A former Commissioner of Police for Lagos State and currently Special Adviser to Oyo State governor on Security, Mr Fatai Owoseni, in this interview by SAM NWAOKO, speaks, among others, on the problems militating against efficiency of the Nigeria Police and proffers solutions.
THE crime rate in Oyo State is better managed compared to some other states based on reports. How have you been able to attain this feat considering the variety of issues?
There is no magic other than that all the institutions saddled with the responsibility of security and law enforcement in the state have been up to task. It is one thing for them to be up to task, it is another thing for them to have the enablement to discharge their obligations. We will have to give it to the governor of the state who has provided the wherewithal to ensure that the security agencies are able to discharge their obligations in terms of providing necessary logistics that are required. To an extent, he also supports in the welfare of the personnel of the security agencies. That provided, we are also lucky to have a people in the state who are always willing and ready to provide the necessary intelligence as they come across them. Above all, the strong synergy that exists among the security agencies is also a key factor to having a relatively peaceful Oyo State. I will also not forget to mention that the state modified the security architecture into what we call an ‘integrated security concept’ that made the state actors to collaborate well with non-state actors. It is an ongoing thing. It’s not to say we should rest on our oars, there are still many areas that we will need to improve upon. In the cause of time, all these things will be addressed one by one to ensure that we are able to ensure adequate security and safety for the people of Oyo State so that they will b able to go about their lawful endeavours without any let or hindrance.
Controversy has bedeviled the ongoing recruitment exercise by the police. We learnt that 10,000 policemen were supposed to be recruited per annum to bridge the personnel gap but we have not been able to complete one recruitment cycle in over one year. What is the problem with this recruitment exercise?
It is a problem that has risen from the total neglect suffered by the police. It is an integral part of that neglect. I have followed the controversy over recruitment between the police as an institution – that is the office of the Inspector-General of Police, and the Police Service Commission (PSC). It is very sad and totally uncalled for. Who suffers from all of these? It is Nigeria and the masses that have been deprived of the services of policemen that would have been recruited. It is sad because the law is very clear and the government has decided not to pay attention. There is a gap and even the people that are ruling us know that there is a gap but have ignored it: Where is the Police Council? This council is a creation of the constitution. In 1957, there was a Minority Commission they called Willink’s Commission. The outcome of the commission’s exercise is that the police is unique in the kind of work it carries out and that there should be a Police Service Commission which should be saddled with the responsibility of appointment into the police of officers of the rank of DIG downwards. It is only the IGP that the PSC does not appoint, it is the Police Council that appoints the IGP. In the report of the Willink’s Commission and in its analysis, it was also indicated that because of the large size of the police, certain responsibilities certain responsibilities should be delegated to the office of the IGP. Such delegation is that from the rank of Inspector of Police downward, the PSC should delegate the responsibility of their discipline to the office of the IGP and that is where the office of the IGP, so to say, derives that obligation that makes them to say for the recruitment of constables, the IGP should be involved. But mind you, it is a delegated responsibility. That is not to say that you are solely supposed to do it. So, when carrying out recruitment, the two bodies should work together. The PSC has the original authority which should be delegated and when it is delegated, you are also supposed to report back.
So this controversy they have come up with to the extent that the office of the IGP is coming up with so many damaging allegations, and some people in the PSC, without a board and without a chairman, a so-called staff union of the Police Service Commission are also joining issues with the office of the IGP, that is an aberration. The staff of the PSC are not the right people, its union is not the right organ to attack the office of the IGP. I worked at the PSC for some years as the head of the police liaising unit. That was when Mr. Parry Osayande was the Chairman. When issues like this arose, the Chairman and the IGP sat down and quietly resolved it. But now what we see is like we are having a season of anomie where everybody is talking recklessly.
But in all these, the organ which is supposed to provide leadership is comatose. It is like it is dead. What is that organ? It is the Police Council. The Willink’s Commission vested the administration and financing of the Police within the purview of the powers of the Police Council. Some of us have clamoured for a very long time that the Police Council should function. Some people even believe that if the Police Council functions very well, there may not even be agitation for state police. The president is said to be the chairman of the Police Council with all the governors of the federating units as members and the analysis done of the Willink’s Commission on its mention of the creation of the Police Council, shows that it did not envisage that we would one day have in the country, a situation in which the president and all the governors would be from the same political party because the beauty of democracy is to be able to have variety. If you have police council that is functioning and you have an IGP that takes his policing plan and his budget to the police council, they would be able to resolve some of these things. I’ve read reports that say that the Minister of Police Affairs is trying to resolve the problem between the Police and the PSC. No, the minister of Police Affairs has no such power. A minister of police affairs is not even captured under the law in the administration of the police. The office of the minister of police affairs is an aberration. The IGP and the Police are supposed to be administered by the Police Council, and imagine putting all the governors together with the president as the chairman. That is the gap that we have not filled. They have not made the police council to function and that is the council that is supposed to have a proper administrative set up, probably meet quarterly so that issues like this where you have controversy, where the Police is challenging the power of the Police Service Commission that has the legal mandate to carry out recruitment exercise, if you have functional police council, you will take it to the council that will resolve the issue rather than going to a minister of police affairs.
For you to know how delicate the police is, in March 1966 the then Head of State, General Aguiyi Ironsi, said: “…police have become an indispensible organ of government in any civilised community. They are powerful elements in the strength and weakness of any nation. Indeed as law enforcement and corrective agencies, their role in the mainstream of any society is distinctively important…” That is why the police should not be subjected to so much political control.” And for you to know that we have deviated from the original intent of the law, and even the PSC itself, in appointing members, the constitution is clear and the PSC Act is clear, that members are supposed to be apolitical. Now, we have turned membership of the PSC to compensate politicians. The Act and the constitution says membership should be the chairman, another permanent member who should be a retired judge of the Supreme Court or the Federal Court of Appeal, and another permanent member who will represent the interest of the Police. He should be of the rank of retired Commissioner and above. There are three permanent members. The other members that constitute the PSC, the constitution specifies such. In order to cover the diverse nature of the country, it stipulates a member representing the media. In taking this member, what is expected is that the government will go to the media unions, maybe NUJ or NGE or NPAN to send a nominee. But now, one political jobber will just be put there. A member representing the women interest, here it is expected that you should go to the National Council of Women’s Societies to get a nominee; a member representing the private sector, and it is expected that you should go to the Organised Private Sector and ask for a representative because such person will give feedback to them. There also a member representing Civil Society, you will go back to the civil society to say give us a nominee. But nowadays, government will just sit down and look for some people that have their sympathy or people that had worked for their political party before and put them there.
So you can see how government has destroyed the police because the PSC is an important organ to regulate discipline. That is why nowadays you have a situation where so many criminal elements are wearing uniform because you have a PSC that is full of politicians. When they get there, they look for someone that had been dismissed for offences that are criminal in nature, they go back to the party or go to the National Assembly, and because the police is such that you have a PSC that is not allowed to function properly, they will go to court and nobody will come to court to represent PSC, the office of the IGP will also not be represented and they will get a judgement that says ‘oh this person had been dismissed unjustifiably’. Meanwhile, the guy is a criminal in uniform. So, you have all sorts of things destroying the police.
So, the government should not pay lip service to this issue. There had been so many committees set up to look at the reform of the police. There are even white papers. There is one particular one, the Dan Madami report, the white paper is there it just needs to be touched up. Mr. Parry Osayande report is there, that put all the past reform committees together and there was also a white paper on it that was not implemented. So you will find out that the government takes one step forward with regards to the police and 20 steps backward. That is why I say that we are not ready to have a police and that probably explains why people coming up – including politicians and governors – coming up with agitations for state police. We have not looked at what the actual problem is. It is just as the Yoruba will say: won n fi ete sile, won pa lapalapa (you leave leprosy to be treating ringworm). If you don’t look at the root cause of how we got here, we will continue like that
There are agitations in the Nigeria Police about contributory pension. Things like these demoralise officers and men. Are there merits in the complaints by the personnel of the Nigeria Police sir? What is the problem and what do you think is the way forward on the matter?
Having been there and out, and having worn the shoe and still wearing the shoe, I think I know where the shoe pinches. The matter is beyond the contributory pension scheme. By this I mean it is about prioritizing the overall welfare of an average police officer in this country. I will sum it up by saying that it doesn’t appear that we are ready to have a police in Nigeria. I said that because you cannot say an institution has a primacy in internal security yet it is the least funded in terms of the provisions you make for them. In addition to making a caricature of an average policeman, the country has so derided an average policeman to the extent that an average policeman doesn’t appear to have a sense of worth. And how did that come to be? It is because the government has more or less turned an average policeman to a beggar on the streets. Little or nothing is made as provision for their welfare. When you talk of salary, you will know that salary will always be an issue. While in service, they are impoverished with little or nothing because even if you make provision for logistics, what about the people that would use the logistics? The salary is just a pittance, and that also goes to pension. As a retired Commissioner of Police, my pension is just N70,000 after 35 years of meritorious service to this country. The retirees and serving people that are clamouring for the removal of the Police from the contributory pension scheme are doing so rightly. However, it is beyond that. Pension is a factor of salary. If you don’t adjust the salary, even if they are removed from the contributory pension scheme, the pension will still be nothing. Is the contributory pension scheme bad?
I’ll explain one of the main reasons the Police has been clamouring for removal. Let us assume that it a policy that the government wants to adopt and they started a contributory pension scheme. At a point in time, an amendment was made to that law, and it was passed by the National Assembly. The amendment was that members of security institutions and the intelligence community should be removed from the contributory pension scheme. When the National Pension Commission (PENCOM) people and the government interpreted that, they took out the police. They said that the Police did not belong to the security and the intelligence community. Meanwhile, it actual fact, it is the police that fathered all the others in the security and intelligence community. So, they only took the armed forces and the SSS out of the contributory pension scheme and claimed that the Police was not in the security and intelligence community. That is annoying. This is not just a story. While I was still in service, serving at the Police Service Commission, I was in the team that took that argument to the government during President Jonathan’s regime. Jonathan asked the SGF then, Pius Anyim, to form a committee to look into that because President Jonathan was taken aback when he heard that police was not part of the security an intelligence community. The only argument put forward by PENCOM, a most annoying argument at that, was that they didn’t remove the police because of the huge number of personnel in the Nigeria Police; because if you put the Nigerian Army, the Nigerian Navy and the Nigerian Air Force together, they still would not make the number of the Police. They said because of that number, if the Police was pulled out of the contributory pension scheme, the fund would collapse.
What are they saying in essence? They are saying that we must punish the police for the country to run. And shamelessly and disappointingly, the PENCOM told the SGF that it was the money from this contributory pension scheme that they used to run the country. That is to say, the police must be punished in order for every other one to survive. So, the police are treated like trash and that is it.
I am also aware that a move was made to the government by the police and they gave the police a middle way. They said you can have police pension fund administrator to take care of the police. Recommendations were made in accordance with the law to say that certain categories of officers should not be removed from the police contributory pension scheme – still under the contributory pension scheme – that officers of the rank of AIG and above should be classified as officer that will retire and go with their salaries, like the permanent secretaries. Commissioners down to the last constable, according to the law, there is an adjustment to be made to boost their pension and gratuity to 300 percent of their annual salary. This would have also helped to an extent but unfortunately too, about three years ago when the government, after adopting that recommendation, adopted it only halfway by taking the AIG rank and above, treating them like permanent secretaries and leaving the other ranks. That made the other ranks feel that they have been removed from the contributory pension scheme. If the other leg that says ‘increase these other people’s pension by 300 percent’ had been implemented, and it is within the ambit of the pension law, things might have been different. But government has refused to implement that aspect and unfortunately, just like we like to reinvent the wheel, some of our colleagues that are fighting for this pension thing are not aware of that letter. It is only about implementation of that second leg, it is not just about removal from the contributory pension scheme.
So, in making moves over pension, what they are going to the National Assembly for is to advocate for removal from the contributory pension scheme. That is not going to solve the problem like I had stated. Even if the police are removed from the scheme, which is a proper thing to do because what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander if you have taken the armed forces and the SSS from the scheme as per the law, why not implement the law fully to take the police out of it? But at the same time, it is important to holistically look at the emoluments of the police. In other areas, to adjust emoluments, it is job evaluation in order to pay salaries and give emoluments to people. When you do job evaluation, who is at risk the most in the whole of all the agencies that are involved with security? It is the average policeman who fights an asymmetric war on a daily basis. Is he not the one that is supposed to be kitted? If you are mouthing to say that this institution has primacy over internal security, it also follows that you should also make their funding a priority. The whole emolument should be looked at. Make emolument a priority and when you do that you should now also look at how to provide the tools to work with.
The average police divisional office is given N30,000 quarterly. What is that money for? It is not even enough to buy fuel in a day. It seems as if no adjustment is being made as per that. There are a lot of things they have to look at and they need to do it holistically. It is not as if you would address one and leave the other.
All you have mentioned affect efficiency; these factors also affect the morale and the psyche of the personnel of the Nigeria Police but people don’t seem to know these and only complain that the police are inefficient while the army has taken over the job of providing internal security. How do you view this?
It is very correct that the factors I have enumerated above seriously affect the work of the Nigeria Police and it is sad that they have taken the Nigerian Army to take over internal security. If you are taking the Nigerian Army to take over internal security role at the expense of external aggression, that is to say that if you have external aggression, God forbid, you are going to have a depleted army. If you look at the whole country, internal security operations have been so taken over to the extent that units that are not supposed to be created by the Armed Forces are being created. So, we are more or less now making the armed forces do routine internal security jobs.
Beyond emolument, even at death, the policeman’s life is made to seem worthless by the government. A few days ago, someone called me and I saw that he probably didn’t know how the police system works. He said his cousin, a policeman, had an accident and died. He said the family had just been left to themselves to do the burial. He was expecting that there would be a provision for the burial, which, of course, is not there. What they do in the Nigeria Police is when someone dies, his colleagues would contribute kobo-kobo from their salary that is not enough to buy coffin. Whatever that is said to be the burial expenses will not come until probably after the burial must have been done. I faced situations in which I had to go cap in hand to philanthropists, governors and so on to beg for help to be able to move the body of our policemen to where their family is. We cannot continue like that and expect the police to perform optimally and be efficient. We need to sit down and appraise all these things and decide whether we want the police or not.
So, how best can we educate people that the issue with the police is beyond corruption in the institution or lack of training or willingness of the personnel to perform their duties efficiently. What is the way forward from the deep rot in the general system you have highlighted, which is also affecting the police?
If you say the police is rotten then all of us are rotten. The government is rotten because the police is the face of the government. So, for everyone that comes out to say that the police is this or that, such a person is equally everything they are calling the police. If the government has condemned the police, the same government that crippled the police, they should also condemn themselves. We have always asked how we found ourselves in this pitiable condition. When you look at it, apart from the neglect by the government, the police has its own institutional problems. Indiscipline is there among many others. However, all these institutional problems will still be tied to the neglect suffered by the police. Indiscipline, erosion of professionalism, non-adherence to extant rules and regulations are among the problems. Recruitment process is not only compromised, it has been politicised and bastardised such that rather than have the police populated by the purest of human beings among us and intelligent persons, it is now full of the dregs of the society, people who are there for lack of nothing else to do. So, they have made police attention to core police duties – crime prevention and crime detection – just not up to four percent. They have turned the police to be spending more time on performance of illegal duties, selling the services of policemen to moneybags and reducing policemen to carrier of handbags and dealing with land matters and other civil matters.
.Coming home sir, the problem of herdsmen in Oke Ogun and Ibarapa areas of Oyo State is affecting farmers. What has the government been doing in this regard to give farmers courage and strengthen their resolve to go back to farm?
We applied past experience in service to seek how to solve the problem in the state. Depending on how you look at it, I will say that it has reduced drastically from what we used to have before. What the state has done is to set up mechanism for alternative dispute resolution. It may seem not too strong now, but it has led to the reduction of the clashes we had before. The peace and conflict resolution methods that the governor has asked the respective local governments to create have also been working effectively. However, that is not to say that we have not had isolated cases. It is still part of the work in progress. Where the state needs to support the farming community, some of those areas have been identified. A combination of Amotekun, Operation Burst, the Agro Rangers of the Civil Defence Corps; and the Police that give farmers confidence-building patrol is available. We are working on strengthening visibility in all those areas by coming together with the local community for both sides to see how we can put a stop to that. I believe that with all the efforts that are being put in place, that should be a thing of the past. But I must also say that you can’t completely eradicate crime. You will still have small-small issues like that. Some of the cases that you’ve heard are not reported as they happened. Skirmishes between people will be so escalated to say it is a full-blown farmers-herders crisis. But we are not going to rest on our oars; we are still going to see how we can get the non-state actors and the state actors to work together; strengthen the alternative dispute resolution concept to see how we can use it to eradicate this.
A new ministry was created on Tuesday – the Ministry of Livestock. People should not condemn it yet. If that is what is going to lead us to have a final solution, fine. At one point or the other, I had taken part in that negotiation before, because it is an initiative which Governor Abdullahi Ganduje started in Kano with Professor Attahiru Jega. I had been invited as contributor at some point. It looks laudable and we need to see where that would lead us to. Maybe it is a way of government saying we want to get attention focussed. While I was in Benue State, I said it that we must change our farming system. We must change our attitude. Where you have the segregated farming method that we do, it is difficult to secure the farming community. We must work on cluster farming so that we can provide security. In Epe, Lagos State, when we used to have problems, what we did was to arrange security to follow the farm owners to the farm. So, while they are doing their work the patrol team goes round and when they are returning, the patrol team follows them. If we have the cluster farming system, it would be nice because it is difficult to cover the whole of Nigeria security wise. We just have to devise a means. Of course we should also be able to tell the concerned people the truth. If you are saying that your cattle is important to you, the oranges or the plantain the farmers planted is also important to them. So, who are you now to destroy the livelihood of one person by saying yours is important to you? In the state we have anti-open grazing law which, to an extent we are still working on the modalities to enforce properly. Law is law. Who is anybody to come and say ‘you have this law you cannot implement it’. No, both sides need to come together. If you are rearing your cattle, don’t go and destroy the farm of anybody. So, we must come to terms with this and we must be able to tell ourselves the truth. We are not telling ourselves the truth, we are just scratching the surface. The government can also help. If you say you are going to create grazing land, if you say you are rearing animals, cage your cows, your goats and your rams. Ranching is the way to go. For everyone that is saying government must be involved, it is a money-making venture. If you are ranching your animals and you find that you are spending more money on them, when you want to sell them also increase the price you are going to sell them, but don’t just arrogantly and with impunity carry your cattle to go and destroy people’s farms.
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