Police is your friend

When the Nigerian police counter reports that they are the worst in the world, then claim that they are the best in Africa, I can only sigh deeply, because this kind of denial is the reason why we don’t get better. For the records, the denial by the police is not strange to us as a people. Yes, our police are only acting out what they have learned from their milieu — the art of denial. Let’s ask ourselves a simple question, how many times has a Nigerian, floor member, or government official, been caught pants down, yet issued a straight faced denial?

But I digress…

I believe that Nigeria’s police is the worst in the world. This is not to discountenance the fact that there are indeed a few policemen who make a genuine effort to reflect a positive image of the force. The sad fact is that these good apples are too few, and too far in between, to make it work. Honourable mention must be made of people like Olu Famous-Cole, Ngozi Braide, Abba Kyari and Aliyu Giwa.

So, why do I believe that the Nigerian police is the worst in the world? Well, we are the product of our experiences, and my experience with these guys is, on average, not very good. Let me tell two stories…

In a man’s life, there are days he never forgets. Friday, November 18, 2011, was one of those days for me. I was violently robbed, a few feet from the front of my house in Ojodu. I won’t go into the details of what went down during that robbery, save for the fact that someone was shot, in the head, a few feet away from me. That experience traumatised me for months. The robbers made away with my car. I remember that for the entire period that the robbery operation lasted, they were going from house to house in Aina Street, Ojodu, there was no police appearance. I remember the guns the robbers held. They had green, yellow and blue markings. I remember the robbers releasing a staccato of bullets at my landlord’s house, because he called the police, and somehow the robbers got to know of it. I remember that after the robbers had finished what they were doing, and gone away, myself, and another chap who had also been beaten up, had to lie down a few feet away from a corpse, because even though the police had shown up, we did not trust that they wouldn’t shoot us, and then display our bodies as robbers. We lay there until it was daybreak. I remember that the robbers who’d made away with my car, eventually used it for another robbery, had an accident with it, and abandoned it. I remember that despite the fact that I was heavily traumatised, facing a hefty bill to fix my car, and was moving to a new place (I refused to sleep in that house after that), the police guys still extracted ₦18k from me, in order to retrieve the carcass of the car. Heck, they insisted that I use their friend’s vehicle to tow the car to my mechanic’s. Are those the actions of friends?

The second incident, was fairly recent. November 3. I was on the way to Umuahia, along with Ikemesit. He was driving. At Orlu we ran into one of many checkpoints, and the usual harassment began.

“Stop!”
“Driver’s license!”
“Vehicle papers!”
“Open your boot!”
“Where are the receipts of your laptops?”
“Open your bonnet!”
“That ‘2’ on your engine chassis, the person who registered your car wrote ‘Z’, not ‘2’. You stole this car!”

It is important to note that at an earlier checkpoint just after Ozubulu, the policemen who’d stopped us, had insisted that we could not drive on Nigerian highways without a ‘police clearance’, and showed us a piece of paper to prove their point. Naturally, they extracted something in lieu of this ‘clearance’ before letting us proceed. The set of cops at Orlu did not ask for a ‘clearance’, seeing that we had laptop computers with us, and a ‘Z’, not ‘2’ on our paper was enough for them.

But here is where it got interesting for me, the intelligence displayed by these chaps. One of them, the lead chap, asked me my name and I told him. I was surprised when he told me my exact village, a fact that I typically do not go about advertising. Then he turned to Ikemesit, and holding Ikemesit’s drivers’ license, asked, “Who gave you this name?”

“My father,” Ikemesit replied, to which the man switched to the Ibibio language, and they had an animated conversation. Ikemesit later explained to me that the man told him that they were from the same village, and that he must sort him out or we’d be arrested for being 419ers.

Our identity cards did not help, neither did our complimentary cards. Then something extremely interesting happened.

One of the lower ranked officers stopped a passenger bus, and the moment our guy saw the bus, he had his subordinate pull it off the road, and disembark the driver and passengers. Then he beckoned us, and the driver, to follow him a little further down the road, to an abandoned building. Then he ordered the driver to, “Read this.” He was pointing at a series of numbers, written on the wall of the building. The driver read the set of numbers that were of interest to the policeman. It was a date, and his license plate number.

Policeman then goes into a long sermon about how this particular driver, on the date noted on the wall, had refused to stop when they flagged him down. He’d known that they’d ask him for gate takings, so he was trying to be smart. What he did not know was that they’d scoped his plate number, and given that he’s a commercial driver, they’d calculated that sooner or later, he’d pass that spot again. They’d gotten their man.

At this point, the man assured us that the driver (and his cargo of passengers) were not going anywhere, and that we’d share a similar fate if we did not “buy” our laptops.

So we bought the laptops.