APC and the crushing burden of police reform

Multiple indicators on security and public safety unanimously point to Nigeria as a failing state- a fragile one teetering on the edge of catastrophic implosion. The 2017 Legatum Prosperity Index ranked Nigeria 145 out of the 149 nations polled in the safety and security component; the 2018 Fragile State Index ranked Nigeria as the 14th most fragile state in the world; and the Mo Ibrahim Index subgroup on national security listed Nigeria as “one of the most deteriorated countries over the last five years in West Africa”. A UNDP report puts it aptly- “generally, the human security index for the country is low, this is an indication that Nigerians are not humanly secured”.
The economic and social consequences of this grim security outlook is huge – more than 2.1 million Nigerian citizens are displaced internally because of conflict and insecurity (close to the population of The Gambia); Niger-delta militants destroyed more than 1,447 pipelines in 2016, impairing the implementation of the 2016 budget in the process and sending Nigeria into an economic recession that she is still recovering from. Again, ongoing conflicts between farmers and herdsmen across Nigeria is costing at least $14 billion in potential revenues annually; the North-East Nigeria Recovery and Peace Building Assessment (RPBA) team has put the cost of rebuilding destroyed infrastructure in the region blighted by Boko Haram insurgency at $US9 billion; and nothing summarizes Nigeria’s security challenges than the fact that Boko Haram insurgency according to Governor KashimShettima is responsible for the death of at least 100,000 people since inception.
What appears more terrifying is the seemingly progressive emasculation of the Nigerian state and her inability to defend herself. Of course, how will a state that cannot defend her institutions and totems of authority protect her citizens? Who then will protect schools and hospitals when bandits routinely sack police stations and butcher police officers at will without swift consequence? How will judges in session, in their wigs and gowns, be sacred when rogues can walk into the National Assembly and seize the mace? We are seeing the development of a wide swath of ungoverned spaces within the Nigerian territory and the rise of well-armed non-state actors.
There is a connection between Nigeria’s security woes and the documented inability (orientationally, structurally, and capacity-wise) of the Nigeria Police Force to meet the demands of modern policing. The police are the most visible symbol of state power and the primary institution of social control in the hands of the managers of public safety and consciousness across the world and that is why nations pay serious attention to their policing agencies. From the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East to the spiraling herdsmen conflict across Nigeria; kidnapping to armed banditry-at their onset basic law and order issues-were allowed to fester to the point of crisis, highlighting how critical the police is to our collective and individual wellbeing.
Whether attributable to gross incapacity, deliberate heedlessness or cold political exigencies, the APC led government especially at the national level has failed to show a clear understanding of the centrality of the Nigeria Police Force and policing to security and public safety in Nigeria. A clear understanding would have reflected in the policy choices the Buhari administration has made in the last three years. An informed choice which would have been to holistically reform the Nigeria Police Force and break away from the century old colonial policing framework. The Buhari led APC government must go beyond the cosmetics of sloganeering to total organizational and structural reform of the Nigeria Police Force and engender a democratic policing policy that reflects Nigeria’s current realities.
Underpinning the operations of every policing agency in the world are conceptual and organizational credos that reflects its ideology and ours is one of the most visible legacy of colonialism – the use of strangers to police strangers. The British at the onset of colonization needed a policing outfit to enforce their narrow colonial objectives in the Lagos colony, so they assembled in 1861 a force made-up of Hausa recruits from across the Niger, referred to as the Hausa Guard which later metamorphosed into the Hausa Constabulary. This force was disconnected from the socio-historical processes of the local communities and was therefore effective for the enforcement of unpopular tax regimes, the raiding of labor camps, the violent suppression of strikes, and the supply and discipline of the labor force required by colonial capitalism. The Nigeria Police Force in 2018 still runs on this colonial template-ideologically, structurally and operationally-but time has since changed and the idea that sufficed for the colonialists in 1861 cannot serve the widely varied interests of the Nigerian peoples of today.
At the ideological level, there is need to return the ownership of the Nigeria Police Force and policing in its full spectrum to the immediate communities it serves through the adaptive use of Community Oriented Policing. While law enforcement shares a lot in common across nations, however there is a reason why there is wide difference in the structure and operation protocols of the London Metropolitan Police and Mutaween in Saudi Arabia: the answer is the differences in the cultures and peoples they serve. Communities in Nigeria must be allowed to take the lead in defining their public safety and security concerns and design strategies for addressing them. If democracy would mean anything, it must include the right of communities to participate in securing themselves.
The Buhari led APC’s government of change must urgently reverse the progressive monopolization of the Nigeria Police Force and policing in Nigeria by the ruling elite. No matter how we look at it, a police force that expends at least half of its active human resource in policing political office holders and the few privileged as indicated by the 150,000 police officers currently on private guard duties out of the current 370,000 (a number that includes phantom police officers, the unfit, dead, etc) is one that has a very poor and indefensible strategic outlook. Planning and resource allocation for sustainable security must countenance the interest of the collective.
To be or not to be-has been the song around the creation of state police in Nigeria since 1999 and the APC government has, like its other predecessors been unable to provide a definite policy answer to the question. Irrespective of where the pendulum swings, there is need for the decentralization of the management structure of the Nigeria Police Force. Can we decentralize the policing structure in Nigeria without necessarily creating totally autonomous state policing agencies? Is it possible within current socio-political realities to create state policing agencies and immunize such agencies from local partisan interests? Can we continue to argue in good faith against state policing when at least 20 states currently have policing outfits (traffic control agencies, neighborhood watches, hisbah police, task forces, etc) with enforcement powers that are a creation of the law and financed by the state?
Security is an expensive public good that is financed by most states through taxation and other non-tax instruments, but here in Nigeria we do have a peculiar problem. Less than 12% of eligible citizens in Nigeria pay tax and incidentally oil-that accounts for 80% of government revenue-has seen a record slump in prices, thus reducing government’s ability to finance public projects. On one hand are a citizenry who do not pay tax for whatever reasons and a government that has refused to prioritize policing and has deliberately underfunded the police force, yet expecting it to perform its duties. The outcome is what we currently have-by expecting the police to perform its duties, without adequately funding it, the government has indirectly imposed on the electorate a tax in the most ingenious way and subject the institution to private use. One thing is certain, we need a realistic approach for funding the police and the approach must include funding from citizens.
The police are the most visible symbol of state power and a primary institution of social control in the hands of the managers of public safety and consciousness in Nigeria; to deliberately or negligently underfund it is to threaten the security of the citizenry. Nigerians cannot talk away police checkpoints and police corruption-we must either fund the services or accept the fact that police services are only going to be free in theory. There is a nexus between institutional accountability and public ownership and the financing of criminal justice institutions and actors and that to expect internationally comparable services from the Nigerian police, it must be funded optimally like its peers are.
As another election cycle beacons, the inability of the APC to reform the police as the key to addressing Nigeria’s worsening insecurity will be albatross but yet still the sun on the horizon can still dry the clothes of police reform.

Tosin Osasona
Tosin Osasona writes from Lagos