In more than half a century, Nigeria Police Force has not produced a celebrity officer quite like Mohammed Wakili, the Police Commissioner in Kano who is a radio, television, social media and real life sensation. This slightly-built policeman has electrified Kano’s streets, has caused a social media storm, is the darling of radio interviewers and television crews, and is the only policeman in Nigeria who receives an excited welcome from jubilant crowds when he appears in public. Everyone now calls him Singham, after an honest, upright and very wise police character in Indian movies.
The last time the Nigerian news media celebrated a policeman was more than 30 years ago, in the mid-1980s. In 1986, the Babangida military regime appointed a judicial commission of inquiry headed by then Court of Appeal judge Justice Mustapha Akanbi to probe that year’s student riots. The commission toured the whole country but during its sitting in Lagos, the Police Command spokesman Alozie Ogugbuaja created instant media sensation when he said soldiers drink alcohol, eat pepper soup in broad daylight and plot coups. Even though rivalry and jealousy between soldiers and policemen is never far below the surface, Alozie’s public dig at soldiers became very popular with the press. He was soon nicknamed “Policeman Alozie,” and for many months he was a media sensation, until the police unceremoniously posted him to Maiduguri.
Other policemen became well known for controversy. One of them was Tahiru Jidda, Borno State Police Commissioner in the Second Republic. According to newspapers at the time, Jidda was an overzealous supporter of the ruling NPN who dealt with the GNPP-controlled state government of Governor Muhammadu Goni. One episode during the 1983 election campaign particularly caused controversy. NPP presidential candidate Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe arrived in Maiduguri to campaign. Governor Goni, who had defected from GNPP to UPN, received him at the airport but the police blocked Zik’s way into Maiduguri. As he approached the police cordon on foot, Jidda’s men fired tear gas.
Before Compol Jidda, another policeman had gone from folk hero to national villain. This was Mr. Sunday Adewusi. In the early 1970s he gained much respect nationally as an undercover detective who arrested top notch armed robbers. DRUM magazine did many stories on him. In 1981 President Shehu Shagari appointed Adewusi as Police IG, and in that position the media soon began to portray him as an overzealous NPN partisan. Adewusi was alleged to have used the Police Mobile Force, widely known at the time as Kill And Go, to suppress opposition rallies and break up student and labour protests. After the 1983 elections, newspapers claimed that Adewusi even told Shagari to drop his minister, a daughter of First Republic Premier of the Western Region Chief Akintola, and replace her with a son of Akintola, whom he preferred. That was the allegation at the time.
When the Army overthrew the Second Republic in December 1983, one of their first moves was to intercept a consignment of armoured cars that Adewusi imported for Mopol. It was alleged then that Adewusi assured Shagari that with those APCs, Mopol could stop the military from ever mounting a coup. Some newspaper reports at the time said the timing of the coup was precisely because the army wanted to stop the police from clearing the APCs consignment at the ports.
Still, no policeman in Nigeria received quite as much media bashing for alleged partisanship as Mbu Mbu, Rivers State Police Commissioner during the Jonathan presidency. Mbu gave hell, so to say, to Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi, a PDP member who however fell out with First Lady Patience Jonathan. Mbu committed many acts of brazen impunity, even blocking the state assembly from sitting and blocking Amaechi from entering the Government House. He also tried to prevent five n-PDP governors from paying Amaechi a solidarity visit in Port Harcourt.
In late 2014, then Police IG Sulaiman Abba’s men tried to prevent House of Representatives Speaker Aminu Tambuwal from entering the Assembly Complex in Abuja. Shocking TV pictures showed the Speaker squatting by the gate while fellow MPs tucked their flowing gowns and scaled the fence to enter their offices. It was one of the worst episodes of police partisanship in Nigeria because Tambuwal was at loggerheads at the time with President Jonathan. Abba himself later fell out with Jonathan and was unceremoniously sacked as IG.
Ibrahim Kpotun Idris, who was IG until early this year, also got very bad press for his poor handling of politically sensitive issues. Only yesterday, a prime suspect in the deadly Offa robbery alleged that the police under Idris tried to force him to implicate Senate President Bukola Saraki of complicity in the robbery. His statement tended to confirm what many Nigerians had believed all along, that Idris was determined to rope in Saraki because the latter had fallen out with the Buhari Presidency. Idris’ handling of Dino Melaye also gave the police bad publicity. Although Melaye’s melodramatic antics are a national scandal, the police fell into his trap and helped him to act them out on a large stage. Then there was the “transmission” episode, when the IG got stuck reading his speech.
It was no small turnaround for the police’s image to produce a man like Wakili. This CP has all the dramatic abilities of a professional comedian. He has all the crowd-pleasing sense of a veteran politician. Wakili has the wisdom of an elderly rural Hausaman, together with high principle and very effective policing duties. He is best known for his strident campaign to stamp out drug abuse in society. Just before the February elections, he led newsmen to see a shocking heap of leather-sheathed swords, knives and cudgels that Kano police seized from thugs. In Kano State’s charged political atmosphere of today, it is very fortunate that everyone trusts the Compol to do the right thing. The elections in Kano could have been a bloodbath without Singham, the most popular policeman in Nigeria in more than half a century.
