How far can Britain go in redeeming our police?

TO Nigerians who have long been agonising about the deplorable state of our nation’s police, recent news that President Umaru Yar’Adua has secured the help of Britain in redeeming the force must bring some cheers.  Although it hurts one’s patriotic pride that we must go to the former colonial power for this kind of assistance, the reality today demands that one must swallow this pride in the interest of a higher patriotism, in the search for a police force that can perform those functions expected of the police in a law - governed society.

To be honest, it is not only the police that could use such pride-swallowing assistance.  Virtually all our institutions have seriously deteriorated from the enviable levels they were at the time Nigerian rulers took over from the British colonial powers, the decline being most precipitate in the last two decades. 

Education, health services, provision of potable water, power, transportation, security and if one may say so, even our humanity index have suffered severe declines under the persistent bad governance and corruption of military rulers and their selfishly in-bred civilian successors.  It was this reality that forced the late humorous politician, Chief Sam Mbakwe, to ruefully wish at one point that we invite the British back to come and help us straighten things out once again, and it is also what others see, especially our detractors, that makes them wonder whether the  blackman is in fact capable of governing himself.

I need not bore the reader with all the evidence that show that our police force exists today only in name and appearance.  What with the myriad of unsolved murders, political and non-political; the ease with which citizens are assassinated with the hired assasins evading capture; the escalating numbers of violent and unsolved bank and home robberies;  the increasing involvement of the police themselves in crimes; the frequent abuse of official weapons by policemen to settle personal scores and take innocent lives; the unending cases of accidental discharges of police weapons; the complete ignorance of or willful neglect of procedures for handling criminal suspects while respecting their civil rights; and the easy susceptibility of the police to corruption in the discharge of their duties, leading to their routinely aiding and abetting criminal activities, their misuse by wealthy citizens to victimize poorer ones and their frequent and deliberate suppression of cases against affluent criminals ready to pay for their liberties.  All these have made the police to fall far short of public expectations in the performance of its traditional roles as a force for the maintenance of law and order and justify the present SOS to Britain.

In seeking British assistance, however, to upgrade the force, one must identify precisely in what areas the British can be of help, and in what areas they cannot.  It is good that the Interior Minister, Maj General Godwin Abbe has been directed by the president to constitute a high powered committee of serving and retired police officers for this purpose, but I believe the committee could be improved by the inclusion of members of the civil society especially those who have, over the years,  actively canvassed for police reforms.  The problems of the police, as I see them, are of four kinds, namely first, the problem of training; second, the problem of structure and organisation; third, the problem of corruption, associated indiscipline and erosion of standards; and fourth, the problem of political constraints to their operational effectiveness. Of the above four problems, the British can be useful in only one area and that is the area of training.  All the other problems can only be tackled by Nigerians themselves.  There has been no shortage of ideas in these areas from patriotic citizens over the years but these have always been mindlessly resisted by successive governments of the day.

Now that Yar’Adua seems open to ideas from the British, perhaps he needs to be reminded of some of those ideas dealing with issues beyond training which have been actively canvassed domestically, and which I believe will go a long way if implemented, in improving the effectiveness of our police.  On organisation and structure, we must decentralize the police command to allow states to have their own police.  Even within each state, if the local governments cannot have their own police, then the police posted to each of them should be indigenes of the area.  A localised police force will be more subject to social and communal restraints against bad behaviour than a centralised and impersonal one controlled from Abuja.  Furthermore, experience in other countries has shown that the police are more effective when they live within the communities they police and are fully integrated into them.  This also dispenses with the need for constructing expensive police barracks.  It would therefore seem that the idea of local policing which seemed to have been reluctantly accepted by the immediate past IG should be carried to its logical conclusion by recognising state police in our constitution.  The British are not likely to want to dabble in such matters even if they believe it is the way out.

On the political constraints to police effectiveness, abuses of the police under President Obasanjo provide irrefutable evidence that a police force under the control of the president cannot be an effective instrument for the maintenance of law and order.  The police, whether at federal or state level, must not be under the control of the executive arm of government.  A police force under executive control is a potential instrument for the sustenance of executive authoritarianism and dictatorship, the cover-up of state – sponsored crimes, the protection of official corruption and the perpetration of election rigging.  Because it is used to cover-up official corruption, it itself becomes a bed of corruption.  Instructively, Gordon Brown does not control any police force in Britain and neither does George Bush control any in the United States and furthermore, both countries have highly decentralized police structures.  We must devise a means of insulating the police from executive control and interference such that the highest authorities in the land can themselves be apprehended by the police when they flout our laws.  This too, we should not need the British to tell us.

Corruption and indiscipline are siamese  twins.  One of the ways corruption manifests in the force is the abandonment of merit-based promotions in favour of biased preferments, leading to the collapse of discipline and standards. Obviously, we cannot have a force that is less corrupt than the political leadership itself, so any success in reducing the level of corruption in the police will be tied to how much we succeed in reducing the level of corruption in the polity as a whole.  A Tafa Balogun was a logical product of a corruption – infested Obasanjo administration and we cannot expect saintly police men and officers under political brigands presiding over the affairs of state.  That is why Yar’Adua needs to preach less and do more to drive it home that no one, no matter how highly placed, will be allowed to profit from corruption.  The signals from him and his attorney general at the moment, do not convey this message.  The British themselves know this and would probably not want to rock the boats, as our guests.

So, let the British come and train our policemen on the use of the latest police equipment, the latest crime investigation technology, and the proper psychological orientation of the police in a humane, civil, democratic society, but all that training will come to nought unless we, on our part give the police the independence to perform its roles free of executive interference and provide a corruption – punishing, merit driven environment in which the police  can work and uphold standards.  Equally important, we must amend our constitution to allow for state and local control of police forces.