Undeniably, Nigerian youths are suffering unspeakable harassment in the hands of the police. Another vivid reminder of the excesses of the police went viral on the Internet after the brutal treatment they meted out to a software developer in Ketu, Lagos. On the spurious pretext of fighting crime, police officers subjected Toni Astro to detention and extortion. His plight, which he narrated via his Twitter account, has exposed the never-ending Gestapo tactics of the Nigeria Police Force.
Many young people have experiences similar to Astro’s ordeal. To some policemen, it is a crime to be gadget-smart. Laptops, iPhones, tablets, iPads, ATM cards, iPods, Bluetooth devices and all such gadgets render the youth candidates for police illegal arrest and detention. This was Astro’s lot recently. He was on his way back from work when policemen stopped him on a commercial motorcycle. According to him, he was arrested simply because he carried a smart-phone, laptop and some IT gadgets. In a digitalised world, this is banality in law enforcement.
As usual, all sensible explanations that these were the tools of his trade made no sense to the officers. At the station, he was threatened with detention at the Kirikiri Maximum Prisons. To regain his freedom, the law enforcers initially demanded N1 million. During the negotiations, he asked for his phone to transfer money to them, which they declined, saying that the transfer would be used to trace them. This means they knew they were engaged in unlawful policing. At the end, he was forced to go to the ATM to withdraw half of his savings for the officers, who had also physically assaulted him. Four officers were arrested after his tweets went viral.
The maltreatment has provoked strong official reaction. The Federal Ministry of Communications warned the police to stop harassing youths found with ICT devices. It noted that the action of the police could “stifle the growth of the ICT sector.” This is the plain truth. Because of police oppression, young people live in perpetual fear. For the word of warning to count, the police should undergo retraining and new orientation in modern law enforcement. All officers who engage in this bad behaviour should be severely dealt with and flushed out of the force.
A few days after Astro’s maltreatment, a fresh incident of police brutality surfaced on social media. An undergraduate of the Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Edo State, Efosa Osayande, in a social media post, narrated his bloody ordeal in the hands of Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad officers between Benin and his school. Osayande and his colleague (Washington) were dragged from the commercial vehicle they were travelling in before FSARS officers shaved their hair. Not minding the medical implications of shaving with unsterilised instruments, the razor they used wounded Osayande’s head. This is objectionable conduct.
Legally, the police make arrests, but they are not the judiciary, the only authority with the power to impose punishment. Brutality is the real face of policing in Nigeria. The underlying motive of these officers is to extort money from the vulnerable youths, after falsely accusing them of being Internet fraudsters, or “Yahoo Yahoo boys” in local parlance. For this, they have been repeatedly caught in the act. At times, some youths have been murdered extra-judicially.
Understandably, Astro’s predicament has re-ignited the #EndSARS online campaign to stop police brutality. It has also sparked activism online with the #StopRobbingUS hashtag, a movement founded by the tech community following the unending police oppression. #EndSARS began late in 2016 after frequent police brutality and extortion of youths became unbearable.
Although SARS was established with good intentions – to check violent crime – the youth mounted a campaign to have it scrapped. Apparently, promises made separately by the Federal Government, the incumbent Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, and his predecessor, Ibrahim Idris, to reform SARS were mere rhetoric.
In truth, most Nigerians are on the receiving end of police corruption and inefficiency. With kidnapping on the increase, police have resorted to mounting multiple checkpoints on the highways again. But instead of proper security surveillance, these points have become another avenue for illegal collection of money, especially from commercial drivers. A joint study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the National Bureau of Statistics noted that, out of the N400 billion bribes Nigerians paid in the one year to May 2016, the police received the highest percentage at 46.4 per cent.
Regrettably, cybercrime and combating it are far more sophisticated than the rudimentary method the police are applying. British experts state that cybercrime cannot be approached like traditional crime and only officers with specialist training are effective in dealing with it. Cybercrime is difficult to investigate because the fraudsters utilise IT skills.
British government data said cybercrime stood at 0.8 per cent of general crime in the United Kingdom in 2016, but grew to two per cent by June 2018. The commonest ones include hacking, phishing, malicious software, including ransom-ware attacks and distributed denial of service, in which the original account owner is locked out. It is implausible that these criminals will be going round with the gadgets that they use for these operations. So, why are the police chasing young men on the streets? They are just after bribes. It is motivated solely by extortion and callous greed.
To reduce cybercrime, they should be proactive. The FBI demonstrated this in August when it busted 77 Nigerians mainly across the United States and Nigeria, suspected of engaging in cybercrime, which cost their victims $3 billion. The FBI did not harass the suspects physically on the streets, but investigated them for months under cover before going to town. This way, the elusive cybercriminals can be brought to book.
Therefore, the police should desist from their crude ways. FSARS should face its mandate armed robbery, kidnapping and other violent crimes squarely. The police and the other security agencies should expand and fund their cybercrime units. Officers deployed there should be trained to acquire the sophistication needed to trace and investigate cybercrime.
