By Steve Osuji
ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT: The new super-cop was exhilarated no doubt. Very much so. He spoke on the spur of the moment and he jived. He would be tiger and lion to criminals and bad boys, he enthused as he was being donned with his new epaulets as the acting Inspector-General of Police.
Apparently, Kayode Egbetokun never dreamed he would make it to the pinnacle of his noble profession, but here he is hoisted at the very peak. It’s ok, anyone would indeed babble if confronted with such good fortune.
When IGP Egbetokun came to, he began to make the right sound bites and with due respect, the usual baloney this column has heard from fresh IGPs for over three decades.
Hear him: “We will work with the rank and file. Together, we will build a police force the nation will be proud of.
Accountability will be the hallmark of my administration. I will work to regain the confidence of Nigerians in our internal investigative system and ensure the highest standards of professionalism.”
If you be a journalist or a keen watcher of the goings and comings in our blighted police institution, you would have heard versions of this same jazz so many times that you would only laugh at Egbetokun and his blah, blah. One is particularly pissed at the new helmsman’s talk because of close encounters with his men on the highways recently.
PROBABLY THE WORST POLICE IN THE WORLD:
Travelling from Owerri towards Okigwe a few days ago, a police roadblock generated a long traffic snarl. The scruffy cop in half mufty and disagreeable footwear was casually picking N100.00 each from commercial buses. He just stretched out his hand a note was shoved into it, he stuffed it into his already bulging side pocket. He didn’t care who was watching, it didn’t seem to matter to him. I watched him extort about three bus drivers ahead of me. I could have filmed this obscenity. I could have been a CNN correspondent or even the new IGP for all he cared.
This ugly spectacle was again replicated on Mbaise-Umuahia road last Wednesday afternoon. This perfidious policing had been a long time practise for sure but they used to be coy about it. They tried to cover their crime a bit but not anymore. It’s now in your, this is what Nigeria police is, they seem to say. This is why it’s more annoying!
ROAD TO HELL: But this is child’s play compared to the bizarre spectacle on the major roads. This column would recommend that IGP Egbetokun do a road trip incognito from Lagos to Port Harcourt.
The journey must be so coded and surreptitious that even his orderly must not know his destination. This singular trip, should he take it, would give Mr. Egbetokun the best, first hand picture of the nature, status and the crass and perhaps, irredeemable state of the Nigeria Police Force.
Littered all through this over 600 kilometres stretch are police ‘checkpoints’, read tollgates. The police Egbetokun has just taken over spreads its ugliest face on this highway with unabashed impunity. The IGP will count no fewer that 200 ‘checkpoints’ on this road. These barricades are eyesores made of logs of wood, used tyres, sandbags and all sorts of unsightly bric-a-brac that deface the road architecture and eventually degrade our highways.
These checkpoints cause undue traffic jam making road travel in Nigeria prolonged and wearisome. But most distressing is that the police are not checking anything. All this hundreds of ‘checkpoints’ are mere EXTORTION POINTS where innocent motorist and commuters are dispossessed of their hard earned money and perhaps other valuables – at gunpoint. It’s worse, indeed a nightmare for commercial drivers on this highway. Drivers are stopped practically at every pole of the way, delayed and fleeced.
This horrific policing has been on for long and this column has written about this over half a dozen times. Yet the situation gets worse especially with coming of each new IGP.
LUCRATIVE POSTING:
The story is that these are ‘special’ (lucrative) postings that officers and men pay huge amounts to secure. Nigerians say that the huge daily collection on this highway go all the way up to the IGP’s office that’s why the evil continues to exacerbate. The posting now seem more like a franchise purchased from the police headquarters in Abuja whereby franchise holders are allotted a section of the highway to go and occupy and recoup their ‘investment’.
POLICE AT WAR WITH NIGERIANS:
Travelling disguised, (assuming he is not aware of the madness) Egbetokun will not only experience the torture his so-called police force put Nigerians through, he will notice that there are probably more policemen, rifles and Hilux trucks on this stretch of road than in actively violent terror zones of Borno and Niger States put together. A foreigner traveling by road from Lagos to Port Harcourt would conclude Nigeria is at war. But the truth is that the Nigeria Police is at war with the Nigerian people on the highway.
And the most crucial point is that Egbetokun’s police is doing everything else but securing Nigerians. In fact, these policemen on this highway seem to have forgotten everything they learnt about policing and security. Their head is overflowing with bribery, corruption and extortion.
The situation out there is better experienced. This is why this column recommends a secret trip by the IGP as a first course if he is truly serious about the reform of the force.
But this column wagers that Egbetokun is just jiving, or catching cruise, as they say it today. We know he knows all the ills of the police; he’s probably part of the problem so he won’t do jack. In any case, he has a short time to be IGP so we already see him parking his (Ghana must go bags) for his retirement.
Egbetokun has less than two years to go – either by year of service or age.
AN OFFICER AND AN ACADEMIC:
He is a well read officer with degrees in diverse areas such as Mathematics, Engineering and Economics; earning a doctorate degree in Peace and Security Studies. He has an MBA as well. He is a core operations officer having headed the Mobile Police (Mopol) and the Rapid Response Squad (RRS).
It is remarkable that he is also a politically exposed cop having served as Chief Security Officer (CSO) in 1999 to then Governor Bola Tinubu of Lagos State, now President of Nigeria.
This must explain his initial tiger and lion metaphor. However knowing the force deeply as he seems, he just might be the man to clean the augean stable, especially if he phases the reform, kick-start and do his bit so the man after him would continue where he stops.
If he is serious about change, he doesn’t need this column to teach him what to do or how to go about it. Improved recruitment standards, reorientation and reacculturation, improved training and professionalism, improved welfare, more discipline and most of all, curb systemic corruption, (most IGPs are seen to be crassly corrupt by Nigerians). These are some of the things Nigerians talk about and the changes they expect.
It is not about tiger and lions.
Osuji, an accomplished Journalist, Columnist, was Media Adviser to former Imo State Governor, Emeka Ihedioha.
