Habu Sani assumed duty as the Commissioner of Police (CP) in charge of Kano State on November 21, 2019 – a period characterised by increasing cases of missing children in the state.
In this interview by Daily Trust on Sunday he speaks about how the missing children issue was addressed and on the cases of daba (thuggery).
Daily Trust: How have you been able to address the issue of citizens’ perception about the police?
Habu Sani: As you can see, even from the comments of the people, they call me Kalamu Waheed.
DT: What does that mean?
Sani: One word. If you come with anything that is far from the truth, I don’t accept it. Even if you are in the lowest cadre of the society and you have a conflict with a high-ranking personality, what I look at is what you both have to present as facts before me.
It’s the facts that will decide the direction of the case, without considering one person as more important than the other. Again, if you have documents to present and the other person has documents too, I send those documents to the issuing authority to decide the genuineness or otherwise of such documents.
So, people now have access to me. I try as much as possible to see anyone that comes here to see me. Now, they know they can reach me, and any complaint they lay is acted on. This has given them the confidence to say, “Yes, the police is really our friend.” They now come closer to us, and that’s how we get actionable information.
DT: A burning issue when you assumed work as the Kano State CP was that of missing children. How did you tackle that?
Sani: It is a matter of information and action. If you get information, and you act on it without compromise, it will send a message to the person who may want to go contrary to the rules. All the suspects in the missing children’s case have been charged to court. In the course of information gathering and processing, we uncovered a house that has been in operation for over 30 years; and what do they do? They portray it as a private orphanage. The state law does not recognise private orphanage; and they have changed location.
We discovered that they had kept people’s children in that house; with the explanation that they were vulnerable children they wanted to assist. What are the ethics and codes of conduct for opening an orphanage? What are the laws guiding the operation of orphanages? They did not comply with any of them. They said the children were from some ladies who got pregnant out of wedlock who do not want anything to do with their babies after delivery.
How can you say you woke up in the morning and saw a child crying in front of the house, so you picked that child and put in the orphanage without informing the police, the supervisory ministry or the Ministry of Social Welfare? No government agency is involved, and there’s no record of accountability of how many children that have gone through that particular orphanage and where they are now.
We did not see a single register in the course of investigation; up to the time we charged the case to court. There was no record of the number of children that passed through that home for the past 30 years. We also discovered they have a branch in Kaduna.
DT: What strategies did you put in place to make the state relatively safe in terms of kidnapping?
Sani: You have to be on the offensive always. So, if anything happens, you know where it is coming from. If you look at some of the (kidnapping) recoveries we have made, they are from the neighbouring states. When they strike there, they come into our area. Sometimes in the course of that investigation, we get them quickly and then from the investigation we get others that are involved in the other side.
If there is a strike in any of the vulnerable villages in our own area, maybe having seen the deployment, they find their way and run back to their base. The last one – a syndicate of 15, we have gotten 12, we are closing in on the remaining and you will find out that some of them are from Kaduna, others from Jigawa.
DT: What do you think is the attraction towards Kano by these criminals crossing the borders like the case of Wadume?
Sani: The attraction is not farfetched. You know Kano is cosmopolitan. In fact, it’s a megacity just like Lagos. You can easily hide. Nobody knows that this is a visitor coming into the state because of the population and activities. So, every day you see new persons coming in. It’s easy for you to hide when you enter Kano. But if you are in Jigawa for example, if you enter even the state capital, you wouldbe easily noticed. You can come from Niger Republic to Kano and be working in the state and nobody will know you are Nigerien until they come closer and speak with you.
People’s attention is more on their businesses and activities than in other things. That is why we are encouraging people to know their neighbours. Landlords are also advised to profile whoever is coming to rent their houses so that they don’t end up harbouring criminals; and if something happens like the one in Magajin Gari, the owner of the house also has to answer for it.
DT: Politicians are mostly blamed for daba (thuggery) in Kano, how were you able to convince them to stop recruiting young men as thugs?
Sani: Let me tell you something, if you decide to tag the issue of thuggery to politicians, we will not be able to solve it. Take it as a crime and let us see who will come to bail that particular suspect. By the time you give an attachment to it, then you are inviting more problems. If you are a thug, I take you as a criminal and I go for you.
By the time I arrest and prosecute you after investigation, let me see who will come and talk, then I will ask him how it concerns him. Are you the one sponsoring him? Are you the one encouraging him? So, when they find out that nobody can come and beg on their behalf, they have to think of an alternative way of survival. That’s how I was able to address that issue.
More so, apart from the people we have arrested, there are other interventions that we have done to help in the fight against daba. We considered their age group. Most of them are youths, and I often ask myself: do we continue to allow these youths waste the valuable period of their life between age 15 and 30?
This is the period they are still strong to carryout meaningful tasks for themselves and the society, but instead they are now indulging in drugs, thuggery, murder and other kinds of crime and criminality. I said no.
While we continue to fight taking the stick approach, we also had to look at the carrot approach and this was to identify the leaders in the various ‘yan daba groups. I had to invite about 52 of them to this office and talked with them, letting them know that they are important to us and the society.
Afterwards, so many of them started withdrawing gradually; that’s why you no longer see them. They have gone into learning skills to survive. We conducted supplementary elections in few local governments and you saw how the process went smoothly; there was no fight throughout when we did the House of Reps and state assembly elections.
