The Nigerian police have long had a reputation for
needless highhandedness and unjustified bloodlust. So
embedded is this fearsome reputation in the popular
imagination that Nigerians have taken to describing
mobile police officers as “kill-and-go.” The picture
is of officers quick to draw their guns, take aim at
(usually) innocent citizens, and let out a deadly
report. Nigerians know that the fear of the police is
the beginning—and often the end—of wisdom.
Inspector General Mike Okiro recently reminded us why
the police are feared. Two weeks ago (November 14),
Mr. Okiro disclosed that, in a mere three-month span
between June and the end of September, the police shot
and killed 785 suspected armed robbers. In the same
period, the police arrested 1,628 suspected armed
robbers.
Okiro’s disclosure was nothing short of a scandal. It
implied that the police under his command had become a
mindless and unrestrained killing machine. Okiro is
less an inspector general than the commander of a
human slaughtering enterprise. He presides over a
business whose corporate name might as well be: Murder
Incorporated.
Okiro’s startling statistic was released with gusto.
There’s no question that the IG expected to be
garlanded and feted for doing a superb job. Instead,
Nigerians ought to recoil in horror and outrage at the
man’s gruesome conception of his job. A police force
that specializes in extra-judicial killing of
Nigerians deserves jeers, not cheers.
What’s worse, Okiro made the chest-thumping revelation
while briefing the House of Representatives’ Police
Affairs Committee on the “achievements” of his first
three months in office. Why didn’t the legislators
tell him there and then that he and his subordinates
were out of line?
Okiro’s notion of crime fighting has produced no
verifiable deterrent effect. His announcement has
brought Nigeria nothing but international
embarrassment. A Sierra Leonean friend rang me from
Tampa, Florida to express shock. He was in Jamaica
attending a conference when Okiro’s gleeful statistic
was disseminated through agency reports.
Instantly, he told me, it became the talk of the
conference. People gathered in groups to discuss this
bizarre factoid of Nigerian law enforcement. Most were
incredulous. Did they hear right? What manner of
country? What would be the fall-out? Would the IG
survive this public confession that the men and women
under his command had become trigger-happy dealers of
death?
Human Rights Watch, which less than two months ago
released a scathing report on the April polls, weighed
in by calling for an official probe. In a statement
titled “Nigeria: Investigate Widespread Killings by
Police,” HRW called on Abuja to “launch an independent
public inquiry.”
Gory as Okiro’s portrait was, Human Rights Watch
actually suggested that the reality could be more
sordid. It speculated that “the true number of people
killed by the police since 2000 may exceed 10,000.”
Peter Takirambudde, the agency’s Africa director, said
“It’s stunning that the police killed half as many
‘armed robbery suspects’ as they managed to arrest
during Okiro’s first 90 days.” Then he added: “And
it’s scandalous that leading police officials seem to
regard the routine killing of Nigerian
citizens—criminal suspects or not—as a point of
pride.”
Okiro’s confession served to bring out to the open a
dastardly practice that has been a poorly kept secret.
Nigerians know that the police operate according to an
unwritten rule, namely, that armed robbery suspects
are taken to the back of police stations and executed.
The victims of such unsanctioned executions are, in
the official lingo, “wasted.”
The Human Rights Watch has a dossier on such blatant
miscarriages of justice. The international body noted:
“Police officers routinely label individuals they kill
as ‘armed robbers’ who fired on police; according to
police statistics, all of the thousands of individuals
shot and killed by police officers were ‘armed
robbers.’… In June 2005, the murder of six young
people at a police checkpoint in Abuja generated a
nationwide scandal that led to an investigation and
criminal charges against the officers involved, but
that case was an exception to prevailing norms.
Reported cases of investigations into police killings
have been extremely rare and accountability even less
common.
“In August 2006, police arrested and publicly
‘paraded’ 12 armed robbery suspects in the Abia State
town of Umuahia; the 12 were later found among a pile
of 16 corpses deposited near a local mortuary. Police
officials claimed that all 16 were armed robbers who
had somehow been involved in an exchange of gunfire
with the police. No investigation was carried out.”
My guess is that this reprehensible practice thrives
because of the popular (and founded) perception that
armed robbery has risen to an implacable scourge:
incessant, pervasive and nightmarish. Many armed
robbers operate with a viciousness that inspires
terror in the hearts and heads of their victims. I’ve
been a victim of armed robbery in a Lagos cab; it is
not an experience to wish on one’s worst enemy. Some
robbers are not content to strip their victims of
hard-earned possessions and valuables; they also gut
their victims of dignity and leave them dispirited.
Some of them relish to rape, maim and kill. They scar
their victims in body and spirit.
In fact, the Human Rights Watch underscored the depth
of the problem. It acknowledged that “Many parts of
Nigeria experience extremely high levels of violent
crime, owing partly to rising poverty, high
unemployment and the proliferation of small arms
throughout the country.” Then it revealed that “Dozens
of Nigerian police officers die in the line of duty
every year.”
Given robbers’ cruel modus operandi, it is no surprise
that the society has come to think of them as less
than human. Armed robbers, so the argument goes, merit
summary treatment. And that includes, especially,
summary capital treatment.
Hard as it is, it is an argument—and an attitude—that
a society that aspires to enlightenment and
realization of humane values must reject. To start
with, we must never forget that the casualties of
police execution are not armed robbers. They are
“armed robbery suspects.”
The difference is critical. No state should ever
dabble in the business of willfully killing innocent
citizens. Yet, even when the paraphernalia of justice
is sound and the process for determining guilt or
innocence rigorous, it is not uncommon for an innocent
or two to fall victim to human error or malice. When
the issue of divining guilt or innocence is left to
the whims and caprice of inept, corrupt and
ill-equipped police officers, then the margin of error
is liable to be multiplied by several factors.
Even if all police officers were morally exemplary and
meticulous in the discharge of their duties, it still
should not be up to them to decide whom to execute,
when and how. Citizens should always be wary of a law
enforcement agency that seeks the powers to mete out
death or grant absolution. A corrupt police—and the
Nigerian police is widely regarded as a synecdoche of
corruption—should not be entrusted with determining
when a suspect is guilty—and deserving of execution.
Impatience with the grinding pace and circuitous mode
of the judicial system is one reason many otherwise
informed citizens are swayed by the seductive illogic
of instantaneous “justice” via police execution. But
it behooves us to realize that it is all of us, not
just the 600 odd “suspects” slaughtered by Okiro’s
men, whose humanity is discounted. In conceding to the
police the fiat to kill in our name once the victim is
tagged an “armed robbery suspect,” we expose many
innocents as well as ourselves to the same hazards.
All we need do to fall victim is be in the wrong place
at a time the police are out to “prove” that they are
up to combating the scourge of armed robbery.
Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa bestirs with the
mantra of “rule of law” when it comes to legal
jeopardy for former and serving public officials
accused of betraying the public trust. But when more
than ten prisoners died at Ibadan Prison, he did not
see fit to visit the facility to inspect its inhumane
conditions and to champion the rights of its hapless
occupants.
Nor has Mr. Aondoakaa got round to rebuking Okiro and
the police for extra-judicial slaughter of
impoverished Nigerians. That’s deplorable. A state
that turns a blind eye to the killing of thousands of
its citizens risks encouraging citizens to adopt
self-help rather than the vaunted rule of law. Human
Rights Watch has collated Nigerian police records on
its unilateral executions. Said HRW: “by the police’s
own statistics, police personnel have shot and killed
more than 8,000 people since January 2000 in
circumstances that remain largely unexplained. In
2005, police officials told Human Rights Watch that
from January 2000 to March 2004 police personnel
killed 7,198 ‘armed robbers’ in ‘combat.’ Remarkably,
during the first three months of 2004, the police
claimed to have killed 422 armed robbers in shootouts,
while recovering only 300 firearms.”
This is chilling statistics by any measure, and an
indictment of the police. It is time the police tried
a different, and professionally sounder and
accountable, approach to crime prevention and
fighting. Instead of persisting with a suspect policy
of mowing down “suspects,” it is time the police
embarked on internal house cleaning. It should then
devise a rigorous method for gathering intelligence on
true crime suspects and update its manual for solving
crimes.
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