Supply of arms to robbers by some police personnel is a phenomenon the authorities highlighted recently when an Assistant Superintendent of Police, Yuguda Abbah, was exposed as a major supplier to a 45-member criminal gang, led by Oliver Honiola. The suspect was paraded with 14 others recently in Abuja, among them eight police personnel who had been aiding and abetting criminality of all sorts in the North-East region.
The affected police suspects were summarily dismissed after undergoing an orderly room trial. One of them, Habila Sarki, a sergeant, had reportedly introduced Abbah to the gang leader. He stunned his interrogators with the disclosure that his gang obtained 16 AK 47 assault rifles from Abbah, for which he was paid between N230,000 and N250,000 each. Recovered from the gang were 17 AK 47 rifles, 363 rounds of ammunition, seven posh cars, among other items.
According to the Force Police Public Relations Officer, Donald Awunah, the principal suspect and the dismissed police officers will soon be charged to court. This should not only be said, but should be seen by the public to have been carried out.
Intriguingly, Abbah, according to a media report, was in charge of the armoury and a custodian of exhibits – recovered arms and ammunition from criminals. In December 2015, an Army Lance Corporal serving in Borno State was arrested by the Inspector-General of Police Special Intelligence Response Team for supplying arms and ammunition to a robbery gang that often raided banks in Lagos.
The soldier hid his illicit merchandise in trucks carrying food items from Maiduguri to Lagos. Apparently, these were arms meant for the military offensive against Boko Haram jihadists in the North-East. After bank raids in Lekki, FESTAC and Ikorodu areas of Lagos and Agbara in Ogun State, four cops were killed, SIRT reported.
In almost every state police command, tainted police personnel exist that work with rings of bandits or criminal gangs directly or indirectly. Among the suspects paraded in Abuja recently were four policemen from the Kogi State Command who aided robbers and kidnappers in their operations there. In Rivers State, a 35-year-old police corporal, Christian Oboko, was arrested for robbery in June. He was attached to the Special Police Squad codenamed C41, Rivers State. He not only rented his gun out for his gang’s operations, he also moved with them to deliver stolen vehicles to inter-state syndicates, just as he used his influence to free them from police net, each time the law caught up with them.
It is this evil coalition that has made banditry so violent and the criminals formidable. They strike at their targets at will, despite the penalty of death sentence and, in some cases, many years of incarceration – awaiting trial.
This ominous trend of arming bandits by officers of the law should compel the IG, Ibrahim Idris, to demand that each state police command should account for the thousands of arms and ammunition so far mopped up in its domain. In 2010, a combined team of security operatives intercepted 13 containers laden with arms at a Lagos port. Where is the seizure and the over 8,741 weapons, 7,014 rounds of ammunition and 164 loaded magazines in AK rifles, which the police recovered from criminal hideouts in Anambra, Edo and Rivers states a few years ago?
Such massive proliferation of weapons triggered the alarm bells that influenced the then IG, Mohammed Abubakar, to direct other state police commands to do the same. At an Onitsha High Court in Anambra State, AK 47 rifles, general purpose machine guns, rockets, rocket propellers/launchers, 5,830 AK 47 ammunition and 1,135 rounds of ammunition for GPMG were displayed as exhibits in the trial of three suspected kidnappers in 2014. When kidnappers stockpile rockets and propellers in their own armoury, it tells a lot about the magnitude of the gun riot in the country.
In mid-November, gangsters surrendered 911 AK 47 rifles and 7,363 rounds of ammunition in Rivers State. To avoid these weapons returning to wrong hands again, they should be destroyed publicly, in the manner the Nigeria Customs Service destroys contraband. This was the step taken on November 15 in Nairobi, Kenya where 5,200 illegal firearms were doused with diesel and then set ablaze.
Public confidence in the Force will remain low if its personnel continue to forge unholy alliances with criminals. The notoriety hit national limelight in 1987 when the late George Iyamu, a Deputy Superintendent of Police, struck a pact with underworld kingpins, Lawrence Anini and Monday Osunbor, which conferred on them the myth of invincibility, as they made life unbearable for the people of Edo State.
As it has now become obvious that fighting corruption or securing convictions in graft cases is very much unlikely without fishing out the bad eggs on the Bench, evident in the recent raiding of the homes of some suspects and their trial, so it is with the Force: landing a killer punch on banditry is almost impossible without internal cleansing in the police.
