NEXT reports that in Abia State a police office who shot into a commercial bus because it did not stop at a checkpoint has been dismissed from the force and arraigned on murder charges.
This is news. "Man bites dog" news.
Police officers frequently shoot at, and kill civilians who have committed no crime. Taxi drivers and private drivers have been shot at, injured or killed, for not submitting to extortion at illegal checkpoints. In these instances, it is the police officers who have committed the crimes (plural) of setting up illegal checkpoints, of using the threat of violence to extort payments from motorists, of economic sabotage (blockading major highways and causing delays, inefficiency and ballooning costs for transportation, industry and commerce) .... as well as attempted murder, and murder.
But it goes beyond that, as I highlighted in this blog post about a police "stray bullet" that killed a 3-year old girl. For those that don't know, "stray bullet" is an excuse the police have used for decades to explain away unwarranted killings of civilians (partcularly student protestors in the 1980s). The idea being the police officer intended to shoot somewhere else, at something else, but the bullet went "astray".
No one believes that excuse, nor has anyone ever believed it. In the case of the 3-year old girl I highlighted, the police colleagues of the guilty officer actually detained the girl's father and beat him up, to punish him for daring to complain about a police officer murdering his child for no reason.
This is not simply a question of "bad" individual officers or even of "bad" officers as a collective. At a fundamental level the training and internal culture of the Nigerian Police Force are in need of substantive transformative reform.
I do not believe in blaming "colonialism", "slavery" or "neo-colonialism" or whatever for our woes, nor do I think being a multi-ethnic, multi-religious federal republic stops us from doing things right. Our problem lies in the complete lack of interest and apathy towards reform, restructuring and transformation.
The modern Nigerian Police Force and the Nigerian Armed Forces were born in the British colonial era. At the time, both forces were designed to defend an illegitimate institution (the British colonial government) against people who would rather rule themselves.
It was the job of the colonial police to coerce the people into complying with "orders from above" that lacked even a modicum of democratic legitimacy. The people had no power over the police, and were not meant to. The police on the other hand were given a free hand to exercise power over the people; it did not endanger the colonial government's power over the people (which was all they cared about), and it increased the intimidation factor of the police. From the perspective of the colonial government, the ideal situation would have the people so afraid of the police and/or soldiers that the mere appearance of the police or just a threat of the army's appearance, would be enough to get people to quietly obey without causing a fuss. Indeed, the earliest decades of the colonial project were based around the use of collective punishment and disproportionately violent responses to even the hint of dissent or rebellion. The essence was to make the people deathly afraid to raise a hand against a European, or against the African agent of a European.
The colonial government did not educate, train or properly equip the colonial police force; and the idea that policemen were not supposed to be as educated as possible was one that persisted beyond the colonial era. The colonial authorities did not need an educated, trained or equipped force to serve their rather limited (and utterly political) purposes. Besides, too much education and the men might start to question their orders.
Lastly, but by no means less significantly, the colonial authorities allowed the colonial police to augment their meagre salaries by accepting or extorting "gifts" from citizens in exchange for doing their jobs. The popular television programme Ichokwu satirized the colonial judicial system, where Nigerian colonial civil servants (like court messengers, clerks, police, etc) who were percieved to be intermediaries between "the white man" and the ordinary people were able to use this supposed status to collect "gifts" from people seeking to curry favour from the all-powerful "white man".
Now before you accuse me of hypocritically blaming colonialism, I am NOT. Quite the contrary. Quite the 180 degree opposite to be blunt.
You see, the Federal Republic of Nigeria has had 50 years since regaining self-rule, half a century in which to reform, restructure, reconstitute and transform the Nigerian Poice Force (and the Nigerian Armed Forces ... though, to be honest, the Armed Forces' internal culture is nowhere near as bad as the Nigerian Police Forces').
We have not done so.
Like most countries in Africa, our leadership since the Independence era has found it rather convenient to inherit the colonial system exactly as it was. They used the police forces they inherited exactly the same way the colonialists did. They treated education, training, orientation and internal culture the same way too.
In fact, the post-colonial Nigerian/African leadership has a lot to fear from effective police forces, and a lot to gain from ineffective forces that serve as the civil bodyguards of undemocratic governments. The pay is still piss-poor, and the officers and men are still expected to augment their pay by extorting funds/resources from citizens.
Fifty years later, and nothing has changed fundamentally.
Okay, let me ask a simple question: Why don't these police officers ever shoot at the tyres? Forget that the checkpoints are illegal, forget that extortion is illegal, and forget that the police have no legal justification for shooting at these vehicles in the first place, and focus on the simple question: If no one in the car/bus/vehicle has fired a gun at the police and there is NO EVIDENCE that an armed person is in the car, no sighting of a weapon, no proof that anything has happened other than a car driving past a checkpoint, why not shoot at the damn tyres first? Why are you shooting into the car itself, packed as it always is with people?
Unless someone shoots first at the police, or unless the police has a rational reason to expect they are about to be fired upon, they should not be shooting their weapons at people ... nor should tear gas be deployed for the illegal purpose of teaching "bloody civilians" that policemen are superior to civilians and should be obeyed like gods, lest there be consequences.
Nigeria's police officers and men come from the same families as the rest of us. They are the same people as the rest of us. But when they join the force, they are socialized into an internal culture that teaches them that the proper way to do policework and to relate to the civilian populace is XYZ ... except XYZ is not the proper way to do policework at all, and is in fact the opposite of everything they are meant to be doing.
In a sense, as much as we the people (myself included) criticize the police, we are all guilty of the same thing. There are over 100 million Nigerians (myself included) doing what we think are the proper things we should be doing, and thinking what we believe to be the proper thoughts we should be thinking, but which in fact add up like raindrops to produce the ocean of problems that we then complain about.
Reform is not just about outside things like infrastructure and laws. It is also an internal exercise, in our hearts and souls. It is not just acknowledging that we do not know certain things (e.g. the Nigerian Police Force's inadequate training) but proper identifying the things that we need to know and learn. Like Paul at Damascus, it behooves upon us to undergo personal conversions from the way of "wrong" to the way of "right".
EDIT 05-04-10: Daily Trust reports police officers manning an illegal checkpoint outside Abuja to extort money from commercial motorcyclists (a.k.a. okada or going) committed what would probably be defined legally as manslaughter, causing the death of a commercial motorcylists who refused to stop to pay the illegal ransom. As near as I can tell from the article, they hit him with some kind of object as he rode past, causing him to fall and die (trauma to the head most likely). It seems this is not the first time they have hit cyclists with objects as they rode past the checkpoint, so perhaps the flagrant disregard for human life displayed on a consistent basis is enough to elevate this from manslaughter to murder.
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