Policing for personal profit, by Suleiman A. Suleiman - Vanguard News
The tragic death of 37 artisanal miners under the custody of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, more popularly known as Civil Defence, in Minna last week reveals, yet again, the kind of structural violence against ordinary Nigerians perpetrated by the state itself. The circumstances of the mass arrest and detention in unsafe and inhumane conditions in which the young artisanal miners died were horrific, to say the least, and entirely avoidable.
Yet these things happen in countless similar circumstances across Nigeria, if only in discrete numbers, and further illustrate the transactional dimension that underlies the policing functions carried out by various bodies like the Nigeria Police, the Road Safety Corps, the Civil Defence Corps, the Nigeria Correctional Service, etc. While these bodies are separate legal entities with complementary and sometimes overlapping roles, they all perform broadly defined policing functions and are a part of the same Nigerian law enforcement architecture. Importantly, their institutional behaviour in terms of how they interact with ordinary Nigerians tends to follow much the same incompetent, oppressive, and quite often transactional patterns.
Historically, policing in Nigeria was not established to protect Nigerians, but to protect the colonial state and its representatives, mainly colonial and Native Authority officials. Nigerians were not even conceived as citizens, but as subjects who had few rights. These colonial legacies, unfortunately, were not only reproduced by subsequent civilian and military governments, but have also been transferred to newer policing agencies like the Road Safety and Civil Defence corps. We probably still have more policemen attached to government officials than are used for policing services for the rest of the country. Undemocratic policing tactics like arresting and detaining a relative or friend in place of a suspect remain in use to this day, as do the display of brute force and torture during arrests and interrogations.
Above all is the transactional dimension that often underlies many policing functions and activities, whereby everyday stops at checkpoints, arrests, detentions, and even criminal prosecutions are conducted to extract personal benefits for policing officials rather than to enforce the law or maintain order. Nigeria’s policing bodies are extremely effective at harassing ordinary citizens, but routinely less so at carrying out even some of their most basic policing duties effectively. Worse still is the transactional nature of policing, whereby basic policing functions are traded for rent from ordinary people. When policing officials stop people on the road or make arrests, for the most part, a transactional process sets in. There may or may not even be a violation of the law in such a situation. But quite often, the motive is more to extract rent for policing officials than to ensure compliance with the law.
If you have the money to pay for violating traffic rules or for breaching a ban on the use of motorcycles in a city centre, or even for engaging in illegal mining, then you are set free. If you don’t, you remain in detention. We have heard or seen such cases, as well as cases of convicted persons paying money to avoid serving their sentences in correctional centres. Policing functions, therefore, are often appropriated as transactional opportunities for the personal benefit of policing officials, rather than as mechanisms for enforcing the law.
For example, artisanal mining is open and commonplace in Minna and its environs. Over time, it has even become a vocation and a source of precarious livelihood for many young people and their families. The people engaged in it are aware that the practice is illegal. All policing bodies in the state are also well aware that an illegal practice is conducted openly and every day. Yet, the whole practice is governed by a quiet transactional relationship. For the most part, the policing bodies turn a blind eye, but periodically carry out raids and arrests at artisanal mining sites. The motive of these raids and arrests is sometimes less to enforce the law and end the practice than to extract extortionate payments from those engaged in an illegal practice.
In this tragic instance, survivors and some family members have reported that Civil Defence officials asked them to pay N500,000 to secure the release of each detainee. This much has been reported in the news, but remains for an independent investigation into the incident to verify and confirm. However, no Nigerian hearing it will be surprised, which points to the pervasiveness of this transactional dimension in our policing operations. This case was about illegal mining, but the transactional dimension can also underlie many policing functions performed by various bodies, from simple traffic violations to serious criminal offences.
A telling consequence and illustration of this mode of policing is the vexatious phenomenon of ‘awaiting trial’ inmates or ‘awaiting further investigations’ detainees in Nigerian prisons and detention cells throughout the country. Reliable statistics are hard to find, but some estimates put the number of awaiting-trial inmates in Nigerian prisons as high as 65% of all inmates. Many of these inmates remain in custody for months or years without judicial conclusions to their cases. Many are not even the actual suspects of the crimes for which they are detained, but relatives or friends. A good number die in detention and are quietly buried.
These are all forms of structural violence and outright crime against the Nigerian person by the state itself. Yet, the situation persists because our policing bodies lack the institutional competence to complete criminal investigations, prosecute offenders, or collect intelligence that helps to prevent crime. This is not to say that all policing officials are incompetent, but that the institutions, as a whole, generally and persistently fail to carry out their basic duties.
The average police, Road Safety, or Civil Defence station in Nigeria tells this story of institutional incompetence and transactional policing even more sharply. First of all, you are likely to be greeted by the sight of dozens of motorcycles, tricycles, and even cars of all stripes. Many of these are left there by ordinary Nigerians who could not pay the required sums to take back their vehicles. Yet, inside the station itself, you would struggle to find any reliable records of these vehicles, let alone a comprehensive database of all the cases ever handled by that station.
Information is among the most important infrastructure of policing, and yet computers, libraries, records, and databases for storing and retrieving information are the most absent things in Nigerian policing institutions. I am aware of the serious constraints of personnel, funding, training, and equipment, etc. But my argument is that these constraints are, in fact, part of the structural design of a colonial policing system that was meant to serve the powerful and oppress the powerless. Unfortunately, three decades into a stable democracy, we have been unable to reinvent our policing institutions to entrench democratic norms in all their operations.
The deaths of the 37 young Nigerians in Minna must therefore become a moment of reckoning. The immediate priority is to establish what happened in custody and whether the allegations of extortion and unsafe detention are true. This can only be done through a public hearing that Nigerians can see and follow for themselves, such as one conducted by the Niger State Assembly or a chamber of the National Assembly. Secondly, any persons found culpable must be prosecuted, as President Tinubu has promised. Finally, this painful tragedy must compel root-and-branch reform of Nigeria’s policing architecture. Nigeria needs policing institutions that protect citizens rather than exploit them; law enforcement agents who understand that even criminal suspects are citizens with rights and who place professionalism above transactional enforcement.
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