent they do. But inherent in the example I just gave (i.e. citizens seeking sanctuary during communal violence) is a reminder of how things are not quite "normal" in Nigeria. With reform and transformation, we would not have inter-communal violence to begin with .... and the police and army would independently, professionally and effectively fulfill the roles we the citizens have wanted for them since before independence.
I believe that deep down in their hearts and souls, the majority of the officers and men of the Nigerian Police Force (and the armed forces) want the same things for Nigeria that the rest of us civilians want. Afterall, they are citizens just like us, and want our federal republic to soar as do we all. But this is not going to happen until we fix our policy-making and decision-making infrastructure, regardless of whatever phantom funds Speaker Bankole claims will be spent on police reform.
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