FRANK TALK BY STEVE NWOSU In Rivers, the police are neutral Reading through a Weekend Trust interview of Tonye Princewill, erstwhile right hand man of Rivers State governor, Rotimi Amaechi, who he has now fallen out with the embattled governor, I could not but agree that Amaechi was left with no other choice than to leave PDP. Much as Princewill agreed that quitting PDP was not the best for Amaechi’s political career, he said the party had made it clear that the Rivers State governor was no longer welcome. He would further add that both President Goodluck Jonathan and Amaechi missed several opportunities presented to them to settle their differences. And he clearly put the blame for these missed opportunities at the doorsteps of aides and close friends of the president who seemed to benefit from the face-off and continuously stoke the fire, feeding the president with wrong information over the matter. But then, having left the PDP and cast his lot with the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), I still cannot understand just why the PDP government at the centre and its federal police force would not let Amaechi be. The last time I checked, Rivers was not the only state where governorship election would be holding in 2015. Similarly, Amaechi is not the only PDP governor that decamped to the APC. So, why has PDP (or is it the Presidency) refused to call a ceasefire on its war in Rivers State? Or better still, why is President Jonathan still fighting a proxy war there? And even if we must fight this Amaechi war, is there no way we can put some finesse to it? Must the Presidency troops resort to this unrefined tactics of the current foot soldiers? My secondary school teacher told us that there was a way you could tell somebody to go to hell and he would really look forward to it. Of course, I am not taking anything away from all those who have been fingered in this war, like our First Lady, Nyesom Wike, Jerry Nedam, Hon. Bippi or Police Commissioner Mbu Joseph Mbu (who must still be keeping his job up till this moment because he is obviously doing exactly what Abuja sent him to do in Rivers), I just feel that if the task to kick out Amaechi (on or before 2015) is a task that must be done, it can be better handled. For instance, would it not spare all of us this daily dosage of embarrassing impunity coming out of Port Harcourt if Abuja empowered a more sensible team to think and battle Amaechi – the underlying word here being ‘to think’ before going to war? That way, we would leave out the thugs, who are presently dictating the direction of the war, for a time when the need for thugs would arise. It does not have to be bomb today, teargas tomorrow, free for all the next day, and lock-out (either from the state Assembly complex or from alternate entrance to government house) the week after. Political rallies and protest marches are going on freely in every part of the country (including even in the Boko Haram-infested areas), why is it in Rivers that it must never hold? Or is anybody afraid of Amaechi? Yes, the president has more than just a passing interest in Rivers, and it is not just because his wife, Dame Patience, is from there, but he needs to take another look at his battle plan and most especially, the foot soldiers. If he has thugs, he should keep them for the day of the thugs. That is why we all have our areas of core competence. Even the young Japanese author and creator of the Hetalia: Axis of Power series, Hidekaz Himaruya, said this much in one of his writings. In this world… It’s HEAVEN when… The French are chefs The British are police The Germans are engineers The Swiss are bankers And the Italians are lovers It’s HELL when… The English are chefs The Germans are police The French are engineers The Swiss are lovers And the Italians are bankers What we have in Rivers state today is a situation where men who should be touting in motor parks and women who lost their way going to the market have abandoned their natural callings to team up with cops, robbers, cultists and school dropouts and are all claiming to be playing politics. The situation has left small people like me in total confusion. Now, we can no longer tell the boundary between law enforcement and partisan politics, or between political rally and mob action. I am totally confused And it is not just because I don’t know what to believe again. While the organizers of the botched rally of last Sunday insist that they applied to the state police command before they embarked on the rally, the police maintain there was no such application. Yet the organizers produced a letter, which was acknowledged by the police, to that effect. Is it that the document was forged? Was it that the organizers were too impatient with a police command that was obviously taking its time ‘processing’ the request? Or that the organizers only applied for police protection at the rally, when they should really have applied for police permit to hold the rally? In other words, Amaechi must seek clearance from Mr. Mbu before he can play politics in Rivers State? Would that clearance ever be granted, knowing Mbu’s tendencies? So, who is the chief security officer in Rivers, Mbu or Amaechi? We will come back to that later. But that is hardly all the contradiction in last weekend’s show of shame. While every report made it clear that Sen. Magnus Abe was shot with rubber bullets, Mbu kept saying that the police did not go to the venue with live ammunition. He went on to tell us what could have happed if indeed anybody is shot with live bullets: “if the bullet hits your hand, the hand will shatter… if it hits your neck, you’re gone”. Pray thee, Commissioner, even if we overlook the drama at the hospital, and the fact that the opposition may have exaggerated a few things in the bid to make maximum political capital of the incident, did the police shoot Sen. Magnus Abe? That’s the simple question we ask of you, not a lecture on how live bullets function. We already know that much. In fact, that is the reason why we were alleging that some two (or five) people were killed. You have denied this claim, and we believe you – since we have no corpses to show to back our claims. So, why bore us with details of how devastating live bullets can be? We will get back to those details when, and if ever, we see the bodies of those alleged to have died in the fracas. It is then we would be interested in knowing if they were hit on the arm or neck. Until we get to that, Mr. Police Commissioner, could you please tell us how the rally actually got disrupted, and the crowd chased away? In one instance, you told us that it was not the police that chased the people away, that it was their political opponents (in this case, the PDP) that chased them away, but going further down on the narrative, you then said that the organizers did not have permission to hold the rally and police, therefore, had to disperse them to stop them from holding the illegal rally. So who chased the Save Rivers Movement (SRM) people away? Was the police? PDP thugs? Or a combined force of police and PDP thugs? Of course, recent developments in Port Harcourt have clearly shown to us that the latter groups (i.e. the police and PDP thugs joint force) have always worked hand in hand. That is why the same police that turn back pro-Amaechi protesters are the ones that provide security for (and sometimes, join) anti-Amaechi protesters. We know that the police in Rivers are non-card-carrying party members of the PDP, but when did we begin this practice of clamping down on opposition with such impunity? We have since agreed that Rivers State, despite Amaechi’s decamping to APC, remains a PDP state, but why are they so scared to let this ‘minority’ APC be? Why have the police so unashamedly become party to the partisan politics in Rivers? Must the police now see everything in Rivers State from the standpoint of Jonathan/Amaechi divide or from the blurred lenses of the PDP/APC equation? It is only in Amaechi’s Rivers State that a case of motor accident would be charged to court as murder – even as the family of the deceased kept shouting that it was purely an accident and should not be politicized. It is only in the police state of Rivers that we would leave the driver, who was behind the steering wheel when his car fatally hit somebody, to go and arrest and detain the owner of the car, simply because he happens to be a certain Chidi Lloyd, the pro-Amaechi Majority Leader of the Rivers State House of Assembly. Yes, the same Lloyd who was in his house with his family and friends when the police issued a statement alleging that Gov. Amaechi was, at that moment, about smuggling him out of the state in his ‘private jet’ to escape justice? It was a story that appeared to have been spun to divert attention from the purported arrest of some friends of the policemen’s political party leaders with deadly arms and ammunition. It might sound stupid, but it is true: they intercepted somebody else with guns and arrested a totally different person for murder. But one word for Amaechi and his SRM people: “Remember, the police are neutral – they hate everybody” – J.G. Ballard, Millennium People.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 08:07:30 +0000