Police brutalities and extrajudicial killings have become commonplace, as if they are part of the daily brief of this security agency. Yet, Nigeria is not an ungoverned territory. Many motorists and citizens have met their untimely deaths at roadblocks for either refusing to pay bribes to policemen or for questioning their illegal operations.
In some instances, fatal stray bullets have hit passers-by from shots targeted at defiant commercial drivers escaping from these corrupt cops. Unfortunately, Inspectors-General of Police come and go, without any of them cleaning the Augean stables.
Now, with Suleiman Abba in the saddle, his men from Mopol 23 Squadron Command shot dead one Aondona Tavershima, a 25-year-old, on his motorcycle on October 10, in Lekki, Lagos, citing the flimsy excuse that he refused to stop. The trigger-happy cops did not stop at only killing him, they hurriedly buried the deceased in a shallow grave in Kuramo Beach in an attempt to cover up their crime.
But they were quickly exposed by an onlooker who contacted Tersoo Tavershima, a brother to the deceased. Tersoo, in his chilling narrative of what happened, said he mobilised relatives and his in-laws pronto to the beach to search for his brother’s body. He said, “We dug a little and saw my brother’s leg. One of my brothers and I quickly ran to Maroko Division and insisted on seeing the Divisional Police Officer. When we reported the matter, he was furious. He led a team to Lekki and arrested all the mobile policemen on the ground.”
The way Aondona died and was buried was the same fate that befell Momodu Ibrahim, a 500-level laboratory science student of the University of Benin, in May 2013. In the same year, Emmanuel Victor in Bayelsa State was fatally shot at a checkpoint while returning from a church service, for querying policemen collecting bribes. Nine years after the killing of six young Nigerians in Apo, Abuja, the trial of the six policemen who allegedly masterminded the killings is still encumbered by a rash of adjournments and absence of the trial judge.
Since December, our national dailies have been awash with accounts of how a couple, Ejeh and Grace Smith, were brutalised by a policeman, identified as Dada Ogunsanya. The so-called officer of the law had flashed his torchlight on them, instead of using the vehicle’s inner light to carry out his inspection. An argument this provoked led the policeman to hit them in their eyes and faces with the butt of his gun. Grace was not only dragged down, her assailant reportedly marched on her stomach.
Unfortunately, these acts of barbarism thrive because of the docility of Nigerians, unlike the norm in developed societies. The August 9 shooting to death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed African-American, by a policeman, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri, the United States, and a grand jury decision not to indict the police officer have triggered a wave of protests in about 14 American states.
The US National Guard and the police have since November 26 been battling to head off violence in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Boston Atlanta, Seattle, California, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Portland, Minneapolis and Oakland just as gridlocks have become a daily concern in these cities. Indeed, the US authorities are getting the message from the boiling public fury, while the killer-policeman has resigned.
There are lessons for Nigerians from the Ferguson killing and its aftermath. Our police must be made to respect the dignity of the human person in the citizens they are paid to protect, through a well-organised civil response to the actions of some psychotic folks in their midst.
What further recommends this mass movement to Nigerians is the obvious failure of public criticisms, Amnesty International/Human Rights Watch’s ringing indictments and the bare-knuckle from even the then Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar, against his own senior officers in February 2012, have failed to make the Force wean itself off human rights violations. HRW’s records indicate that the police killed over 8,000 Nigerians illegally between 2000 and 2007.
Abubakar himself had charged, “Our anti-robbery squads have become killer teams…Justice has been perverted, people’s rights denied, innocent souls committed to prison, torture and extrajudicial killings perpetrated,” shortly after he mounted the saddle.
Yet, the Force almost arrested the Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, Chidi Odinkalu, a lawyer, in 2012 for saying that about 2,500 persons, according to some estimates, were summarily executed annually. However, he believes that “the response of law enforcement to the incapability of the legal system to ensure convictions is an epidemic of third-degree policing, torture and extrajudicial executions.”
Even in repressive jurisdictions such as China, for instance, civil rights activists and students are known to have risen to demand the enforcement of their civic rights. Therefore, there is the overarching need for a public-inspired social change in the police. After all, our constitution does not inveigh against civil protest.
Instructive here is Wole Soyinka’s warning, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”
