Over the weekend in Abuja, something came over Pastor Uche Aigbe, as he was about to mount the pulpit for his Sunday sermon. Aside from his Holy Book, he decided he needed another prop to reinforce his preaching. Since he didn’t have one of those props lying around, he decided to borrow one from a police officer assigned to offer protection to the church.
That was how Pastor Aigbe ended up on the pulpit with a Bible in one hand and an assault rifle slung over his shoulder to preach to his congregation about ‘Guarding their faith.’
At first, his congregants were unsure what to make of seeing him arrive like that. It was in all honestly a shocking spectacle. But the pastor told them it was no laughing matter as he was there to urge them to use their guns to defend their faith. Photos and videos of the pastor trended and soon enough the storm broke.
Fortunately, Pastor Aigbe belonged to a church that has so far responded to this crisis with uncommon integrity. The Church on the Rock has been quick to tender an apology on both its behalf and the pastor’s and making the important pronouncement that it “rejects all forms of violence.”
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“We are cooperating fully with the authorities as they carry out their investigations into this incident, and we will continue to engage internally to ensure this break in protocol does not happen again,” the statement by the church said. “Without hesitation, Pastor Uche has acknowledged the gravity of his actions and apologises unreservedly for them.”
That is a responsible reaction from the church. And in view of this statement, the text and substance of Uche Aigbe’s potentially inciting preaching (video clips of which are available online) should be taken with caution—as the Hausa will say, to chew water before swallowing it. The authorities have intervened and Aigbe has been arrested. He will get out eventually. His only crime was violating the 1990 Nigerian Firearms Act, which prohibits unlicensed individuals, which Mr Aigbe is, from bearing assault weapons.
Of course, some flippant arguments have been made about why the police arrested the pastor while terrorists and bandits are carrying these weapons freely. Such arguments are faulted by the argument itself, which put a pastor and bandits on the same bandwidth. They are not the same. The bandits are called bandits because they are criminals. The pastor is so addressed because he is the opposite, or is supposed to be.
The issue here is not whether Pastor Aigbe carried a gun or not, as that is being addressed and investigated. The issue is how he got hold of it in the first place.
A certain Inspector Musa Audu has been named as the culprit. He is one of the policemen assigned to protect the church and is currently explaining to his superiors how he was convinced to part with his weapon.
On two fronts, this is an incredibly ludicrous thing to do. First, it compromises his professional integrity, as every arms-bearing security personnel is trained never to surrender his or her weapon. Secondly, he compromised the security of everyone he was tasked to protect. After all, if there had been a security incident at the church, he would not have been in a position to defend the congregation because he had callously surrendered his weapon.
On that level, Pastor Aigbe also contributed to compromising the safety of his congregation by conspiring to have the officer surrender his weapon to him.
The police are investigating Inspector Audu, who is in detention and will be facing an orderly room trial soon. Regardless, the FCT Police Commissioner, Sadiq Abubakar, has reportedly recommended his dismissal.
This officer’s callousness brings to the front burner yet again, the Police’s persistent self-sabotage in the name of VIP protection.
The business of attaching officers to VIPs for protection has compromised the professionalism of the police and resulted in potentially costly or downright embarrassing slip-ups like Inspector Audu handing over his gun to an unlicensed civilian. Or that officer in that viral photo holding an umbrella for a Chinese businessman he was attached to, or the numerous officers you see in the markets or malls holding the handbags of VIPs or the wives of the VIPs they are serving, reducing themselves from officers of the law to armed, roving butlers.
It has also created situations where officers will spend eight or 10 years attached to VIPs and therefore become unable or incapable of performing other duties of regular policing. With the intervention of their VIPs, such officers might end up getting promotions that will put them in decision-making positions in the force without the necessary competence or experience.
Yet the police itself keeps enabling this misconduct. It is a lucrative business after all. Not too long ago, one-time Chairman of the Police Service Commission, Mike Okiro lamented that nearly half the police officers in the country are on VIP protection duties.
Every time a new Inspector General is appointed, he goes through the routine of announcing the recall of all officers on VIP protection duties. It has so far proven to be grandstanding as this recall has never happened. Not even after Mr Okiro, sometime in 2015, announced that the police will be deploying a monitoring team to force all its officers on VIP protection duties to return to base.
Sometime last year, reports emerged that policemen attached to singer Burna Boy allegedly shot and injured a man at a nightclub in Lagos.
Like this weekend’s church incident, the police said it was investigating those reports. Many months after, no report has been made public. With all the parties involved—the victim, the perpetrator and the witnesses—easily identifiable, it makes one wonder why it is taking the police so long to announce its findings.
As long as the Police Force is being run like a private security firm, such incidents will continue to happen. Celebrities, pastors and imams have no business being assigned police details. They are not holding any sensitive public office that should justify the devotion of these national assets to their personal service.
If on account of their popularity, they need protection, the normal thing to do would be to hire private security. But since the police hierarchy runs the force as if it were a private security concern, if you put the right money on the table, it doesn’t matter if you are Dangote, Burna Boy or Hushpuppi, you will get assigned police orderlies. They will hold your bag, walk your dog and beat up anyone whose looks you don’t like the looks of.
The irony in this arrangement is that it often leads to situations where individuals declared wanted by the police are walking around with a retinue of armed policemen protecting them from being arrested.
The incident at the Church of the Rock last weekend, should not just focus our attention on the propensity of religious leaders to do irrational things like incendiary preaching but also on the complicity of law enforcement in such incidents that compromise national security.
It makes no sense for a country facing multiple security situations, from the bandits of the Savannah, the terrorists of the Sahel, the raiders of everywhere and the ‘unknown gunmen’ of the rainforest regions—to indulge in such a kamikaze security set-up. You simply cannot have half of your entire police force devoted to protecting VIPs, mostly from other Nigerians who actually need the protection.
The police need to stop with regular proclamations of closing down its security-for-hire operations and devote itself to the task for which it was established—the protection of the entirety of the population, not just the one per cent.