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These are tough times
to be a policeman. Not that it has ever been easy; with the dubious welfare and
being sitting-targets for bad jokes and scathing social commentaries. But these
days, the shadow of peril is more pronounced, and the deadly attacks on them
have attained alarming levels of uniformity.
I remember a few years
ago, a friend of ours had a nearly ruptured appendix and we were maniacally
tearing through the roads of Enugu egged on by his tortured moans. We made it
to the Teaching Hospital, but collectively froze at the entrance doorways. It
was a horror scene. At the sight, our
sick pal who was earlier bent and twisted in agony, miraculously straightened
out and gaped with the rest of us, his pains forgotten. There was blood everywhere: blood on the
tables; bloodied bandages across a bloodied head here, and a displaced limb
there. The wrenching cries, the shrieking relatives, the obvious hopelessness:
a nightmare. And they were all dressed in police uniform.
There was no vacant spot
so went to sit outside. We sat beside a policeman; one of the luckier
casualties. He had a heavily bandaged arm and leg. We murmured our sympathies
and asked “what happened?” Their team
was driving home from a routine patrol and suddenly encountered robbers
attacking a convoy of newly-weds. The bridegroom was already shot in the head. Gun
fire erupted. The bad guys had superior fire power and tumbled their patrol-car
down the hills in a hail of bullets and he woke up in this hospital. He stared at us with a bleary eye and muttered “I have a son at the university, three more
kids in secondary school, and this is how I would have ended their future. No life
insurance, just a beggarly pension, and yet people say we are bad people.” I
must have shed tears.
Now, contrast this with
the night of my Call-to-Bar in Abuja, a couple of years later. After the formal
ceremonies, I was naturally called to another kind of bar by my excited
friends. We partied till the wee hours before heading homewards. At an
intersection, we were waved to a stop by a police patrol team. They asked to
share in the celebrations, and we readily handed out 500 Naira. The lead guy
pocketed it but haggled that we could do better, we bantered cheerily that the
country was hard; safe in the knowledge that it was just a routine delay. Well,
it wasn’t. A big Hilux van screeched
to a stop and a more menacing group of cops jumped out. “Step out of the car! Hands on your head!” I quickly looked upon the
guy we had given the 500 Naira to act on our incipient friendship. But he
looked the other way, and waved his colleagues ahead. We were bundled into the van
and to the nearest station. In the streets, you learn not to introduce yourself
as a lawyer to the police at night, so we had to empty our pockets to avoid the
inevitable. I consider myself sufficiently prodigious, but being called to
three different bars in one night
would have been a bit too much. In
any case, the bitter memory remained, and I eagerly swelled the population of
cop-bashers.
Of course my own
travails pale beside more gory tales of accidental discharges, random bullying
and maiming. And the collective hatred for our cops daily overflows to near
apocalyptic proportions.
Yet, at the first sign
of trouble...nay, inconvenience; we call them.
And they are always
available. In fact they typically avail themselves beyond the call of duty and
become enforcers in civil claims and domestic disputes. They become
debt-recovery agents, club bouncers and veritable tools for teaching errant neighbours. Depending on
the side you are on, they become friend or fiend. And these guys can act any of
these parts to perfection. Their talent lies in magnifying little faults and
exaggerating possible consequences enough to quake the stoutest hearts.
So, we flee from the
courts and other administrative machinery. Their procedures and bureaucracy are
frustrating. Police guarantees instant results. So, everyday, we cloak them
with more powers, then cry foul when we are visited with the same absolute
powers we have conferred. It reads somewhat like the thoughts of Kasco (in
Soyinka’s “A Play of Giants”): “Power
comes only with the death of politics (procedure); that is why I chose to
become Emperor. ...At the realm of my coronation, I signal to the world that I
transcend the mundane-ness of politics; now I inhabit only the pure realm of
power...”
This was illustrated in
a recent bus ride I had from Uyo. Bus discussions were typically noisy, I never
partake in them. Having passed series of check-points with corresponding delays,
the collective cop-bashing commenced. Some particularly vociferous fellow with
an annoying habit of talking with a mouthful of cashew-nuts (which he never
seemed to run out of throughout the journey) had numerous police-anecdotes and
had the crowd in boisterous stitches. Suddenly, a booming voice interrupted the
party in protest. It was some gentleman seated at the back. His English was
polished and the thought-sequence, impressive. He stated that people only became police victims
as a result of ignorance as dedicated phone numbers were published everyday for
people to report police-victimization. He took us on a tour of trial-within-trial
and validity-checks for confessional statements, ending by announcing that the
police administration was bent on eliminating their bad eggs. Before his
arguments could be drowned in the expected wave of cynicism; he introduced
himself. He was Police Area Commander of a certain Northern Territory. He dug
into his briefcase and brought out brochures with contact details of the
relevant administrative officers in every tiny crevice of the country.
There was a stampede for
the brochures. “Please, I need the number
for Rivers State, Eleme in particular” “Abeg, does anyone have for Enugu?”
“Oga, we want your own number too sir” The whole episode would have been
hilarious if I hadn’t overheard the girl beside me (who had copied almost all
available numbers in the booklet) heatedly announcing to another woman: “There is this man who has had my 400
thousand Naira for two years now, Once I get back to PH I will call the Area Command
to deal with him.”
Our hero alighted at
Abuja, evidently elated at his redemption message of the Police Force; while in
reality, he had just empowered another set of vengeful Nigerians, looking for
even quicker dispensation of evil upon those who trespass against them...
Viewed
in another light too, the policeman’s effort was probably a cry for help to any
random Nigerian headed up-North: We are
on your side too, please stop killing us.
In any case; we cannot sit aside
smugly in our civilian clothes while the violence continues. In a land tilting
everyday towards anarchy, I shudder at the possible fate of lawyers when our
armed counterparts are being taken out this easy.
I rest.
Also published on Thisday Newspaper, Tuesday 21 May, 2013: http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/sparing-a-sober-moment-for-our-cops/148107/
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