Martins P. Iwuanyanwu
The ongoing #EndSARS protest is a very welcome development and I wholeheartedly support it because it is an initiative long overdue. We should be demanding an end to the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in Nigeria and total overhaul or reform of the Nigeria Police as a whole.
In fact, the Nigeria Police is not just anti-Nigerian people but also a very dangerous public institution. It is dangerous in the sense that it is ‘cash-and-carry’. What most people do not know about the Nigeria Police is that 95 per cent of high-profile assassinations in Nigeria were masterminded by the police. That is the reason we never find such killers of our people.
Unfortunately, Nigerians have stopped asking questions, thinking we have leaders that care for us. No, we do not have any such leader in Nigeria of today. Have we questioned who supplies arms and ammunition to kidnappers and armed robbers in Nigeria? Who supplies arms and ammunition to Boko Haram? Does anybody audit or take inventory of the police armories, as well as that of the military? I doubt any such thing exists. Why has Nigeria not been able to defeat Boko Haram? Nigeria cannot defeat Boko Haram when the expert intelligence and sophisticated arms and ammunition in their operations are not possible without the collaboration and support of our police and the military personnel.
Intelligence gathering and prosecution of wars are not the business of untrained hands. The architecture and formation of Boko Haram was not done by civilians. I am not talking about the sponsors of Boko Haram, which the Department of State Security (DSS) has refused to disclose to us and Nigerians kept quiet and we are spending billions of dollars annually fighting insurgents and the insurgents are getting stronger. Money being spent in the fight against insurgents could have been used to address our numerous challenges, especially creating jobs for the unemployed youths, if our politicians do not loot it through other means.
I never knew the extent of the decay in our police system until two years ago when I had a personal experience with the Nigeria Police, with particular reference to Special Fraud Unit (SFU), Ikoyi, Lagos. A client of mine was misguided to write a petition against me with the help of the police officers in SFU in a matter he knew very well that I was totally innocent. The client paid some money to my office for onward transmission to an agent in the transaction who I had a memorandum of understanding with and who also made an undertaking to refund the money should he fail to execute the project satisfactorily as agreed. I was not suspecting any foul play and never knew things had gone that bad in Nigeria.
Fortunately, the records showed how I transferred the said money to the account of the fraudster-agent through my bank and that case is still pending in another court. I did not know that fraudsters could sign every necessary legal documents in a transaction and yet go ahead to defraud the second party. When it dawned on me that I was dealing with a fraudster, I took necessary police action to recover my client’s money. But while I was at Police Force CID, Panti, Yaba, Lagos, fighting and spending my own money to recover this money from the fraudster, the client went to the SFU and paid them money to help him write a petition against me and to compel me to pay the money that was not with me.
Of course, the SFU officers did accordingly and collected money from the client and secured a magistrate’s court order to freeze my bank accounts and to arrest me inside the bank without invitation of any kind. I was incarcerated and dehumanised for more than 24 hours, the first time in my life to have such an experience. Efforts by my lawyers and friends to make the police to see all related documents to the case fell on deaf ears. I was ordered to pay a sum far above what was involved in the transaction as they cooked up charges, or I would be charged to court. In fact, they have prepared charges that only God knew what they contained. Because of the way our system runs, if I was charged to court by police as a criminal, I might have ended up not being able to extricate myself from the criminal charges. I deliberately shield the names of the two police officers involved in this cruel behaviour for now. They deserve to lose their jobs.
My lawyers and I had no choice but to proceed to the Federal High Court to apply for an injunction to stop the action of the police. Fortunately, I was vindicated in the matter at last. The same police abandoned the case and refused to show appearance throughout seating on the matter. Another good news here is that the court awarded me reasonable cost against the police. I want to see how the police will not pay me the cost. It is now three months after the judgment was delivered; neither the police nor the said client has appealed the ruling. The most baffling aspect of the matter is that police saw all evidence I provided in the case and also the fact that I was a public figure that ordinarily should even be accorded bail on personal recognition and yet they failed to do what was right because of the commission they were expecting from their client.
We all read about missing persons in Nigeria every day and, unfortunately, we never get to find such persons. Police could tell all kinds of stories and everything is forgotten.
How did we get here that human life means nothing anymore to most people, especially the Nigerian police? I have seen and heard so much about the police that I am beginning to be afraid of the Nigerian police.
In Owerri, Imo State, every minute, you see uniformed police officers, sometimes they are in mufti, beating up somebody in his car, particularly young people, and alleging that they are Yahoo-Yahoo boys. You stop somebody in a car, you accuse him of being Yahoo-Yahoo (Internet fraudster) and instantly convict him. The next thing, you take him away for ‘settlement,’ or he may never return to his people.
Time to totally reform of the Nigerian police is NOW.
•Dr. Martins P. Iwuanyanwu, fcalm, is the founder of Leadership Watch, an NGO in special consultative status with the economic and social council of the United Nations
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