Is Nigeria Police The Most Corrupt Institution In The Country?

To many people, the question as to whether the police is the most corrupt institution in the country cannot be answered in any other way except in the affirmative. I make this assertion based on the easily observable sentiment among Nigerians to the effect that the country’s police force is a perfect depiction of everything that’s bad.

The police, undoubtedly, has, over the years, done very little to deflate this public perception of it, as all the conducts that have earned it this inglorious image have continued unabated among its personnel. Over the decades, the force has failed to purge itself of bribery and all sorts of abuse of power. The result is that most Nigerians have lived through their adult life not knowing any other police force than one deep-seated in depravity. For example, since my childhood, I have been seeing policemen who use checkpoints as extortion spots, meaning that this image has stuck to my head as all that police checkpoints represent.

It’s for all this that the police has become an object of all sorts of ridicule. For example, it is commonplace to hear people tease others using words like “are you a policeman” when they show any inclination for bribe taking, whether real or intended as a joke. The conduct of personnel of the force has so much lowered its estimation in the eyes of the people.

On Easter Sunday of 2009, someone close to me was arrested and detained by the police at the instance of a person he fell out with following a business dealing. By evening of the following day, I met this young man, now released from detention, and he informed me that he had retaliated by getting the police to arrest and detain the guy that caused his own detention. A few days later, this successful revenge was confirmed to me by two of our mutual friends in the presence of the young man who followed up with a boast, “he used the police to detain me for a day and I came out and got him detained for two days.”

The fact that our police force has so degenerated as to cede its arrest and detention powers to the highest bidder clearly underscores the level of moral ferment in that institution. This explains the reason the police has thoroughly been vilified and seen as a leprous hand.

However, can it be true that this force is the most corrupt institution in our land? As I stated earlier, many people would like to affirm so. Even the police knows that this is the view of many Nigerians. As a journalist in Lagos, I once interviewed a police spokesman who told me “people wrongly see us as the worst people on earth.” I can recall other instances where police officers have directly or indirectly admitted this negative perception.

Many years ago, a police image maker in Anambra State, while addressing this same issue, said “if there’s a yardstick for measuring corruption, it would have helped us to find out whether what we have is a corrupt force.” In other words, he was suggesting that if corruption is to be measured using objective and standardized criteria, the police wouldn’t come out worse than other institutions in Nigeria. I agree completely.

Our police force is simply a reflection of the kind of society we have and the values we uphold. We cannot expect that institution to look everything un-Nigerian whereas every other institution in the country reflects the “Nigerian” character. The extortions, bribe taking and other forms of abuse of power which the police has been accused of are exactly the same conducts that have hampered the efficiency of other public institutions in our country.

In government offices, civil servants demand for bribes to do their routine work. This is well known. A lecturer of mine (now late) told me how his file got “missing” in the federal ministry of education Lagos in the 1970s until he had to “find something for” a messenger in the ministry. He had won a government scholarship for postgraduate studies in the USA and needed to obtain a letter from the ministry to facilitate his visa acquisition. On arrival at the ministry on the morning of that day, the Director in charge asked the messenger to go fetch his file. This messenger went inside and came out after a long time to report that he could not find the file. “You mean you can’t find this man’s file,” the Director queried, sending him back to search for the file more thoroughly. The messenger came out after spending even a longer time to report that he still couldn’t see the file. When this occured the third time, the boss of this messenger called this lecturer of mine closer and whispered to him “you don find am something?” That was when he realized the reason his file was suddenly “missing”. Guess what, after parting with a naira note, the “missing” file appeared!

The above is not a one-off incident but a deeply ingrained extortionist culture that thrives in our public institutions. How many persons go to the Immigration and acquire a passport at the official government cost? The immigration officials get even richer through collecting huge amounts from those that want their passports to be processed quicker. The same can be said of obtaining a driver’s licence from the Federal Road Safety Corps.

What of the Nigerian Customs and all the immoral dealings with import regulations defaulters? What of the admission racketeering and sale of grades going on in our tertiary schools? What of the dirty affairs between operators of “special centres” and officials of examination bodies like WAEC and JAMB that have resulted in leakage of exam papers over the years? In fact, no institution is clean, it’s a national culture.

In every of our institutions, we do not find corruption existing as isolated incidents but as a systemic culture that’s embedded in the hierarchy. What the messenger does, the perm sec knows and cannot act because he’s equally guilty or is even in cohort with the messenger.

Someone close to me told me of his experience at the Ikeja passport office of the Nigeria Immigration Service several years ago when he went to acquire a passport. It happened that he was in a hurry and had no time to go through the process of getting some of the requirements like local government identification certificate. So, someone in the Immigration helped him to obtain fake ones. After payments and documentations were made, this immigration officer passed the file to his boss who rejected them and wrote “fake” on each of the papers. The officer smiled and said “don’t worry I know what to do.” He went outside and bought some edibles including juice and went into his boss’ office. By the time he came out, all the fake papers had become “genuine”. What had happened was that his boss was only unhappy that he had not given him something from the “settlement” brought by the passport applicant.

So, when people complain that extortion by the police goes on because what’s happening at roadblocks also benefits the senior officers who should act against it, they seem to overlook the fact that this is a pattern that has become part of our public culture. The immigration story told above clearly underlines this truth.

As I wrote last week, this is a manifestation of what is termed “state capture” where individuals seize the apparatuses of the state and use them for personal gains. The policeman who uses his gun and detention cell to enrich himself is doing just what the civil servant who uses the service he renders to the public to make money. Corruption in the police can only manifest through the apparatuses of force (such as gun and cell) particular to the police, just as corruption in civil service will only manifest via apparatuses particular to the ministry, department or agency concerned.

However, this is not to say that corruption in the police should be judged at the same moral and pragmatic level as that which occurs in other sectors like the civil service. This is because the police is the watchdog that should check illegalities in other sectors, so when it becomes as bankrupt as these sectors, then society is confronted with a monumental moral and practical catastrophe.

Nonetheless, I find it important to highlight the fact that corruption in our police force is a mere reflection of our society so as to point out the need for a holistic approach to our response to the problem. We need to be mindful of the external factors that sustain corruption in the police, including the citizens’ collaboration. For example, my friend and his business colleague who paid the police to arrest each other should not find it so easy coming out to lament that the police is corrupt.

The #EndSARS event offered a great opportunity for the nation to take such an exhaustive look at our police force and what has rendered it so morally bankrupt. It was an opportunity to do a complete institutional audit of that force to diagnose its ailment as against dwelling on the symptoms as we always do. Punishing individual offenders is not enough because the individuals are merely acting according to the institutional stimuli. For example, while individual SARS officers were accused of torture and extrajudicial killings, it is more important to find out how such individuals were so emboldened to so flagrantly and gravely break the law in the face of a supposed regimented hierarchy of control in the force. It is also very significant to know why it had to take years of public outcry and ultimately an uprising for the hierarchy to “suddenly” discover the atrocities that had gone on for years under their nose.

But as always, Nigeria is a country that is wont to allow every opportunity for self-redemption to pass it by. We’ve had the Oputa Panel and the reports have been left to gather dust in shelves. Are we bent on continuing on this self-destructive path until the final doom? The future beckons!

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.