When some Nigerian youths were asked to choose between being stopped by armed robbers or being stopped by the Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS) popularly referred to as SARS, they chose the first option.
Jola (not real name) recounted his experience with SARS officials in December 2019 and the memory brought tears to his eyes as he spoke.
“On that fateful day, I had just gotten news of my twin sister’s death and as I was roaming the streets of Mafoluku, Lagos, a SARS van stopped beside me and two officers dragged me into the van without saying anything,” Jola said.
“As I struggled with them asking what I had done and where I was being taken, they just kept on hitting me and telling me to stop talking, and that was how I found myself in a cell for a whole week, being beaten almost every day,” he recounted.
Jola’s case is one of the numerous cases of the brutality Nigerians, especially the youths within ages 17-30 have faced at the hands of SARS officials.
Last week Saturday, the hashtag #EndSARS started trending again on social media after some SARS officials allegedly shot dead a young man in front of a hotel in Ughelli area of Delta state and a video surfaced reporting the gruesome act and showing the car of the victim being driven away by the officials.
The media went wild on the issue and almost at the same time, some powerful people from the entertainment industry, the ministry of youth and sports as well as the political side lent their voices to the issue stating clearly that something urgent needed to be done about the FSARS.
Davido tweeted “if we all come together as brothers and sisters and also as citizens of this country we can end this Nonsense!!.” Wizkid on the other hand tweeted directly at the president saying “Donald Trump is not your business! Old man! Police/SARS still killing Nigerian youth on a daily! Do something.”
Former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar lent his voice to the issue expressing that the SARS officials are not facing their goal as a team and it is expedient that their activities be reviewed to ensure that the rogue elements are removed from the unit.
It was, therefore, some form of good news on Sunday when the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mohammed Adamu announced that SARS and other tactical unit of the Nigerian Police Force (NPF) have been banned from carrying out their usual stop and search as well as roadblock duties.
The NPF also announced that all members of the force must at all times wear their uniforms or approved tactical gear.
Read Also: Senator want closure of SARS detention centres as #ENDSARS protest erupts in Osun
Some hours after the ban by the IGP, the current Vice President, Yemi Osibanjo also expressed his anger at the issue and emphasised that something was going to be done immediately.
SARS and the abuse of power
SARS, a unit of the Nigerian Police Force and one of the 14 units of the Force criminal Investigation Department (FCID) was created in 1992 by former police commissioner Simeon Danladi Midenda in a bid to curb high crime rate at a time when the NPF was at war with the Nigerian army because of the death of Colonel Rindam at the hand of police officers in Lagos.
They had 3 roles: detain, investigate and prosecute people involved in crimes armed robbery, kidnapping, and other crime forms and they have had several successful missions.
In 2009, they started making it into universities to take down cultists and internet fraudsters (yahoo boys), and soon spread to the streets across Nigeria, further becoming power hungry and losing their core focus. Even Wikipedia says SARS has come under controversy for being linked to extortion, torture, framing, and blackmail before 2012.
In 2010, the squad was accused by Amnesty International, a Non-Government Organisation (NGO) of abusing three bike riders in Port Harcourt who were detained and beaten every night for one week straight and within that same year, a ruling court asked the squad to release the culprits in the killing a 15-year-old secondary boy they mistook for a kidnapper.
In 2016, a report released by Amnesty International showed how SARS officers frequently detained youths in facilities around the country, tortured and coerced them into confessing to crimes they did not commit, and also extorting these young Nigerians.
Their new extortion trend according to people’s shared experiences on social media is through the use of Point of sale (POS) machines and taking their victims to Automated Teller Machine (ATM) stands to transfer large sum of money.
Uproar against FSARS before now, and how it was met
In December 2016, Segun Awosanya, a human rights activist put together an online advocacy campaign against the brutality of SARS. This was coming after Amnesty International had threatened to sue the NPF on the grounds of SARS brutality.
Nonetheless, members of the NPF at the time and some quarters shunned SARS brutality claims stating that the squad was doing a great job and it was criminals who were reporting these cases and trying to make them look bad.
By December 2017, the IGP reorganised the unit into operational and investigative parts and also asked that allegations against the squad be investigated. This, however, did not stop the complaints against the squad and by August 2018, the federal government announced the total overhaul and decentralisation of the squad, following its renaming to FSARS by the IGP.
There was a further decentralisation in January 2019 which saw the Deputy Inspector Generals (DIGs) of FCID and commissioners of police in states being held accountable for the action of SARS officials.
Despite all these positive efforts to change the notorious tag of the FSARS, the new report of Amnesty International titled ‘time to end impunity said a total of 82 cases of torture, ill-treatment and extra judicial execution by FSARS have been documented between January 2017 and May 2020.
The Director of the organisation has therefore called for the Nigerian authorities to go beyond lip service to ensure there is a real reform with the NPF with emphasis on FSARS.
“These reforms must translate into holding police officers suspected of torture to account, ending torture, unlawful detention, extortion, extrajudicial execution and other human rights violations that SARS officers are known for across Nigeria,” he said.
In conclusion, the total crime rate in Nigeria worsened by 7.05 percent in the last crime statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in 2018 as a total of 134,663 cases were recorded in 2017 as against the previous 125,790 in 2016.
Of all the crime types, offences against property which accounts for robbery cases has had the highest contribution at 65,397 in 2016 and 68,579 in 2017.
The Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS) should more than anything be focused on its core goals of fighting robbery and reducing crime rates to its barest minimum.
