The major topic of political conversation in federal republic continues to be President Yar'Adua's extended stay in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for medical attention. I do not want to say anything about the issue until he comes back home, to Abuja, in full health. When he gets back, I will (hopefully) put together a post discussing the issues arising; for now, I am less interested in the politics and more interested in his health. Aso Rock's spokesmen said it was acute pericarditis, which is treatable. I wish him well.
In other news:
The Minister of State for Education, Hajiya Aishatu Jibrin Dukku has said at least 10 million children in the north of the federal republic are left to support themselves through begging. The root causes of this problematic statistic run the full spectrum of political, economic and socio-cultural, and the reforms necessary to improve the lives of our children are by consequence political, economic and socio-cultural as well. The issue predates the Yar'Adua administration; in fact, the issue, like seasonal meningitis, has been around for a long time, with no one actually doing anything substantive, permanent and long-term about it.
The Independent (independent? are they kidding?) National Electoral Commission (INEC) did not include former Central Bank Governor Charles Soludo's name on its list of "cleared" candidates for the Anambra State gubernatorial elections early next year. They did not list any candidate for the Peoples Democratic Party; the courts are still adjudicating the legality of Soludo's emergence as PDP candidate, and I think INEC means to add Soludo's name if the courts uphold his candidature. I am not sure what they would do if the courts rule against Soludo; the deadline for nominating new candidates has passed. As you might expect, Soludo's emergence as candidate was yet another example of just how anti-democratic the PDP truly is -- not just undemocratic, but viscerally ANTI-democratic. The rest of the parties are just as bad, so it isn't really like voters have any choice; and to top it off, election results do not reflect what voters chose anyway. That Soludo accepts this farce, is happily participating in the joke, and hopes to benefit therefrom is just another reason why I think so-called "progressives" in Nigeria are the worst hypocrites you can find. Men like Ribadu and the late Moshood Abiola (though I hate to speak ill of the dead) are elevated to hero status by these progressives, even though their import and impact of what they actually do and did is and was to elevate, sustain and strengthen EVERYTHING the "progressives" rhetorically claim they oppose.
And finally, Amnesty International has accused the Nigerian Police Force of hundreds of extra-judicial killings every year (two articles, here and here). To be honest, organizations like Amnesty are about as useful as the "progressives" in Nigerian politics when it comes to hard and difficult issues like reforming the police; there is a lot of talk, but nothing comes of it (hey, at least I admit that this blog of mine has ZERO impact on policy-making and governance, and do not pretend to be a relevant or powerful authority making an impact on the world).
Nigerian citizens have always known the Police carried out extra-judicial killings, there just hasn't been anything we could do about it. Or maybe there was lots we could do, but we just haven't bothered ourselves to stand up and do it. When the Boko Haram affair started, we all looked at it as another "Maitatsine", another of the recurring bouts of violence Nigeria has suffered over the decades, but in the long-run the event will probably be remembered for the extra-judicial executions of leading suspects and the Police command structure's lies about it. It is not that we were surprised they lied, nor were we surprised they extra-judicially executed suspects, no, what made the event stand out is the executions were PROVEN and the lies were EXPOSED. In a country run on rumours instead of news, it is rare for something we all know to be proven in such a public way.
The Police have denied the Amnesty Report. They have also denied carrying out collective punishment in Ogun State), attacking an entire village of innocent citizens in revenge for the murder of a Police commander by youths suspected to be from that village. And they have insisted the recent killings in Enugu State were of armed robbers.
I have talked a lot about the Police in the year since I started this blog. Without going into voluminous discourse, let me just briefly repeat that the Police (like our politics) are an extension of our society, an outgrowth of what we collectively do, and (perhaps more importantly) of what we collectively fail to do.
Collective punishment was a British colonial practice that we Nigerians did not discard after regaining self-rule in 1960. Our 1960s leaders remain massively popular, but their refusal to substantively reform the institutions of the colonial state they inherited set the stage for much of what has happened since then. More importantly, we the citizens practice collective punishment too; our version is mostly non-violent, but on occasion Nigeria is hit by communal violence driven in large part by a tendency to blame everyone from Ethnic/Religious Group XYZ for the (alleged and usually unproven) crimes committed by one member of Ethnic/Religious Group XYZ. In the first paragraph of this post, I mentioned Yar'Adua's extended absence raising the temperature of political discourse; a depressing amount of that discourse has revolved around ethno-religious accusations, denials, counter-accusations and threats.
And many members of the public do not, and have not, necessarily frowned on "extra-judicial" punishment, up to and including lynchings, by civilians on other civilians deemed to be criminals (be they alleged pick-pockets, alleged stealers of genitals for juju, alleged kidnappers, alleged anything, including alleged desecrators of holy books), without any credible trial proving their guiilt. Since we don't have accurate elections, or an accurate picture of our polity, it is hard to come up with a statistical picture of just how many of us have been ambivalent about it in the past or present, but not too long ago various ethnic and religious "militia" arose in different parts of the country, ostensibly to fight "armed robbers" (though more accurately serving as political enforcers and armed wings for ethno-religious extremists) and many citizens stood up to defend their extra-judicial violence.
Add in the lack of confidence in the judicial system, and it becomes difficult to create a climate where extra-judicial punishment (including beatings) by police is unacceptable, because so many citizens' knee-jerk reaction to crime is to instantly punish the suspect, lest they disappear into the non-functioning morass of the judicial system. Indeed, there are thousands of people in Nigerian prisons who may be guilty of nothing at all, but who remain there because there is no campaign or pressure to review their cases and/or release them -- at a certain level, the society believes they deserve what they get, because they are "criminals".
All I am saying is there is a reason I call for a level of reform, restructuring and transformation that can only be termed REVOLUTIONARY. You cannot reform Nigeria on a piece-by-piece basis, as everything is connected to everything else, and much of the reforms we need are reliant on other reforms (an intricate, interconnected web of reforms) in order to be successful. And the most important thing to note is we have to change ourselves and change the way we think as individual citizens and as a society.
Nigerian Police officers are not born that way. They are made to be that way. It is not magic, but a sequence of life experiences from outside the Force as much as within it. We are their victims, but we are also their creators.
Seriously, where are the voices and forces of revolutionary reform?
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