I criticize the Nigerian Police Force a lot, explicitly and implicitly. Every Nigerian does.
Even police officers are critical of the Force, none more so than Sergeant Musa Usman, the speaker of truth to power whom I wrote about in this post. I still don't know what happened to Sergeant Usman. If you know anything more about his story, leave a reply or email me.
Among many posts I have made directly or indirectly about the Force is this one, about the murder of a 3-year-old girl, Kaosarat (or Kausarat) Muritala. In September of 2012, the Police Corporal accused of the crime was convicted and sentenced to death. I have not seen anything in the media in terms of an appeal, or in terms of the sentence being carried out.
There is another side of the story, one told in part by Sergeant Usman. The conditions of service of the Nigerian Police Force not only encourage things like graft and corruption, but discourage things like bravery or initiative in the face of violent criminals.
I have often said on this blog that the people who govern Nigeria do not want Nigeria to have an effective law enforcement system or an effective judiciary. If these institutions functioned properly, most of what the political and economic leadership are currently free to do in advancement of their self-interest would become impossible, difficult or would attract a higher risk of sanction than currently pertains. As such, the people most responsible for ensuring that the Police Force are effective are simultaneously the people least interested in the Police Force being effective.
This is not just true of political leadership beyond the Force, but is true of leadership within the Force. Read the blog post on Sergeant Usman, and you will see where he makes clear that the top brass of the Force are ultimately responding for the corruption and graft. They deploy their men in a manner so as to make money for themselves, taking a cut of whatever "action" their men are involved in and passing a share of that cut up the chain of command.
This paradox of the government being constitutionally responsible for an effective law enforcement system while being simultaneously opposed, in practice, to the existence of effective law enforcement has existed since the founding on the modern Nigerian Police Force as an arm of the British Colonial Government(s). From the start, the Nigerian Police Force has been obliged to systemically ignore the fact that the government(s) it served were illegitimate, that these governments could only sustain themselves in power by doing illegitimate and unconstitutional things, and that the policy-making output of these governments were inevitably going to be just as illegitimate.
Indeed, from the very start the Nigerian Police have been poorly paid, and have been expected to supplement their wages through activities that were just as illegitimate as the activities of the governments they served. Yes, believe it or not, Nigerian Police were "supplementing" their pay as far back as the colonial days. I know we have all been taught to believe that everything was perfect when the British ruled us, but that is colonial propaganda still being spread by the products of colonial education systems.
Having said that, the British were a foreign people pursuing their own interests at the expense of ours. What is our excuse? We regained our self-rule in 1960. Why have we continued the pattern? Why are we consigning ourselves to a situation where public security is ephemeral rather than substantive?
As citizens, we perceive the police to be behaving badly, but in reality the police are doing exactly what is expected of them. This is what they were created to do, this is what they are trained to do. Their original job was never to protect us from crime, but to protect the British colonialists from us and to punish us if we didn't obey British decrees that we neither approved of nor were consulted about. What we in post-colonial Nigeria see as their brutal treatment of "bloody civilians" is the modern iteration of an institutional culture put in place from the very beginning to create a Force that sees us, the people they are supposed to protect, as people to be beaten into submission on behalf of whoever happens to be in government. Indeed, the post-colonial police have been more likely to aid in rigging an election than they have been to arrest an election rigger.
Again, one can see why the British would do this .... but what is our excuse?
I am a federalist, like every other Nigerian, so I am not philosophically opposed to "state police", but calling for "state police" ignores the basic problem. The Regional and Provincial police forces of the past were just as likely to follow the colonial paradigm, and just as ineffectual when it came to the issue of public security and crime-fighting. If things seems more peaceful in the past, it is because there were fewer armed robbery gangs, for example, and not because the Colonial or First Republic police had any particular skill at fighting armed robbery gangs. Beating up the political opponents of the major regional First Republic parties was a more likely function.
What I am trying to get you to understand is that the Police Force functions the way it was designed to function. For an individual officers, your choice is to do what the institution requires of you, or to exit into the congested pool of unemployed or under-employed formal sector Nigerians. Tell the truth, most of us make compromises of one kind or another to keep our jobs, so long as the compromise does not hurt us individually, and the Nigerian policeman is no different.
I wonder sometimes if the same men and women wouldn't have been more effective as a Police Force if our Federal Republic had been genuinely interested in making them an effective Force.
Channels TV is organizing a forum to discuss the Nigerian Police Force, and prepared this report as a sort of primer to the problems facing the Force. It seems the disincentives to effective policing start as early as the induction to the Nigerian Police College.
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