March 19, 2012 by Emmanuel Nwachukwu

In most decent countries, the police station is where people flee for refuge; in Nigeria, however, it is where people avoid at all cost; a place Nigerians have described satirically as business centres where extortion is commonplace under the direct gaze of police officers. All this may be about to change, if the words of the tough-talking Acting Inspector-General of Police, Abubakar Mohammed, are anything to go by.

For most families, 2011 will not be so easily forgotten. It was the year terrorism visited our homes, streets, offices and places of worship, leaving death and destruction in its wake. The bombings have continued in 2012 with unrelenting intensity as terrorists have become more emboldened with the massacres in Madalla and Kano, and the continued attacks on security agents, schools and places of worship across the north. Sadly, the Police have borne the brunt of the casualties, with fatalities in their ranks that must number in thousands, and counting. These are indeed difficult times for our dear country.

As a nation, our security report has never been worse. Terrorists seem to choose their targets at will; armed robbers hold up towns to ransom for hours as if in stubborn defiance while reports of ritual killings are on the increase; and kidnappings continue unabated. Standing between this wave of crime and the people is a Police Force that seem to have been caught unprepared; a force that is poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly paid, and deeply corrupt.

With current security challenges, the appointment of a tough-talking Police boss could not have come sooner. His address to his senior officers said it all: “They lead a deeply corrupt force that has lost the confidence of the public; a force in desperate need of change.” None of his predecessors had gone this far, even in the face of deep criticism from the public. Reforming the police will be Abubakar’s biggest challenge; it will be the President’s toughest challenge. It is a challenge that must be won if we are not to degenerate to another Pakistan, or worse still Afghanistan.

With terrorism now a reality in Nigeria, we do not have much time as a country. The police must set out to win back the trust and confidence of Nigerians. They cannot ask people to report crime to them if they are seen as the enemy. Policing in any nation is by the consent of the people and the police must win back this consent.

Addressing crime effectively in Nigeria requires a root and branch transformation of the entire police establishment. And in doing this, the committee on police reorganisation will do well to learn from Georgia, a former province of the old Soviet Union. Georgia used to have one of the highest crime rates in the world before the government embarked on a radical transformation of its police force. The change was so radical that in 2005, the President, Mikhail Saakashvili, fired the entire traffic police force of the Georgian National Police, numbering around 30,000 police officers, due to corruption. A new force was then built around the new recruits with more than fivefold doubling of pay. Now, Georgia has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Although we may not need to go that far in Nigeria, there are a large number of police officers that are so mired in the current ways of doing things that trying to retrain them will be an exercise in futility. For these officers, retrenchment must be the only option.

We need to build an entirely new force from the scratch, a force with a new name (say ‘New Nigerian Police Force’) to mark a departure from the current establishment. Georgia’s unique success in tackling corruption has transformed the country and raised its ranking in the World Bank’s global ‘Doing Business’ survey from 112th in 2005 to 16th in 2012, an improvement that is helping attract foreign investment into the country. Nigeria must take a cue from Georgia. These are desperate times and desperate times require desperate measures. There is no doubt that there are good officers in the police that have integrity and are appalled at the corruption in their profession. Abubakar should identify them, promote them and use them as drivers for change. Do nothing is not an option.

Whatever emerges as the ‘New Nigerian Police Force’ must reward police officers handsomely to remove the temptation to take bribes. We must reconsider the colonial idea of police officers living away from the rest of the community in barracks. Intelligence is in the community and that is where police officers should reside.

Also, we must re-examine the present unitary police system and consider if we should go down the decentralised route with a separate police command for each of the six geo political zones, and another smaller central core like the FBI in the United States of America that will cut across zonal boundaries.

The reform must also look at how officers are promoted, especially into senior levels. The batch promotion of officers based on length of service is deeply flawed and rewards incompetence. Promotion should be based on performance and achievement of set objectives. We saw the worse example of this in the case of the former Economic and Financial Crimes Commission boss Alhaji Nuhu Ribadu who was demoted two ranks to Deputy Commissioner of Police because his promotion was considered too rapid compared to his colleagues. In countries where things work well, he would have been promoted for his daring achievements in tackling corruption.

The reform of the police cannot be done in isolation and must go hand in hand with the reform of the entire justice system, including the Prisons Services and the Ministry of Justice. We seem to have had Attorneys-General of the Federation that are either complacent, incompetent or fast asleep in the bosoms of corrupt officials, leading Nigerians to believe that you can commit crime with impunity and get away with it, if you are a so called ‘big man’. We have examples of recent probes where individuals have practically indicted themselves in full public view and the reaction from the AGF’s office has been deafening silence.

It has now been revealed how the then AGF, Mr Michael Aondoakaa used the state machinery to shield the former governor of Delta State, James Ibori, from prosecution. Only a few weeks ago, a US court sentenced two Britons and an American for conspiring to channel $182m bribes to top Nigerian government officials in an international corruption scandal involving Halliburton. We are still waiting for the AGF to follow up on the Nigerian officials indicted as accomplices in the trial. No doubt, this will never happen! At this critical juncture in our history, we need a justice system that is ready to arraign and convict corrupt officials and an AGF with the spirit, fervour and urgency to prosecute crime.

The proposed budget for security in 2012 accounts for about 19 per cent of the total 2012 budget, more than the combined budgets for Education, Health, Agriculture, Transport, and Lands and Housing. This budget must be used judiciously to address our security challenges and deliver a new Nigerian Police Force. We have at the helm a man whose rhetoric on reforming the police accords with the aspirations of most Nigerians. We must now support him. The President must give him all the backing he needs including the resources to transform the Police Force.