Monday, March 13, 2023

Nigeria: The Rise In Police Brutality

 By Tochukwu Ezukanma

This is an Igbo saying: “Eze mua amu, ndi odibo ya e tiwa si ba isi.” It loosely translates to, “If the king laughs, his servants will become delirious with laughter.” In other words, servants are out to impress their master and prove their loyalty to him, and consequently, will carry to the extreme the master’s desires and actions. 

The Nigeria Police Force, in this context, is the servants, and President Buhari is the king. If the government respects, develops, protects and secures Nigerians, the Nigerian police, invariably, will revere and protect Nigerians. But, as the administration obviously despises Nigerian lives, what is expected of its police force – its servants – is commitment to furthering the master’s desires and preferences. It will inevitably despise Nigerian lives, and consequently, be brutal and trigger-happy. 

The current administration allegedly stokes violence across the country and trivializes human life. It reportedly allows bandits and terrorists alarming amplitude to murderously rampage across the country; ethnic irredentists and expansionists seem to have its sympathy. Thus, what used to be periodic clashes between sedentary farmers and itinerant herdsmen and was usually slugged out with knives and bludgeons, took a gruesome twist. It degenerated to routine, meticulously orchestrated and extremely deadly attacks on farming communities by heavily armed herdsmen. 

Armed with machine guns and high-powered assault rifles, emboldened by impunity, and exhibiting strategies and dexterity beyond the capabilities of mere cattle-herders, the herdsmen are terrorizing farming communities: maiming and slaughtering defenceless men, women and children, raping women, torching homes and destroying entire villages across central and southern Nigeria. 

These terrorists seem to be the lords of Nigeria, with an incontestable right to every inch of the country, and can therefore traverse it, and triumphantly and defiantly flaunt their AK47s, rape women, murder the innocent, sack and seize villages. As the horrific consequences of their terrorism increase, and the number of the dead, raped, maimed, bereaved and displaced mounts, the current administration prevaricates and equivocates. 

Banditry is a progeny of ethnic chauvinism, expansionism and warped sense of exclusive right to power. In addition to being pampered and paid staggering amounts of money for their robbery, killing and kidnapping by their victims, fundamentalist politicians and clerics ingratiate them and extol their blood-soaked criminality. Did Sheik Abubakar Gumi not recently laud them as “our warriors?” 

His acclamation of these marauding kidnappers and mass-murderers as “our warriors” is repulsively cold-hearted. It is nauseating; it dramatizes incomparable callousness to the pains, sorrow and death of their victims: thousands of them. However, he can continue to spout his hateful nonsense and express scary disdain for human lives because they seem to conform with the prevailing sentiments within the administration. 

The police force is merely an instrument of the ruling elite; and its handling of Nigerians is a direct reflection of the attitude of the government towards the citizens. What can be expected from a police force whose behaviour seems to reflect acclaim for banditry and terrorism; approval of the mass-murder of the innocent by herdsmen; and dramatized contempt for human lives? It must be palpably contemptuous of Nigerian lives, and thus, kill and degrade the people. Not surprisingly, since 2015, painful, tear-jerking stories of police brutality and extra-judicial killings have been on the increase in Nigeria. 

At Ijora, Lagos State, a sixteen-year-old boy, Emmanuel Chukwu, was killed when the police opened fire on a group of youths that gathered at the police station in protest against possible police connivance with a child kidnapper. According to the boy’s mother, “On getting to the police station, I pleaded that they allow me to see his body but they refused and threatened to shoot me if I didn’t leave immediately”. 

And the Baale went to the station to plead that the mother be allowed access to the son’s corpse. He was arrested and detained till the next day. Why threaten to shoot a mother for wanting to see her son’s corpse? Why arrest and detain a Baale for pleading that a mother be allowed to see the remains of her dead son? It is Apartheid-styled systematic degradation of Nigerians by the police, which unavoidably mirrors the contempt of their masters for the Nigerian masses. 

On Christmas day, 2022, a police man, Drambi Vani, shot and killed a 41-year-old pregnant woman. She was riding with her husband, daughter and other family members on their way home from church when the policeman shot at them and killed the lady. A husband, wife and daughter and family members – what an innocuous, benign group? Still, they were shot at, not by a psychopath on the prowl to steal and kill, but by a policeman, a sentinel of law and order and supposedly, professionally trained, disciplined and self-restrained, and deployed to protect the people. Secondly, the errant policeman is not a police rookie still susceptible to twitchiness, rashness and other strains of unprofessionalism but a veteran police officer of 33 years of service! 

A litany of the wanton killings by the Nigerian police is beyond the scope of this article. The point however is that a police force in the service of a government that places more value on bovine (cow) life than human life will inescapably be derisive of human life. Until there is an attitudinal change within the police force, nothing, not retraining and/or reorientation will considerably reduce these unjustifiable killings by the police. It is only a new found reverence for the sanctity of human life within the ranks of the governing which will inevitably filter down to the ranks of the police force that will drastically reduce the meaningless killings of Nigerians by the Nigerian police. 

*Ezukanma writes from Lagos via maciln18@yahoo.com

No comments:

Post a Comment