IGP Mohammed Abubakar Adamu
By Promise Adiele
Fela, the late enigmatic afro-beat maestro, and social crusader, in his song “Sorrow, Tears, and Blood” captures some aspects of brutal and sadistic attributes inherent in Nigeria’s police and military establishments. For some members of the police and the military, torturing, slapping, and whipping ordinary, defenseless citizens appear to be a birthright that must be morbidly lived out. Some officers of the police and the military seem to be in informal competition to bludgeon fellow citizens to damnation. According to Fela, Sorrow, tears, and blood are their regular trademark. The populace is aware that the police and the military try to conceal their savage vices under a cloak of assumed sophistication and virtue. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 era has given the men in uniform another opportunity to war against their fellow citizens and this has not gone unnoticed by conscious observers.
Anxiety, despair, despondency, and many negative conditions have all conspired against humanity across the world following the outbreak of the lethal COVID-19. These conditions delicately hang in the air, threatening to descend with fury and rage. However, while these conditions are ominously bidding their times to finally harvest humanity, two kinds of viruses, coronavirus and hunger virus, currently hold the world by the jugular, especially African countries with their documented anaemic economic conditions inflicted on the motherland by successive unconscionable leadership. In Nigeria, while the populace struggle and battle with coronavirus and hunger virus, there is another kind of virus presently plaguing the people, brutality virus enunciated by our security outfits.
All over Nigeria, there are reported cases of manhandling and brutality by these overzealous officers who relish any opportunity to inflict pain and agony on their fellow citizens. I saw a video of some military officers forcing a young man to swim inside a cesspool. His offence – he was standing in front of his living premises apparently to receive fresh air when these military men pounced on him, inflicting the worst kind of human degradation. As I watched the young man swim inside the filthy pool with pallid agony, I flinched in disgust and with some measure of strong will, controlled my bowels from forced regurgitation.
Recently in Osun state, South West of Nigeria, two police officers were dismissed because, in their lockdown assignment, they brutalized a helpless woman, causing her disgrace and bodily harm. In Ogbor Hill Aba Abia State, a police inspector, while trying to enforce the lockdown, killed one Mr. Chibuisi, a 44-year-old man with a wife and three children. According to the then commissioner of police in Abia state Mr. Ene Okon, the offending police officer was arrested and handed over to SCID. In the same Abia state, a police sergeant killed a 21-year-old young man, Chukwubuike Onuoha for straying outside his compound during the lockdown.
There are other cases of police and military brutality across the country. According to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) more than 18 people have died in the hands of the police and the military since the nationwide lockdown. This calls to question the rationale behind asking armed men to enforce lockdown. Looking around the neighbourhoods and streets in Nigeria, the sight of heavily armed security operatives with AK-47 riffles gives the impression that there is war in Nigeria. Why would officers be armed just to enforce lockdown?
Even before the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, Nigerians lived in awe of men in uniform but the lockdown has witnessed a rise in impunity, brutality, and inhuman treatment from those who out to protect the people.
There are arguments whether total lockdown is the answer to the fight against coronavirus in a country like Nigeria where the informal sector accounts for a substantial percentage of the workforce. Of course, many Nigerians live on a daily income, therefore when they do not go out in a day, they are faced with hunger and starvation. While I do not quarrel with the stay at home order as a response to the ravaging COVID-19, its mode of implementation must be reviewed and readdressed.
When people stay at home, they are devastated by hunger, when they step out of their houses, they stand the risk of contracting the deadly virus or being harassed and killed by fellow citizens in uniform. This is the present dilemma a Nigerian faces. Let us not flounder on the quicksand of argument or rationalization, the current total lockdown is inimical to the circumstances of millions of Nigerians. It has become an avenue for the police and the military to extort people and allow them to move around. Those who are not able to pay their way for movement are punished or even killed. Recently, an inspector of police in Okota was filmed collecting 40,000 naira as a bribe from a motorist who went to get food items for his family.
That particular incident was reported but many such incidents are not reported and therefore not known. Perhaps, had the man not parted with the money, he would have lost his life. It becomes a very anxious situation for Nigerians who do not know what snare to avoid, whether the police, COVID-19 or hunger.
The question to ask is this – are the police and military hierarchy in Nigeria not aware of the unprofessional conduct of some of their men assigned to enforce the lockdown? Is it that the military and police establishments do not give adequate orientation to their men before unleashing them on the populace? What exactly is the rationale for arming officers with AK-47 riffles just to enforce lockdown? Are these officers promoted on account of the number of fellow citizens they maim or kill daily? Last week, along Awolowo way in Ikeja, I saw a military officer alight from his car with two other junior officers. Immediately the senior officer, with an immediate hideousness and undisguised cruelty conveyed in his starched khaki uniform, ordered his men to put an Okada man in the car boot for an offence that was not immediately clear to me. In a show of degraded sensuality, the two young military officers beat up the hapless motorbike rider, dragged him behind the car, opened the boot of the car, forced him inside, closed the boot, and drove away. I recoiled in sickening outrage and looked up to heaven for immediate intervention which never came. I was sufficiently violated and for some days, I struggled to extirpate the horrible image from my mind.
While not totally relaxing the lockdown, it must be reviewed to give room for survival of the people who are ostensibly being protected. The brutal truth is that the palliatives from the government at the federal and state levels are like drops of water in the ocean. Nigerians are independent-minded people. Therefore to suddenly ask them to depend on stipends from the government to survive is asking for too much. To suddenly hand Nigerians over to those who oppress them is to advance the frontiers of defeat against a people who are already groaning under the heavyweight of economic hardship.
Dr. Adiele teaches in the Department of English, Mountain Top University via promee01@yahoo.com