It is not unusual for a new person in a new position to think of how to implement new ideas. And that is exactly what the nation has been getting in torrents each time a new chief cop is appointed. Following in that tradition, the former Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Ogbonna Onovo, and his immediate predecessor, Mr. Mike Okiro, anchored their ideas on a three-point and a seven-point agenda respectively. Though, for many reasons, their supposedly brilliant strategies in either crime prevention or crime fighting disintegrated while they lasted.
Now, enter Alhaji Hafiz Ringim. Since Ringim was appointed on September 8 as the new IG, he too, like every IG before him, has been talking tough. He needs to. The tenure of his immediate predecessor, Onovo, had been particularly unimpressive. By his own confession, his tenure in office was ”the most turbulent” in the history of the Nigeria Police Force. As he put it, he presided over a force that was ”fighting crime almost bare-handed”. Onovo ended the way he did, not because he was bereft of ideas. He simply got stuck in the murky mess of the Nigerian policing system.
But if Onovo got stuck, it appears Ringim is about to deepen the mess. At least two of the innovations he has announced so far may get him into trouble much faster than his predecessor. First, Ringim is quibbling for the scrapping of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps at a time when internal security challenges are evidently scary to the conventional security organisations, especially the Police.
The IG claims that the existence of the NSCDC contravenes Section 214 (1) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which makes provision for only a Police Force for the country. Ringim‘s other grouse centres on the exigency use of members of Police Mobile Force by state governments in fighting crime. The IG, who was at a time the Commander of the 9th Police Mobile Force Squadron in Kano, bemoans the fact that ”the Police Mobile Force has been subjected to performing unprofessional and degrading duties”. And just like that, he has ordered the immediate disbandment of all anti-crime squads/teams across the country.
According to him, ”In recent years, it (PMF) has been the most bastardised and most cannibalised outfit; every rogue, vagabond, unauthorised person wants to be seen with a lorry load of riot policemen hanging around his entourage.” Onovo had also lamented that a sizeable number of policemen were in the habit of serving as ”errand boys” for moneybags and their spouses and also offering sundry and ignoble domestic services such as opening gates, going to the market and saluting politicians. Sound argument. But then, that is if Mr. Ringim will not be throwing away the baby with the bath water.
Yet, as much as we have to acknowledge that Ringim means well, the setting up of special anti-crime squads by state governments remains the last tiny link that still holds the nation‘s security network together. Policing a federal state is a complex affair. In most countries, federal police agencies have relatively narrow police powers, as the individual states or provinces usually run their own police forces to enforce laws within their own boundaries.
The fundamental problem with our policing system is over-centralisation and the abuse that goes with it. There is no point pretending again: the Nigeria Police as it is constituted today lacks the discipline and the framework to police the country. It should be noted that state governments began setting up special anti-crime outfits when insecurity in some parts of the country reached an alarming level.
The growing inability of the Police to discharge their statutory duties can be directly linked to the desecration of Nigerian federalism as contained in the 1963 Constitution. Though Section 105 of the 1963 Constitution made provision for the establishment of the Nigeria Police Force, Sub-section 7 stated, ”Nothing in this section shall prevent the legislature of a Region from making provision for the maintenance by any native authority or local government authority established for a province or any part of a province of a police force for employment within that province.” And that was 47 years back.
Read More:http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art201011100555515
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