By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
When Olusegun Obasanjo returned as the president of Nigeria in May 1999, according to Mohammed Dikko (MD) Yusuf, a former Inspector-General of Police, (IGP) he “inherited a Police Force that was poorly equipped, decimated in numerical strength, deprived of necessary logistics, and lacking, as it were, moral and public support necessary for effective performance and the enhancement of the security of the nation.”
Former IGP, MD Yusuf said these in the report he submitted in 2008 to President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua as the Chair of the second Presidential Commission on Police Reform to report in as many years. Headed by former Deputy Inspector-General of Police (DIG), Muhammadu Danmadami, he first submitted its report in May 2006 to President Yar’Adua’s predecessor and benefactor, President Olusegun Obasanjo.
In
August 2012, another retired DIG, Parry Osayande, reported to President
Goodluck Jonathan as the chair a third Presidential Commission on Police Reform
to report in the six years between 2006-2012. The ritual of these reports
achieved one thing: they crystallised a diagnosis of the problems of the Nigeria
Police Force (NPF) and they are many.
When
President Obasanjo returned to power as a civilian in 1999 after 15 unbroken
years of military rule, there were an estimated 137,000 personnel in the NPF,
representing a police-to-population ratio of approximately 1:876.5. The UN
Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) recommends a ratio of 222 per 100,000 or
1:450.
To
address what he believed was a serious shortfall in police personnel, President
Obasanjo directed the recruitment of 200,000 additional police personnel over
five years from 2000 to 2004 at the rate of 40,000 recruits every year. By
2003, the police population was estimated to be 260,000 and by 2005, Human
Rights Watch estimated that Nigeria had 325,000 police personnel.
President Obasanjo deserves credit
for identifying the situation with the NPF as a priority and giving attention
proactively to the need to fix it.
In
a mere five years straddling his two presidential terms, he had managed to
completely redress the deficit of police-to-population ratio in the country. In
2007, the NPF claimed reported that it had achieved a police-to-population
ratio of approximately 1:400, based on an estimated force strength of about
360,000 police officers. At the beginning of President Yar’Adua’s tenure in
2008, this had climbed modestly to 370,900.
But
this came at a cost. At the time, all the training institutions in the NPF
could only accommodate an intake of 14,000 per year. With no additional
investments to upgrade police training institutions, it meant that standards of
training, doctrine and orientation had to be sacrificed in the expedited
recruitment. When he reported in 2008, MD Yusuf pointed out three consequences
that have come to haunt the Force since then.
First,
the expedited recruitment was “carried out in a very unwholesome manner without
adherence to the established rules and guidelines governing the screening and
recruitment of candidates”, which led to an influx of “suspected criminals,
people with physical deformities, doubtful background, over-aged and
educationally unqualified barely literate entrants into the Police Force.”
This
“grossly compromised standards and resulted in widespread abuse of established
procedure”, resulting in “the enlistment of unsuitable candidates…. many of
whose suitability to wear the respected uniform of the Force is in doubt.”
Second, it transpired that many
politicians had used the opportunity to insinuate elements from their private
networks of violence into the force for future political gain. As a result, the
expedited recruitment created an internal market in the outsourcing of police
assets.
In
its 2008 report, the MD Yusuf Presidential Commission on Police Reform
estimated that 27 per cent of police personnel were engaged in personal guard
and protective duties for private individuals and VIPs, thereby creating a
situation in which “the rich and powerful behave with impunity because of
police protection.” When it reported in 2012, the Parry Osayande Presidential
Commission on Police Reform put this proportion at over one-third.
Third,
the Force was chronically underfunded to the extent that, as IGP Ibrahim Kpotun
Idris pointed out in 2017, “budgetary allocations on paper (were) insufficient
to meet the financial needs of the Force, (and) the actual releases are far
below what is budgeted.”
As a result, the outsourcing of
police personnel for guard duties became a subsistence and wellbeing supplement
for the officers so deployed and a source of revenue for the commanding
officers deploying them, who were often privately rewarded for doing so but
also got through that to secure the patronage of their rich and politically
connected benefactors.
This
is the structure that President
Bola Ahmed Tinubu did not appear to have taken account of in
designing his recent directive to the Inspector-General of Police to withdraw
“police officers guarding VIPs for core police duties.” Four days after this
directive, on November 27, the IGP proudly announced that 11,566 of officers
and men under his command had been ordered withdrawn in compliance with the
directive. He cleverly failed to say how many had complied.
Olusegun Adeniyi, who served as
presidential spokesperson when MD Yusuf submitted his report in 2008, warned
firmly that the police officers “may not obey” the president or their
Inspector-General.
In
his directive, President Tinubu had, somewhat naively, added that “VIPs who
want police protection will now request well-armed personnel from the Nigeria
Security and Civil Defence Corps.” The result will be that officer of the NSCDC
across the board will now make more money at the expense of the police
personnel whom they will be replacing.
A
presidential directive cannot fix this political economy of policing in
Nigeria. That requires imaginative and committed commitment of time and
leadership. Police personnel depend on the crumbs from the table of VIP
benefactors for survival and subsistence.
With
no functional police training facilities, many of them have been denied
exposure to basic training, formation, and professionalism. They are unlikely
to see their uniforms as evidence of a bond to get killed in a gun-fight with
Ansaru, Boko Haram, Mahmuda, or any of the number of nihilist groups that now
afflict the country.
For
many police officers, desertion will be a better alternative than compliance
with the order. There will be no capacity to replace the number of officers who
could choose to do that. For the leadership of the Force, therefore, discretion
is likely to be the better part of valour. Moreover, the Force itself relies on
the market that it has created in the commercialisation of its human assets for
significant informal funding.
For President Tinubu, this is
evidence of a failure that he must own. It is not as if the crisis of
insecurity in Nigeria is one that he was unaware of before he assumed office.
On the contrary, he had weighed in on the matter repeatedly both as an
opposition leader and as a senior member of the ruling APC before 2023.
Yet,
since assuming office over 30 months ago, he has failed to identify the issue
as a priority or to address it with the forcefulness and imagination required.
Many now believe that he is issuing incomprehensible and untheorised directives
under pressure from the fulminations of a foreign leader.
The
presidency is not one job. It is many jobs in one. Some of those roles are
delegable. But the job of Commander-In-Chief is not. As president, Bola Ahmed
Tinubu has excelled in the delegable dimensions of the office. But he has been
mostly missing in action in relation to the non-delegable aspects of the
presidency.
In
his most recent directives, he has been found out. It is well possible that his
presidency will come to be defined by how he re-tools. That could begin with
finding his way to coherence on the issue of police reform.
*Odinkalu,
a lawyer and teacher, can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
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