One year without Solomon Arase

By Ogbonnaya Nwota

The call came early on Sunday, 31 August 2025, in the way bad news always travels in the Force, by telephone, from a colleague who could not find the words to begin. Dr. Solomon Ehigiator Arase, the eighteenth indigenous Inspector-General of Police, was gone at sixty-nine.

A year has passed since that morning. I have learned that grief of this kind does not fade so much as change its character. What was raw last September has settled into a question I have not been able to put down. What are we doing with what he left behind?

I write as an interested party. I owe the man my career.

I met him first when he was a Deputy Commissioner and Principal Staff Officer to the Inspector-General of Police, and I was a young cadet called to the Force Headquarters as one of the ten best graduating officers of my course. I had rehearsed answers to questions he never asked. What he wanted to know was what I had been reading lately, and what I made of it. When I answered, he listened in a way that unsettled me, because it was the listening of a man who might actually revise his position. I left that office having learned something the Academy had not taught me, which is that authority does not need to raise its voice.

It was years before I understood how I came to be in that room at all. Long before my course passed out, he had written a memorandum to the then Inspector-General proposing that the most academically distinguished cadets of every course be posted to the IGP’s Secretariat, not as decoration but as apprentices. He wanted young officers exposed early to the level at which decisions are actually taken, and he wanted them mentored while they were there. In an institution where advancement has too often followed the geography of a surname, he put his name behind merit and then spent years tending what he had planted. Some of us are the crop.

That was the man in private. He corrected you without leaving a wound. His advice was so plain that it slightly embarrassed me at the time, and it has outlasted nearly everything more sophisticated I have been taught since. Read widely, think properly about what you read, and do not let yourself stop growing.

It would be a small and sentimental thing, though, to remember Solomon Arase only as a courteous senior officer. He was a reformer with a thesis, and the thesis sounds unremarkable anywhere else in the world while remaining close to revolutionary here. A police officer should investigate before he arrests.

Almost everything Nigerians complain about in their police is contained in that inversion. A force that arrests first and reasons afterwards does not merely inconvenience innocent people, though it does that on a scale we have long stopped counting. It also ruins itself. Investigative skill decays when nobody has any real need of it, and after a while the cell is doing the work that the case file used to do. Arase understood this, which is why he pressed intelligence-led policing as a working discipline rather than as language for a press briefing. Gather the intelligence first, test whether it holds, and only then move on a suspect. He was making an operational argument for a constitutional principle, that a man is innocent until a court says otherwise.

He then did something none of his predecessors had done with the same conviction. He gave the Nigerian public a telephone number. The Complaint Response Unit meant that a citizen humiliated at a checkpoint had somewhere to take it, and that somebody at the other end was expected to answer. Anyone who remembers what it was like to have no such number will understand why officers of my generation still talk about it.

His reach went well past our borders. His involvement in the development of the Méndez Principles on Effective Interviewing, now the international standard for questioning suspects without coercion, placed a Nigerian policeman inside a global effort to replace the extraction of confessions with the pursuit of truth. We are not often on that side of the table. He was, and he had earned the seat.

When he was appointed Chairman of the Police Service Commission in January 2023, he carried the same convictions into the slower work of oversight. He invested in the Commission’s staff, on the simple reasoning that people who supervise the police must know more, not less, about human rights, accountability and the investigation of misconduct. He established a Complaint Monitoring Unit so that the Commission could see for itself whether public grievances were actually being attended to. And he had no appetite for the theatre of institutional rivalry that has soured relations between the Commission and the Force for years. He was not going to humiliate the institution he had once led. Neither was he going to let the Commission become an appendage of it.

I watched all of this from close range as his Special Assistant. I also saw the man behind it, a father figure of unforced courtesy, and a thoroughly good companion whose laughter could take the edge off the worst week.

So the question stands. What are we doing with it?

Honouring him does not call for another wreath. It calls for intelligence-led policing to become the thing our investigators are actually trained and equipped for and assessed on, rather than a phrase recited at workshops. Complaint mechanisms have to be funded and publicised and then audited, so that the citizen who calls gets an answer rather than a warning. The Police Service Commission needs both the independence and the money to exercise its statutory authority over recruitment, promotion and discipline the way he exercised it. And the Force would do well to revive the pipeline he built, to go looking for its brightest young officers, put them where decisions are taken, and grow them on purpose for the leadership this country will need in twenty years.

None of that is sentiment. It is simply the unfinished portion of his argument.

I have a small answer of my own to the question I keep asking. I am close to finishing a book, Beyond Impunity: Towards an Accountable Policing in Nigeria, and it is dedicated to his memory. The dedication is not really to the ranks, Inspector-General of Police and Chairman of the Police Service Commission, though he carried both with honour. It is to what he stood for while he held them, and to the man he remained when the titles were set aside. The argument in those pages did not begin with me. I first heard it in an office at Force Headquarters, from a Deputy Commissioner who wanted to know what I had been reading.

We do not grieve as men without hope. He lived fully and he lived deliberately. His legacy is not in the files he signed or the offices he occupied. It is in the officers he formed, in the institutions he steadied, and in an unfashionable idea he never gave up on, that a police force can be effective and humane at the same time.

We know now what we lost last August. The next year will tell whether we understood him.

May his soul rest in the dignity he wore so lightly. Adieu, mentor and boss.

• Dr. Nwota, an Assistant Commissioner of Police was Special Assistant to the late Arase when he chaired the Police Service Commission. He is now Director, Research and Planning, at the National Institute of Police Studies.