Changing Nigeria’s Cruel Police Culture LAGOS, Nigeria — Many Nigerian police stations have an officer in charge of interrogating suspects who is informally known as “O/C Torture.” I got to see one in action 10 years ago when I was traveling between two state capitals in a shared taxi with seven other passengers, three of whom had apparently taken part in a bank heist. The thieves, who were somehow able to rummage through our bags, were caught red-handed when a brown paper package belonging to them burst open, spewing bundles of tightly packed naira notes. The police were alerted and we were taken to the local cop shop. The “Officer in Charge of Torture” ordered the suspects to sit on the floor while the rest of us identified the stolen property — which included my mobile phone — whereupon one of them was told to remove his shirt and lie face down on the filthy carpet. I will never forget his screams when the first lash laced across his back. I quickly excused myself and left the station. According to a recent Amnesty International report, aptly entitled “Welcome to Hell Fire: Torture and Other Ill-Treatment in Nigeria,” such practices — and worse — are routine. Torture is used to “extract ‘confessions’ or as punishment for alleged crimes,” the organization says. It catalogs the horrors perpetrated in police stations: shootings in the leg, foot or hand; extracting teeth, fingernails or toenails; water torture and rape. It adds that “security forces enjoy a climate of impunity.” Understandably, the police force’s public relations officer, Deputy Commissioner Emmanuel Ojukwu, takes “serious exception” to what he calls the “blatant falsehoods and innuendos” contained in the report. The police force, he said in a prepared statement issued last month, has “significantly improved on its human rights records” in the years since military rule ended in 1999, “owing largely to training and retraining, community policing, attitudinal change and structural transformation.” Though the extent of improvement is debatable, nothing in the Amnesty International report was particularly shocking to Nigerians, for whom police brutality is just another fact of life. Indeed, in some ways the report hardly goes far enough. No mention is made of the extrajudicial executions of suspected armed robbers — often conducted to “decongest” chronically overcrowded jails. In a 2008 study, the Open Society Foundation estimated that the average time spent in pretrial detention in Nigeria is nearly four years. Peter Udoh, the prison system’s deputy controller of prisons welfare in Enugu State, says the number of suspects awaiting trial there now makes up over 90 percent of the prison population. In any case, brutality — here as elsewhere — is a two-way street. Back in 2005 some policemen whose vehicle had broken down tried to commandeer a bus on the busy main road in front of police headquarters near where I live. When two passengers objected, the policemen beat them up. That proved to be a mistake. The two victims, though dressed in civilian clothes, turned out to be soldiers. When word got out to the nearby barracks, there was hell to pay. Soldiers descended on the police station, beat up all the policemen they could find, freed the prisoners, looted the place, then burned it to the ground. A number of people were reported killed — though, as usual, the numbers are uncertain. Nigeria’s president at the time, Olusegun Obasanjo, himself a former military man, intervened and nobody was ever charged. Three decades of almost continuous military rule have done much to undermine every institution in the country. The police are hobbled by poor equipment and demoralization is widespread. Nevertheless, change is in the air. Just last year Channels TV, an independent station, filmed the poor conditions at one police training college, broadcasting images of decrepit dormitories with broken toilets, leaky roofs, and an Olympic-size swimming pool now overrun with toads. The report set off a nationwide debate, and officials promised broad reforms. Some efforts have already taken place. The police academy has been overhauled and the police headquarters in my own neighborhood that was destroyed by angry soldiers is now the site of a new, four-story, air-conditioned, state-of-the-art building. Though the new station has yet to be commissioned, a visit last week to the makeshift annex nearby made me think that things really may be changing for the better. For one thing, the station now has a human rights unit, and the “O/C Human Rights” clearly takes his job seriously. Though he kept with police protocol in explaining that his name could not be published, he was voluble in describing his qualifications for the position, expounding at length on all the courses and instruction he had received, thanks to foreign aid from countries anxious to deepen Nigeria’s new commitment to democratic norms. He also said repeatedly that he had read the Amnesty International report and that he was most unhappy with it. “We are not like before,” he kept insisting, “we are not like before.” Perhaps things at this particular police station will be different, but the culture of torture is not going to end any time soon. Nevertheless, we Nigerians have a tendency to grasp at any sign that the country is “moving forward.” Nigeria certainly is not the same place it was under the military. And though President Goodluck Jonathan’s initial reaction to the Channels TV documentary about our dilapidated police academy was highly critical of the media, he acted promptly to see that it be rehabilitated. In the old days, the filmmakers would have been locked up.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 07:01:04 +0000
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