Onovo’s Police Story

Comfort Obi

It was an evening to celebrate some of the brightest in the Nigeria Police Force, NPF. Hosted by the Hon.Minister of Police Affairs, Maina Adamu Waziri, at the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja , it was in honour of the immediate past Inspector General of Police, Ogbonna Onovo, and  six Deputy Inspectors General (DIG) of Police whose careers were abruptly cut short recently during the re-organisation of the country's Security Agencies. It was not the array of dishes, the who is who at the dinner, or the musical band that were the high points. It was, instead, Onovo’s story of how he became a Policeman. A brief re-cap.
In 1962, he began, he and his father, a Police Corporal, were living in a village, about 30kms from Abakaliki, current capital of Ebonyi state. A message had come that the then IGP would visit the barracks. So everybody began to clean, and scrub, to await the 'big man.' He was a white man. They held him in awe. As soon as he left, Corporal Onovo called his son, Ogbonna, and asked him the name of the IGP. Ogbonna said he didn’t know. That earned him five strokes of the cane for not knowing the name of such an important man. After flogging him, his father told him: "That man is an important man. You must strive to be like him”. Later, immediately after his youth service, his father, then a Sergeant, asked him what he wanted to do. And he said he would enter the Civil Service. But Onovo senior asked his son to join the Police instead. Knowing what his father had suffered in the NPF, the younger Onovo told his father that was not his portion. But his father retorted: “You will be entering as an officer. Officers don’t suffer. Enter the Police, and get for me what I couldn’t get”. Now, not only did the younger Onovo get for his father what he couldn’t get, he ended up being as important as the white man over whom his father flogged him. He became an IGP. The senior Onovo died in 1982. Wherever he is, he must be proud. What nobody can confirm though is if the NPF, which he served, and pushed his son into, is as good as the the one from which his son just retired. My candid answer would be, hardly. More sophisticated and more modern, yes. But what else? The present NPF has been stripped, almost, of everything that made the then NPF tick. Criminally neglected by successive Nigerian governments, the NPF is like an empty shell. The morale of its personnel is low. Their motivation is poor. They are the least paid in West Africa. They have no decent barracks, no decent offices, and their arms and ammunitions are a joke, compared to what the criminals they confront parade. They have no vehicles, and no communication equipment. Their training and re-training are still very elementary. They are the butt of jokes, and the favourite of newspaper cartoonists. There are, of course, the very bad aspects of some of them. In uniform, they have reduced themselves to the level of motor park touts, bus conductors, and some illiterate commercial bus drivers. Nobody can forget their corrupt tendencies, or the toll gates they mount, or how they have become tools for injustice. But the worst thing that has happened to the Police is that its responsibilities are gradually being taken away from its personnel. Everyday, one agency or the other is created to take over the job of the Police. There is the EFCC, the ICPC, the Civil Defence (Corp), Road Safety, all doing the work of the Police. They investigate. They arrest. They prosecute. So, what you see is a duplication of the job of the Police being done by everybody. And those are not all. Anybody in uniform does the job of the Police. The Boys Scouts, the Girls Guide, the Man O'war, the V.I.Os. Most scandalous are the different task forces created by some state governments. They wear all kinds of funny uniforms, all kinds of ranks, do Police work, and rub shoulders with the Police.
In Lagos State, for example, there is the Lagos State Traffic Management Agency, LASTMA. Established to help deal with the traffic situation in a mega city like Lagos, and create employment opportunities, LASTMA personnel have become a law unto themselves. They pray motorists to run foul of the law. They are intolerant. Instead of controlling traffic, they are, almost, always, on the look-out for any little mistake, any minor traffic offence, and they pounce on the vehicle, and cause more traffic problems. They arrest motorists. They beat motorists. And if on the highway, or anywhere at all, your vehicle breaks down, God save you. Instead of LASTMA personnel helping you to push the vehicle out, they tow the vehicle away, and slam a fine on you, unless you are ready to settle them. Many of them are very corrupt! To compound the insult, LASTMA personnel look down on the police. It is not surprising to see them sit in an air-conditioned cabin of a vehicle, while Policemen sit in the open cabin.
State-sponsored Traffic mangers have since taken over the job of the Police. The other day along Airport Road, Abuja, it was personnel from the Civil Defence who were using metal detectors to screen vehicles going to the airport. The question everybody was asking was: Whatever happened to the Police? There is the other agency in Lagos known as Kick Against Indiscipline (KAI), which wears army green and lemon uniform, equally doing Police work, and wreaking havoc on Lagosians. They have Black Maria. And then there is the one which calls itself Task Force. They wear Khaki uniform. Their speciality, aside from taking over Police work, is to harass traders in the market. They have Policemen, usually PMF, attached to them, but most of them behave like animals. And so, any havoc they cause is attributed to the Police. They seize, in bulk, traders' wares- shoes, clothings, underwears, wrappers, foodstuff, including bags of rice, basins of meat, and more. Atimes, they share what they had seized among themselves. Worse, they beat the traders. They flog them. They arrest them, and they treat them like animals. If the Governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Fashola, seen as delivering democracy dividends, gets the nod of his party, shaky as it is, to run for a second term, fails to win in the general elections, he should hold LASTMA and the various task forces in Lagos responsible. The people are angry.
Back to the Police. Could the authorities, please, put its feet down, and take police jobs from all these agencies, legal and illegal, masquerading as law enforcement agencies? Only then can parents, like Onovo’s father, proudly ask their bright children to join the NPF.