Nigeria appears to be the only country in the world where the police arrest before investigations commence.
Reason: There are no resources available for the police to operate.
An average Nigerian police officer or policeman in his job is like a national orphan.
He uses his personal call credits to make official calls. There are no operational vehicles for most tactical units. When you see those policemen collecting money at a checkpoint with a van close by, the money collected is used to fuel the vehicle and repair the same. If they don’t collect those monies, there will likely be no policing at the local level in this country.
Those of them attached to private individuals buy their own bullets.
The Nigerian Police Force is grossly underfunded. The fact that they are making inroads in fighting crime with the little funding they have makes them look like magicians.
There are no functional forensic laboratories in each state of the federation.
There is no deployment of CCTV cameras in public places.
There is no national biometric or forensic database in Nigeria.
Anybody can commit any crime anywhere in Nigeria, leave his blood at the scene of the crime, and still go scot-free.
Men of the Nigerian Police are the only ones that still do physical policing in the world without national technological infrastructure support.
Yet, when they die, pittances are given to their next of kin, which will take years to process.
It will interest you to know that a Commissioner of Police does not earn up to N1,000,000.00 (One Million Naira) as salary per month.
Just imagine what a constable earns.
We pay lip service to issues in this country.
If you want a matter investigated by the police, you have to pay for everything.
Not because the policemen just want to extort you, but because the investigation processes are not funded!
You can have a very good case, and if you do not have money to fund the investigation, the case is DOA — Dead on Arrival.
It is a very big problem. Everyone is quiet as if everything is okay.
The truth is that until we fund our police system, we will not get the desired results.
The police are ready to work when they are well-funded and motivated.
The National Assembly should amend the applicable laws to tinker with the funding module of the police by the Federal Government crediting all monies standing to each police post, division, area command, state headquarters, and zones directly to them—just the way government has started crediting each of the 774 Local Government Councils in the country directly. This will allow these formations to have direct funding that will get to them. The current system is not working. Nigerian politicians are happy our police is the way it is—underfunded, undermotivated, undertrained, underkitted, underarmed, and not given the requisite technological infrastructure to thrive. This allows them to get away with a lot.
The Nigeria Police Trust Fund should be rejuvenated and now backed up by law.
We must attract funding from the private sector.
We should also properly apply the monies being generated from the Police Special Protection Units (SPUs).
The business components of the Police Force should be rejuvenated:
The Nigeria Police Microfinance Bank Limited, the Nigerian Police Properties, the Police Pension Scheme, and the Nigerian Police Cooperatives.
What is due to the rank and file, and officers, should be given to them. They should not be underpaid, and neither should their entitlements be denied them.
The police should adopt the same pension scheme as the military and other agencies in the armed forces. The current police pension and gratuities leave much to be desired. We should take good care of our police officers and policemen when they retire. That is one of the ways to stop corruption among those still in service.
The current auction system of police vehicles and abandoned vehicles should be revisited to allow for an open and advertised auction that will be accessible to all to generate more funds for the force.
The police should leverage the forfeiture laws in criminal prosecutions.
The police should support their lawyers who are ill-motivated at the moment.
They use their own money to pay for their practising fees, stamp and seal, local and national NBA conferences, and sometimes they use their money to file processes for the police.
No incentive is given to them when they win cases.
And I will say, from my experience with the police, based on the zero support they get, the lawyers are doing well.
Police lawyers should also be treated as experts like doctors, EOD officers, pilots, and those in the Canine Section.
Thus, all police officers and policemen who are lawyers, who are still of the rank and file, should in batches be taken to the Staff College in Jos for their Officers’ Course to become Senior Police Officers (SPOs).
We need to encourage our police officers and policemen. They are doing their best, except for a few bad eggs.
If you deal with some other Nigerian security agencies, then you will realise the truth in the saying that “The Police is your friend.”
About the Author:
Ogbankwa is the Convener of the Security Situation Room. You can reach him via douglasogbankwa@gmail.com
