Nigeria is daily inundated with stories of police malfeasance, of so-called accidental discharge, extrajudicial murder, trigger-happy shootings and attendant cover-ups, torture, human rights abuse, and on top of these, ineffective policing. The police, it is clear, are a poorly equipped and poorly incentivised federal establishment. Indeed if states, which exercise little or no control over the security organisation, were not subsidising the operations of the police, it would in all likelihood have collapsed. But poor funding does not justify a large part of police malfeasance.
Within the constraints of their operations, it is still possible to run a fairly humanised and fairly responsive police. They may not respond promptly to crime emergencies such as kidnapping and armed robbery because of infrastructural shortcomings, but they can at least control what happens at their stations where distressed citizens present their challenges.
There are three ways to handle the declining efficiency and poor image of the police. First, the federal government must declare an emergency in policing to stem the infrastructural decay and operational and attitudinal rot in the Police Force. The government cannot pretend not to appreciate the abysmal level to which the police have sunk. The police need to be restructured, adequately funded and properly equipped — just as efforts are being made to retrain and equip the military — and a firm and organised system of accountability must be instituted. It is not enough for offending policemen to shoot and kill indiscriminately, sometimes for as little as N100, and be dismissed and prosecuted. What of the dead, and the many who may yet die if the malady is not checked? Have dismissal and prosecution of errant policemen deterred other officers from committing casual murder in the name of the state? Clearly the problem is more fundamental than the pirouette of malfeasance, dismissal and prosecution. Senior police officers must be made accountable for the behaviour of their men.
Second, the police leadership must find innovative ways of running the law enforcement organisation and enforcing discipline, including reliving officers of their jobs if they cannot control their men, to prevent the kind of appalling behaviour and impunity now rampant in the Force. The federal government may be reluctant to impose innovation on the police. That is why the police have an Inspector-General. Mr Solomon Arase should sit down with his men and other brilliant and knowledgeable experts to fashion out a way of funding, reorienting and rebuilding the police. The present system is absolutely untenable. Mr Arase must of course understand that if the continuous bad press the police are receiving does not change, it makes his leadership equally untenable. But he must not resign himself to the present situation. Where others have failed, let him prove he can be a success. Despite the handicaps, let him be determined to leave a great and enduring legacy commensurate with his high educational attainments.
Third, the most practical option — and sooner rather than later, the country will come round to this — is to decentralise the police away from federal to state control, and also rejig the revenue allocation formula to reflect the new reality until such a time that economic federalism will be instituted. The fact is that in the past few decades, both the police leadership and the federal government have appeared to lack the will and ingenuity to run the police. It is perhaps time the Buhari administration summoned the courage to join hands with the National Assembly to recast the police as a state institution. The federal government can no longer fund the institution, and obviously cannot even think for it. It is time others attempted a more imaginative approach. The country is already witnessing paralysis in the police. But paralysis is simply not feasible in the present circumstances of deteriorating security situation and police impunity.
NATION
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