From #EndSARS to #DecoloniseNPF

It is refreshing to see Nigerians revolting against unjust government policies. The recent – and in many ways, ongoing – widespread protests calling for an end to the flagrant and incessant human rights abuses under the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigerian Police Force (NPF) is something that has long become inevitable. The successes achieved by the protesters is phenomenal and they should be applauded. The unfortunate events reported to have happened at the Lekki Tollgate has, in my opinion, doesn’t take away from the inspiration we should all gain from the peaceful protests across the country and our resolve to work harder for wholesale change in policing in Nigeria.

As laudable as the protests to end the hated SARS are, we mustn’t stop there. The flaw in SARS is deeper than this single programme. Demanding an end to the dreaded unit will merely eliminate one symptom of a much bigger and much deeper problem. Demanding an end to police brutality even, as wide-reaching as that call is, ignores the entrenched nature of the main problem. SARS is only flawed because it exists within a fundamentally flawed system that is the NPF itself. Police brutality occurs only because of the institutional disposition to the brutality that exists within the NPF. Human rights abuse is woven into the NPF DNA, and so, while human right abuses carried out by the officers of SARS will end with the disbandment of the unit, wider human right abuses by police officers will continue unabated. If anything, it might be expected to increase now that many officers will have misinterpreted the revolt against SARS as an affront to their profession and an outright attack on their authority.

One can see how easy it can be for police officers to think that citizens exercising their rights—duties even—to protest unjust law enforcement practices sets the protesters up against their profession and even them personally when they have mostly been conditioned to see the goal of policing as exerting power and dominance over the very people they theoretically are intended to serve. This skewed view of policing is rooted in the foundational objectives of Nigeria’s colonisers—the British—when they set up the NPF. This makes talks of mere cosmetic reforms within the NPF simply laughable.

Organised policing in Nigeria started as separate regional law enforcement units in the pre-colonial era. The Hausa Constabulary was established in 1879. The Royal Niger Company Constabulary was established in 1888 and the Niger Coast Constabulary was set up in 1894. After the British annexed Lagos in 1865, the Lagos Constabulary was set up in 1896. Nigeria became a British protectorate in 1901 and it was after that, in 1930, that the current system of national policing—the NPF—was established by the colonial government.

Since the single most obvious threat to the colonisers achieving their goal of profiting off Nigeria’s vast resources was internal dissent, they didn’t hesitate to make a premium investment into policing in Nigeria. Ironically, this high investment in policing during the colonial era, which helped to embed the deeply faulty foundation of policing in  Nigeria, is what also made the NPF one of the most developed institutions in the country at independence. The colonisers’ primary purpose for policing—to stifle dissent to their rule and to protect their interests—was by design actively worked against Nigerians. Just as it is in many world histories, getting people to take up a campaign of brutality against other human beings is often achieved through a systematic dehumanisation of the target group. It was a goal that was successful in colonial-era Nigeria. The core of the resulting culture of forceful repression of citizens’ rights through brutality has essentially become embedded within the fabric of the NPF, with new recruits inadvertently imbibing this culture upon joining, to this day.

After Nigeria attained independence in 1960, it would appear like the NPF simply went from its foundational purpose of stifling dissent against colonisers and protecting their interests, to doing the same things for the emerging Nigerian ruling elite. A poignant and recent case in point is a 2019 incident in Ekiti State where officers of the NPF sporadically shot at defenceless protesting students of the Federal University, Oye Ekiti, with impunity. One student, Oluwaseyi Kehinde, was killed and some others were injured. It was reported then that the police felt their action was justified because the wife of the Ekiti State Governor, Bisi Fayemi, was visiting the campus at the time and risked being attacked by the protesters. Lawlessness in policing is hardly a new thing in Nigeria, however. police adherence to the rule of law never mattered to the colonisers, except for when it serves to prevent possible revolts from within the institution against being used as instruments of citizens’ oppression.

Policing in Nigeria requires a fundamental overhaul to decolonise it. Policing in the pre-colonial era happened at a community level and was steeped in the search for fairness and justice. Unsurprisingly, therefore, one of the policies for policing during the colonial era and which continued to exist post-colonial era was to not allow police officers to serve in the communities they are from. Decolonising policing in Nigeria will require collapsing the current national policing structure in favour of a community-owned system. The value of community policing is well established. It brings communities and police together to work towards a shared goal of safer neighbourhoods. As an extension of the community, community policing helps the police to better understand and respond to the needs and priorities of their communities. Crucially, it also ensures that people in communities will have greater trust in the police, making the statement ‘police is your friend’ more than just a meaningless slogan on the backdrop of police station front desks.

The current Nigerian government has accepted that there is value in community policing and have approved N13 billion for what they say is a community policing initiative to recruit 10,000 new police officers to serve in the communities they are from. This does not even begin to scratch the surface of what is required. As important as it is, community policing isn’t primarily about police officers being from the communities they serve. It is necessarily about community ownership of the system of policing that affects them. It requires communities—with the police being ‘a part’ and not ‘apart’ from it—to lead the strategy of policing and not just its operations. Grafting aspects of community policing unto a faulty policing structure and ending programmes like SARS—as positive as these are—do not provide the answers to the deep-lying issue of persistent human rights abuses by the officers of the NPF. A three to five-year fully-funded strategy to transit policing in Nigeria from its colonial-era roots to a decolonised policing structure that places human rights and dignity at its centre will signal the government’s seriousness about ending the culture of brutality in the NPF for good. #DecoloniseNPF.

Buraimoh is the founder of Diaspora Initiative for Nigeria’s Development (DiND)