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Security agents as security risk
Nothing best underlines the unmistakable
advent of anarchy in Nigeria than the current trend whereby security agents now
constitute themselves into a potent threat to lives and property. Indeed, when
the very agencies charged with the responsibility of ensuring the safe
existence of people now turn around to terrorise them, and collude with
hoodlums to foment mayhem and inflict pain on society, the resultant enlarged
fear of insecurity in the absence of any credible and functional security
apparatus has the great potential of pushing people into unhealthy desperations
that prepare the ground for unfettered anarchy.
Only recently,
President Olusegun Obasanjo shocked the world with the disclosure that
policemen in Nigeria now hire out their guns to armed robbers to facilitate
their deadly operations. Given the high position of responsibility occupied by
the President, we have no reason to doubt the veracity of his chilling
disclosure. The only thing to add,
however, is that the President was merely re-echoing a stark truth that has
since become our nightmarish existential experience, but which we are all too
scared to admit. Indeed, a policeman that hires out his gun to an armed bandit
will most unlikely be willing to respond to any distress call from an area
besieged by his clients and partners in crime. We must deplore the situation
that provides incentive for this frightening degeneration of our security
agents to a chilling aggravation of the very problem they are constituted to
combat.
Unfortunately, the security agencies are no more
content with merely failing the people at the most critical times, but have now
become eager accomplices in organised terror and banditry. Only last week,
there were reports that three policemen were dismissed in Adamawa State for
making their uniforms and identity cards available to criminally minded
individuals to facilitate their extortion of money from hapless Nigerians. If
this is not horrifying enough, the chilling event last year on the Third
Mainland Bridge, Lagos, where a distressed motorist witnessed some policemen
hand out guns to robbers shows clearly that we are in more danger than we have
ever imagined. His car had broken
down in the middle of the bridge
late in the night, and deciding not to take the risk of footing his way
home by that time of the day, he took the less frightening option of staying
put in his car till morning. About
1.00 am a police van pulled up
nearby. And before long, a bus
equally pulled up by the police van. And before the greatly frightened
man’s eyes, guns changed hands from the police to the fearful men of the
night. The hoodlums sped off, only to resurface at the same spot by 4:00 a.m.
This time, not only the guns were returned to the policemen, but some baggage,
spoils of robbery operation, followed.
The present government had better wake up to the full
import of this unqualified decay burrowing into the very heart of the
nation’s security bulwark and rouse itself to the realisation that the
nation is saddled with a clear and present danger. It is most risky to remain
complacent about the whole thing
merely because, at present, it appears that only the poor masses are at the
receiving end of its destructive consequences.
The Nigerian Police is in dire need of an all-encompassing over-haul. And the
best spot to start the exercise is right from the top where the Inspector
General of Police, Mr. Tafa Balogun, is labouring under a credibility crises
arising from unanswered allegations of corruption and gross abuse of office. Certainly, no genuine effort at
reforming the police will succeed in the absence of any worthy paradigm at the top. The present
IG may have to give way for a more pro-active, transparent, people-centred and altruistic police leadership to
show the way to a refreshingly new era of transparency and selfless service in
the Force.
The gross indiscipline currently ravaging every
security arm in this country has become too scaring to be ignored. When there
are no reports of policemen killing innocent people for refusing to part with N20 at police checkpoints, we
are being told that some naval men are involved in oil theft. During the last clash between
the police and the Air Force in Lagos, the police alleged that the Airmen had
turned their base into a hideout for criminals.
It should be clear that we are already reaping the
fruits of the recklessness and unqualified profligacy of the ruling class,
which saps the will of the citizenry to be patriotic. Only selfless and
transparent rulers are capable of exciting patriotic sentiments in the masses.
So an attempt to reform the security agencies must not be devoid of a
simultaneous exercise at the corridors of power.
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