IGP Baba’s Big Stick

The dismissal, by the Inspector General of Police [IGP] Usman Alkali Baba, of three police officers for an offence that would have passed for one of those things that lot of police personnel commit and which are, more often than not, condoned or even encouraged by the prevailing system in Nigeria has received a maximum public attention. A shot in the air without any precipitation, as done by the three officers—Inspector Dahiru Shuaibu, Sergeant Abdullahi Badamasi and Sergeant Isa Danladi–is a violation of the law that was described by the Police Public Relations Officer, Muyiwa Ajimobi, in his tweeter handle as “high-handedness, unprofessional and misuse of firearms” and therefore heavily punishable.

The offenders who are personnel of the Special Protection Unit (Base One) in Kano served as escorts to a popular Kano-based Hausa political singer, Alhaji Dauda Kahutu, also known as Rarara, whom they recently accompanied to his village in Danja Local Government Area of Katsina State. While there and in the midst of the people who jubilantly gathered at the point of the singer’s departure, the policemen over-zealously fired several shots in the air; an act that was visually recorded and widely circulated.

Although the incident generated huge attention and the resultant condemnation from across the various segments of the country’s citizenry, there was however only a slim expectation that the offenders would be so severely punished. The almost general assumption was that the complaint over the misconduct would subsist for just a little time, but would eventually fizzle out as did many similar or even worst matters over which utmost concerns were painfully expressed.

The IGP’s swift reaction to the police officers’ offensive attitude, therefore, came across as some kind of new high to which the Nigeria Police Force [NPF] has been raised and which is still a subject of a lot of interpretations, all of which have already translated into an arguably favorable conclusion on the police. The outright sack of the three over-zealous policemen looks like a deliberate effort of the NPF to make up for its several operational shortcomings for which it is widely and consistently criticized.

However, while their immediate expulsion has helped to restore some amount of confidence in the police, an adequate probe into the incident will reveal a terrible systemic problem that has always been the root of such failures. There is no any other way in which the attachment of police officers to a singer who is not occupying any leadership position and whose vocation is not related to public service can be explained, which means that the absence of justification for the conferment of such a rare privilege on an undeserving citizen is one of the manifestations of a rot in the security system of the country.

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Everything about the incident is a clear testimony to the fact that the NPF, which, as stated in its website, is the “principal law enforcement agency in the country” that is fully responsible for the “prevention and detection of crime, apprehension of offenders, preservation of law and order, protection of life and property” as well as the discharge of a few other related duties, has already been substantially compromised. The deployment of more police personnel to serve as security aides of some privileged Nigerians than can be easily ascertained or even imagined is the biggest evidence that the agency has, in fact, been cheapened.

IGP Usman Alkali Baba whose main resolve is the protection and promotion of image of the police has every reason to worry about the obvious disrepute to which the Force is being associated. A combination of some embarrassing tendencies of the personnel and contemptuous disposition towards the agency by some members of the public are enough to make him uncomfortable.

It is, for example, quite easy to recall that in October last year, the NPF under him openly reprimanded a female police officer who was seen in a video holding the handbag of Hajiya Titi, wife of the former Vice President of Nigeria and Presidential Candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) during the last general elections, Atiku Abubakar and to whom she (the female police) was a security aide. This particular reaction must have fully served as a strong warning to all those officers who might have willingly or unwillingly indulged in such a disgraceful act.

Two months earlier, precisely in August 2023, two female supernumerary officers were suspended for, as contained in a certain report, “breach of the provisions of the Police Act 2020 and the Nigeria Police Force Guidelines for recruitment, promotion and discipline of supernumerary police”. The officers—Blessing Obaze and Emmanuelle Obaze—were found to have, by putting their photos on a social media platform(s) showing themselves in camouflage uniforms, contravened the “Police Social Media Policy”; an act that called for a sanction.

The other offence over which the IGP showed anger was the one committed, not by, but against another female police officer, Inspector Teju Moses, who was physically assaulted by an Abuja-based lawyer and human rights activist, Professor Zainab Duke, to whom she was attached as a security aide.  Withdrawal of the security aide(s) and prosecution of the lawyer were the immediate reactions of the NPF to the incident and for which the IGP was highly commended.

All these are manifestations of the battle that the police boss has continued to fight in a bid to salvage an agency on which the whole country relies for the strict application and maximum observance of the rule of law. This means that the amount of respect the police enjoy, as inadequate as it appears, would have been much lesser had the IGP not been so committed to the protection of the image of the Force.

The swift manner in which he, unhesitatingly, applies his big stick whenever something untoward was committed by or against the police helps to curb such tendencies that on the one hand lead the personnel to commit a breach of the provisions guiding police operations and on the other hand make Nigerians accord enough respect to them as law enforcers. The country deserves nothing less from the Head of its biggest law enforcement agency.