Zainab Duke’s Assault On Police

To say the picture of Inspector Teju Moses’s battered face trending on the social media is utterly embarrassing and disturbing is an understatement. Her principal who is a Legal practitioner and human rights activist, Prof. Zainab Duke-Abiola and her domestic staff allegedly assaulted the inspector, in full police uniform.

The Police authority said Zainab Duke, assaulted her orderly in company of some accomplices at her residence in Garki, Abuja, following the Police officer’s refusal to breach professional ethics by carrying out menial and domestic chores.

It is doubtful if Duke, a wife of the late MKO Abiola, is an activist because her actions betrays activism. More disturbing is the fact that Duke is a lawyer by training. Regardless of her reasons for assaulting the police officer, even a layman knows that assault is an offence.

Fundamentally, the assault on Inspector Moses by Duke and her accomplices is symbolic of a frontal attack on the Nigerian police, which should be a serious source of worry to the authorities. Incidents like this create image problem for the force.

The assault has brought to the fore, for the umpteenth time, the recurring calls for the withdrawal of police orderlies attached to the so-called Very Important Persons (VIPs)

It unimaginable that while VIPs have a generous supply of police orderlies, communities under sustained attacks by criminal elements are left unpoliced? Who benefits from this vexed posting of police orderlies to VIPs? Why should the security of a privileged few take precedence over that of many hapless citizens?

We recall that recently, Governor Aminu Bello Masari of Katsina State said that the number of police operatives in Katsina cannot tackle the insecurity in his state.

“We’ve a local government where there are not more than 30 policemen with only 10 guns. And they have over 100 villages.” He also noted that the state has no more than 3,000 police officers.

Masari told the Inspector General of Police that Katsina lack adequate number of personnel to effectively police the area with a population of about eight million people.

To understand why the concern raised by Masari is worrisome and should not have been taken lightly, we must reaffirm the fact that this is Katsina where citizens are being killed almost on a daily basis by bandits and other terrorists who have continued to make life brutish for especially residents of rural communities.

 Governor Abubakar Bello of Niger also made a similar complaint when he lamented that only 4,000 officers were policing the state’s 4 million people. Niger, which has continued to suffer attacks by bandits, is the state with the largest land mass in the country covering 76,363 square kilometres.

Sadly, under this precarious situation, the Police find it fitting to attach well-trained personnel to serve as orderlies to some utterly underserving persons like Zainab Duke.

Equally distressing, in our opinion, is the fact that the Police authority seems unbothered by the fact that a police officer, trained and equipped by the state, is increasingly being reduced to a domestic servant.

Like most Nigerians, we are worried that the Police authority appears comfortable with their personnel being attached to former and serving public officials, who sometimes redistribute them to their wives and children.

It is more worrisome when one considers the fact that even among the police personnel, there are widespread allegations of lobbying for postings to serve as orderlies.

We are not oblivious of the fact that there is the need for the Special Protection Unit (SPU) in the Force, to provide security for high-risked, state protected persons. Indeed, this understanding informed the formation of the SPU, which began full operations in 2011 as part of the implementations of the Police Reform Agenda.

However, the increasing abuse of this privilege as witnessed in the case of Zainab Duke and other instances where police personnel were seen carrying handbags of their principal, make it incumbent on the Police authority to reassess the relevance SPU.

As for Zainab Duke, her action is condemnable and she must face the full wrath of the law. It is pleasing that the Inspector-General of Police has ordered the withdrawal of all Police personnel attached to her.

Beyond the directive for withdrawal, the IGP needs to take a holistic look at the deployment of police to VIPs in the face of genuine concerns about most communities being under-policed.