I am chewed up with worries about the level of insecurity in Nigeria. Kidnapping for ransom, gang-land style of killing political opponents, extra-judicial killings, Al Qaida-led religious riots, robberies, frauds are par for the course. There is no gratifying prospect that the Nigeria Police Force has the ability to deal with these threats by which our people are being daily victimised. And no one can give us a painstaking explanation of why security in the country has gone to the wall.

As we speak, news coming out from Nigeria says more than 500 people have been slaughtered, while 300 are listed as missing after a horrendous attack on a Christian village in Jos by Muslim invaders. The attackers encroached on the village, turned its pastures into battlefields. Those who managed to escape the onslaught will tell you. They may never be able to slink back and try to put the pieces together to continue their sowing and reaping.

Nigeria is the only country I know where police foot patrols are a thing of the past. And we all know for a fact that the presence of the police on our streets gives us sense of security. We can run to them on foot and provide them with useful information to prevent and detect crimes. If police are on the ground among the people, members of the public will drop them hints about Al Qaida-inspired youths and other miscreants before they assemble to wreck their characteristic havoc on innocent Nigerians. But not until numerous lives have been lost, and houses set ablaze will you begin to see the police moving in to close the stable door when the steed is already stolen.  

In most cases the police will not even show up at all. Where have they gone? The answer to this question is not a million miles from us. Most of the police we expect to be patrolling our streets to keep us safe are on highways erecting illegal check-points to collect bribes. More are in border town stations harassing families taking a bag of rice home for their children. And a lot more have disappeared into the houses of politicians where they are being used to provide domestic help – they open gates, wash cars, baby-sit, do the shopping and the washing up for their owners.

We are even told in some organs of the press how a magistrate in Ibadan beat a policeman assigned to him black and blue for failing to open the gate for him to drive into his private house.

Within the police force itself, there is appalling waste of human and material resources where you see different sections duplicating the jobs of the others without conscious reference to a definite goal. The Divisional Police Officers (DPO), the Area Commanders, the States Intelligence and Investigation Bureaus (SIIB), and the Zonal Commanders all have their own homicide, narcotics, anti-robbery, and surveillance sections. They also have separate check-points on highways.

In spite of the duplications, our streets are open and living laboratories for studying how insecure we are because they have been abandoned for criminals to colonise. When you are under attack, manage to place a call to the police department. I am sure they will tell you there is no fuel in their car to come to your rescue.

We witness all this in the Nigeria Police Force in the consequence of bad leadership, mismanagement and corruption. And, unfortunately, those in a position to do something about this are themselves corrupt, which is why they lack the determination to follow hard on the heels of efforts to break down the country’s corruption wall of Jericho.

A couple of days ago, I read a news report about some policemen who were arrested and publicly paraded by men of the X squad at the Force Criminal Investigations Department (FCID), Alagbon, for manning illegal check-points on highways, and collecting money from motorists.

Unfortunately, the journalists who covered the event did not see it fit to balance their story by talking to the accused policemen. They might have wanted to talk to the press about the bosses they made ‘returns’ to. The money which the police on the frontline collect is shared with the bosses who send them there.

And to show you that the arrest of those policemen has a misleading appearance, two days after the arrest, the Federal Government through the Minister of Police Affairs, Dr. Ibrahim Lame, came out publicly to describe the Nigeria Police Force as a failure. So the Inspector General of Police, Mr. Ogbonna Onovo, saw that coming, and all he could do to weaken the strength of the condemnation was sacrifice nine of his junior officers. The good news is that the affected policemen will soon return to their duties. But they too must be ready to offer bribes so as to be able to receive their letters of return-to-work. That is usually the case.

If the police are serious about purifying themselves from within, they should publicly parade six Divisional Police Officers (DPO) and two Assistant Commissioners of Police (ACP). That will signal the end of illegal check-points and bribes in the police.

And if we are to take the war against corruption as a great national charge and duty so that we can tackle it on the surface and under the surface, let us empower the EFCC (Economic and Financial Crimes Commission) to take on the police, customs, and immigration officials. If it already has the power, its staff should fan out into these departments and pretend to want to do business. Voila!

It also needs be said that we need special courts to try corrupt public office-holders, as suggested by the EFCC boss. And if such courts are established, it must be made illegal for cases in them to be adjourned on more than two occasions.

What sense does it make when we have a case of corruption against a governor wannabe, for example; he goes ahead to win in our kind of election; and the case against him in our regular court cannot end because of adjournments upon adjournments until he sees out his entire eight years in the office we do not want him to occupy in the first place?