Friday Musings with Ayo Olukotun ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com 07055841236
“From Taraba to Sokoto, to the South-South, people don’t feel secure until they see the military. I am pleased to make the increase in the salaries and allowances in the hope that it will increase the performance index of the police”
– President Muhammadu Buhari, The PUNCH, Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Conversation has collated around the recent increase in the salaries and allowances of the police by President Muhammadu Buhari.
Information remains patchy on the actual size of the mark-up, with at least one source informing that a memo attached to the letter granting the pay boost contains details of the rent subsidy, while remaining silent on the actual pay. Nonetheless, the trickle of information available reveals that the Inspector-General will take home N3.3m as rent subsidy, police commissioners N1.5m; and a corporal, N88,000. It is still unclear whether the rent subsidies took account of differential rent charges in cities, suburbia and the rural hinterlands; what is known, however, is that pay rises for the police are few and far between, causing many to draw a linkage between predatory policing and startling welfare deficits.
As Buhari himself admitted, the police are increasingly overwhelmed in their efforts to maintain internal security, to the point where they are fast losing credibility. Mentioned in this connection are ongoing challenges to national security such as kidnapping, daring robberies and sundry violent crimes across the country. Interestingly too, the upgrade in police pay has come barely a fortnight after the disastrous attack by Boko Haram insurgents on the Metele stronghold resulting in scores of deaths of Nigerian soldiers. That apart, hotspots like Zamfara, Southern Kaduna, Benue, Plateau, Kogi and Delta continue to seize national attention, creating apprehensions about the capacity of our law enforcement institutions. In other words, even though questions have been raised about the timing of the enhanced police pay suspiciously close to next year’s general election, it is nonetheless a fact that the upgrade is badly needed to shore up the flagging morale and ethical outlook of the Nigeria Police.
As known, for several years, there have been complaints, even from retired senior police officers about the capacity, efficiency and hand-to-mouth character of the force operatives. It was not so many years ago, to give an example, when a former Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar, lamented that, “The Nigeria Police Force has fallen to its lowest level. Police duties have become commercialised and provided at the whims and caprices of the highest bidder”. Such moans were corroborated in a 2017 survey conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics ranking the police as the most corrupt institution. In the same vein, three global think thanks, namely, the World Internal Security and Police Index, Institute for Economics and Peace, and the International Police Science Association, in a 2017 report, rated our police as one of the least capable on the globe. Expectedly, the force rebutted the classification, citing the superior performance and valiant output of our police when they go on international assignments. However that may be, it is pertinent to recall that there are some other reports which speak to the lack of capacity as well as shortfalls in process, legitimacy, and outcomes.
We do not denigrate the police, considering that several of them are labouring in heroic circumstances, often lacking as they do, in, weaponry, supporting infrastructure, as well as skills to efficiently tackle hardened and highly organised crime rings. To take an aspect of the problem, at a time when other police forces are brainstorming about terrorism, social media, and cybercrime, increasingly constituting new crime frontiers, our police appear to be trapped in elementary stages of crime bursting. That is not all. Apart from an inadequate police to citizen ratio, there are serious welfare issues, some of which came to light sensationally a few years ago when Channels Television focused its searchlight on the deplorable condition of the elite police training institute at Ikeja, Lagos. Of interest is the fact that very little has changed between then and now in the area of police welfare. Indeed, it is pertinent to wonder why a political elite with a national project would leave an important law and order institution in the dishevelled state in which it has existed under successive governments. Two further points are worth making in this connection, the first is that police squalour, which has given rise to police predation, that by its own admission, uses bribes to supplement an inadequate budget, is a metaphor for most of our national institutions which are far from healthy, a point to which I shall return shortly.
The second is that the current status of the police has not persisted for want of proclamations and commissions of inquiry. Since the inception of the Fourth Republic, every administration, beginning with Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, has set up a presidential commission on police reform presumably with a view to understanding and doing something about its problems and challenges; hence, we had a presidential committee on police reform in 2005 under Obasanjo headed by Dan Madami; another in 2008 under President Umaru Yar’Adua headed by M.D. Yusuf, and yet another one in 2012, by President Goodluck Jonathan, under the leadership of Parry Osayande. In a pattern characteristic of state futility, these inquiries did not translate to any significant changes in the fortunes, capability and topicality of the force.
The underlying problem amplifies the issue of the status of our national institutions, security institutions especially, namely, the absence of a state-building project which will grapple with endemic dysfunctions in order to produce a capable and developmental state. A capable state does not come into existence by mouthing slogans but by the conscious programme of a reformist elite taking the necessary steps to build one. You cannot have a reform without reformers and a reform template; and there is a world of difference between a wish list and a programme of action driven by social purpose. When, about a decade ago, Georgia decided to reform its police, it came as package of interventions which tackled predatory policing through a crackdown on corruption in a bid to end police linkage with organised crime, a purge of officers linked with stupor and corruption, as well as, a reform of cognate institutions undergirded by a public demand for wider reforms. It begs the imagination to assume that merely increasing the salaries and allowances of the police will translate into an efficient and effective force. We are making the same sort of idle assumption in believing that an anti-corruption programme targeted mainly at the opposition will result in a reformed public service. It takes much more to bring about these outcomes. In essence, raising police pay is a necessary but far from sufficient step to bring about a capable and reformed police or state. More importantly is the need for a political elite, armed with the correct political vision and script of transforming security institutions, as part of a wider state building project. Unfortunately, we do not seem to have that kind of reformist elite on the horizon, as even the mainstream opposition party is reduced to picking holes in the agenda of the ruling party, instead of advancing a truly renovative project.
This is the dilemma of the hour.
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