The images of the police taking on demonstrators in the streets of Tanzania and Cameroun, following disputed elections, remind me of the first time I was battered by policemen.
I was 17 and had gone to the Kings Cinema on Lewis street, Lagos Island. After the film, my friend, Albert Biodun Okopie and I were, like many film goers, excitedly discussing the film as we walked on the road. When we got to the Magregor Canal, we noticed a small crowd. Parked was a reconfigured 911 bus popularly called ‘Molue’. We joined the crowd to find out what was going on. Two policemen ordered the crowd to disperse.
We refused, insisting on being told the crime the bus driver might have committed to warrant his bus being seized. There was a standoff. People wondered why the policemen would insist on the crowd dispersing, leaving them alone with the driver, who seemed helpless. Then Albert, who stood beside me, volunteered that the policemen wanted to collect a bribe from the driver but did not want witnesses. In a flash, one of the policemen jumped down and went for him. But my friend, like a deer, took off and disappeared from the scene.
The frustrated policeman decided to vent his anger on me as he grabbed me. His colleague let the bus driver go and both descended on me with heavy blows, while angrily demanding that I produce my friend. I protested that I did not know him. They told me to stop lying. They had walked past us when we were discussing the film we had gone to watch. I told them he was a stranger I had met at the cinema. They were not convinced. They battered and dragged me on the road. At the gates of the Obalende Police Barracks, I refused to go any further.
This led to more beatings. As one of my eyes was closing, swollen from the beatings, I saw and faintly heard a friend, Young, whose father was a policeman living in the barracks. He was telling his sister that it was me, his friend, being beaten. The sister wondered how that was his business, and advised that they should hurry home. So, I was left in the hands of the policemen. As they dragged me to the entrance of the police station within the barracks, the beating suddenly stopped. I looked up, the brutes were gone!
I dragged myself off the road, used my torn clothes to wipe off blood trickling from my body. I had three immediate tasks. First, to drag myself home. Secondly, how to steal into the house without being noticed. How was I to explain my state? How was I to explain I went to the cinema? The third was how to stop the bleeding, change my clothes and dispose off the torn ones. I succeeded on all counts. Then, Albert reappeared. He had not disappeared. He had, from a safe distance, watched my being battered, but could do nothing. I thought he acted well. At least, if I were deposited in the police station, killed or disappeared, there might have been a witness.
The following year, 1978, there were massive student-led protests across the country. It was the ‘Ali-Must-Go’ protests for the democratisation of education. The police was out in full force. An unknown number of persons were shot dead, especially in Samaru, Zaria. That year, I was admitted into the then University of Ife, and a raging topic on campus was police brutality. In one discussion, a post-graduate student said the main lesson he learnt from those protests was never to go out on demonstration without being armed. He was tired of the police and the state wasting the lives of Nigerians. A few months after my admission, there was a demonstration at the gates of the campus on the Ife-Ibadan Road. The police was there in full force, so were thousands of students. I watched the police shoot tear gas canisters, and a handful of the students trapping some of the canisters and lobbing them back at the police.
There were endless symposia on police brutality. A popular position was that the police were quite brutal against students because most of them were basically illiterate and jealous of the young studying in the universities. So, fundamentally, there was a class issue between such policemen who tend to see undergraduates as spoilt brats disturbing the peace and students who saw the police as defending the dictatorial state which must give way to a pro-people system. It was also argued by some that if the entry qualification into the police, which is designated a ‘force’, were raised to high school certificate, the clashes will greatly reduce as the policemen sent to quell protests would be literate enough to realise that students were fighting for the betterment of the entire society, including the families of the police.
In my third year, I collaborated with some on campus to establish a campus-based movement called Coalition Against Police (CAP) Brutality. However, over the years, even with the entry qualification into the police force being raised to high school certificate level and graduates joining the police, some from the lower ranks, the brutality of the police has increased. So, the issue was not basically that of illiteracy amongst the rank-and-file, but a class issue. The Nigeria Police Force, NPF, was created by colonial Britain to suppress, repress and subjugate the citizenry. It was built in Lagos on the Hausa Constabulary, packaged from people who were alienated from the environment and trained to be antagonistic and brutal towards the locals. So, the latter called them ‘Olopa’: he who wields the cudgel. The basic training is first to depersonalise recruits and make them loyal to whoever is in power not, the Nigerian people.
The anti-riot police is so brutal that for some five decades now, their members are called ‘Kill-and-Go’, which means they have the power to kill Nigerians and go scot-free. Also, for some four decades, the police has sought to assure the populace with the campaign claim that: “The Police Is Your Friend”. But the populace does not believe the police. Worse, not a few Nigerians believe members of the police collude with criminals. So at a point, especially in the old Bendel State (Now, Edo and Delta states) the police was called “Kill-and-Divide”: implying that while armed robbers kill their victims and dispossess them of their property, policemen divide the spoils with the robbers.
In the last few decades, the police has introduced human rights training and desks. But the 2020 mass uprising against the police, called the EndSARS Protests, revealed that the police have not been transformed in a fundamental manner from its colonial origins. What is needed is a decentralised, democratised policing with loyalty to the citizenry.
