Is the federal government a friend of the police?

In the last two Saturdays I have read with extreme discomfort the excellently written stories in the Saturday Sun of September 5 and 12, 2026. The stories titled “Police Barracks of Shame” depict, very graphically, the sordid situation of police barracks in various states of the federation. These stories with pictures reveal to us the decaying structures unpainted and unrenovated; the ramshackle buildings that could collapse any minute from now; the sardinised space occupied by many policemen; the shallow wells from which policemen and their families draw drinking water at great risk to their health; the fact that some policemen actually sleep in their offices not because duty demands but because that is the only place where they can lay their heads. It is incredible that some families of policemen share toilets, with no running water, no electricity, with cracked walls of buildings and leaking roofs. These constitute the very definition of squalor. Some months ago, I saw some of the barracks in Lagos. I just restrained myself from vomiting. In the 70s when I was schooling in Lagos I used to spend my short vacations with my cousin who was a member of the mobile police force. The place was horrible, more horrible than horrible but I could not complain because my cousin was doing me a favour by allowing me to squat with him. If I didn’t stay there I would have smelt the rancid odour of frustration. Eventhough the place was as boring as a place of detention I had no choice but to stay there. Five decades later, nothing has changed. Our policemen are still wrestling with sorrow. We have not yet given them fig leaves with which they can cover their nakedness. Are we waiting for them to organise a mutiny before we do something drastic to improve their situation? During President Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidency I was a board member of the Governing Council of the Police Service Commission. We travelled to a few countries to study their police systems and how we could significantly improve ours. We submitted a report to the Government. If the situation of our policemen is still as bad today as it was in those days it means that the report was buried in the bowels of bureaucracy and forgotten. In Nigeria the reigning philosophy is that we must always leave everthing to God to do for us but God is in the details of what we choose to do. If we do not plan and execute our plans in detail God cannot help us.

When you look at the salaries of our policemen you must inevitably come to the conclusion that our policemen are not in fine fettle. A police constable in Nigeria earns a monthly salary of between N43, 000 and N78, 000 plus some meagre allowances such as uniform allowance or some allowance related to what duty they are assigned to. However, there is a Ministerial and Stakeholders Committee led by the Ministry of Police Affairs that is expected to do a comprehensive review of the police salary structure, allowances, insurance and pension benefits. But the report is apparently not yet ready and in police circles the discussion is that the Federal Government is partial to the Armed Forces and neglecting the Police. As you are already aware, President Bola Tinubu has approved a salary increase of between 30% and 80% for the Armed Forces with effect from September 1, 2026. And the insinuation is expanded to include the fact that the government took the decision on the military to avoid another coup attempt. These are all speculations and they only arise because nothing is being said or done for the police who are on the street in every state of the country every day. I urge the Federal Government to fasttrack whatever it wants to do for members of the Nigeria Police Force. The Police Force bears the biggest burden of the insecurity facing Nigeria because they are available in all the 774 Local Governments of the 36 States. But they are only about 380, 000 serving a population of about 230 million people. That is grossly short of the United Nations prescription of one policeman to 400 persons. Out of this about 100, 000 of them are still assigned to guard political elites and some moneyed VIPs. This has therefore reduced further the number of policemen available to serve the general populace. Eventhough a number of soldiers have been deployed to do what ordinarily ought to be police duties, we must not perpetually assign soldiers to do police duties. It is because of the high degree of insecurity that the Armed Forces have had to be deployed to do regular security duties. But that will change once State Police is established because there will be more policemen in various towns and villages then. And Armed Forces personnel will only be invited into scenes of insecurity when the police is unable to cope with the situation.

The Police are doing a very risky job if you consider the high level of insecurity in various parts of the country. The Police have had some slogans that they have been mouthing for years. One of them is “The police is your friend.” Many people who have been harassed by the Police at one point or another think differently about the slogan. Instead, they see the police or some of them as an enemy. There are also the famous ones that the police drop when they are at checkpoints, a roundabout way of begging for money. These are: “Your boys are here ooo.” “Territory is safe” (even if it is no longer safe). Several people dash them money because they know that they are doing a difficult job with low pay and humiliating circumstances. Some of them mount illegal checkpoints with two or three of them and no official vehicle. Their motive is not security but money eventhough checkpoints have been officially banned. Even the officially approved stop-and-search groups have now opened a new conversation line that says: “I want to drink water.” If you want to drink water why don’t you go ahead and drink it instead of telling a car driver. But that is the new begging formula. If you pull out a bottle of water from your car and give to him he will not thank you because that is not what he wants. What he wants is kudi, owo, money. Nothing else. This is humiliation of our police not only by the policemen themselves but also by their employers who pay them peanuts. As the saying goes “if you pay peanuts you can only get monkeys to work for you.”

Nigeria as a country, has been victimized by corruption for decades now. And the police on the streets are the visible signs of that corruption. Their corruption may be at a lower level but it is still corruption. They exhibit this level of corruption because by refusing to pay them decent wages we are allowing their lives to go the wrong way, the corrupt way. And these are people who should be, by their profession, in the vanguard of curbing corruption. But as Robert Ludlum said: “when push comes to shove, people opt for living.” I am not making any excuses for them. I cannot. We are the ones that assigned them to do the heavy lifting for us but we are not paying them anything that is commensurate with the assignment we have given to them. There is a saying that “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar “ Yes, that is the unvarnished truth. Another saying is that “you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” No, you cannot. That is also the unvarnished truth. So the police we have today is the police that we deserve considering how badly we treat them. I see lots of policemen under the rain without any raincoat. Why should that happen? Even young boys who sell gala or plantain chips on the streets of Lagos wear raincoat. Years ago, policemen used to wear raincoats with “police” on it. In other countries, developed or developing, that is still the case. Why are we different and yet we expect the best from them? We hope to get diamond from a coal mine. That is a miracle that will never happen, not now, not today, not tomorrow. Having a police force that can help us to have a safe and secure country is not Easy Street. We must work hard for it. It is easy to criticize our policemen for being rude, for being extortionists, for being bribe takers, for being human rights violators but we are largely responsible for the way they are. Let us treat them better, much better, than we are treating them now. Then we can feel free to punish the errant ones without the sickening sensation of doing something wrong. That way we can make the police our friend. And then they will not keep turning our days into nights as they are doing now.