The Maiduguri Police Strike and the rest of Us.

Policing is categorized as an essential service and should be treated as its essentiality implies by all governmental agencies and officials in charge of police affairs. It was, therefore, a disturbing incident when policemen took to the street in Maiduguri, Borno to protest the non-payment of their allowances. 

It is no more a surprise because the unusual incident is a miniature to various police strikes we had in the country in the past, even though the police authority would not admit it. Before the smoldering tension snowballs into a catastrophic flame, we need to look at what that short but ominous protest means to all of us as Nigerians.

If not contained, the protest portends another strike in the Nigerian Police, one comparable to the one we had on February 1, 2009, that resulted in the sack of the then Inspector General of Police, Tafa Balogun, and some high-ranking police officials.

Perchance there is strike now, President Buhari would be unwilling to give Inspector General Ibrahim Idris the boot. Given the many security blunders he had committed in the past and President’s Buhari insistence on keeping him, despite popular outcry to replace him, there is a slim chance of his replacement.

The loyalty of the country’s security apparatuses to the president matters more to the president than their commitment to the Nigerian constitution and the Nigerian people. Ibrahim Idris and others controlling the security architecture of the country have earned the trust of the President which make them irreplaceable. The solution to the festering security crisis in the country may be far away as the President is unwilling to rejig the current security structure.

We are far from safe as a people and entrusting the security of our lives and properties to the Nigerian police is with a dose of skepticism. A demotivated cop would not give his best on the job because his needs are not met by his employer.

Unpaid bills and needy family back at home would be problems coming in the way of the job. The priority to secure lives and properties is replaced by the preference to put bread on the table, pay children's school fees, and what have you? No wonder they usually arrived late to scenes of crime. Unmet needs have replaced the urgency to police the people.

In spades and scale of killings that have broken out in the life of Buhari’s administration, having police protest anywhere in the country makes the hope of stemming the massacre a gloomy one. The available police personnel is already overstretched, a reason for the recent recruitment of 6000 more hands into the force. Unpaid allowances would only aggravate the already not too good situation.

We have had more than enough killings during Buhari’s administration. We cannot confirm the accurate figure of those that lost their lives to the herdsmen insurgency in the North Central of the country. This is a time to satisfy the policemen in any aspect of their job so that attacks on peoples' lives and properties can be arrested by the police force.

The police force is designed to mingle with the civilian population with civility and helps in maintaining peace and order in the society. Denying the cops manning the apparatus of policing of their rightful allowances is dehumanizing. It affects their emotion at work and their interaction with the people they are supposed to protect.

 In the Maiduguri protest, we saw masked cops wielding tree branches in the air, an insignia of protest. Some of them were shooting into the air.  How would they account for these bullets that were shot into the air? Perhaps, there is no accountability for weapons as we were made to believe. 

The fall out of what we saw of the Maiduguri protest is that the civilian population is at risk of attack from the police at the slightest provocation. Policemen have been reported to demand for bribes from people and resulted in the killings of the uncooperative civilians. The death of a bus driver, Muyiwa Ijaduola at Igando, Lagos who died from the beating by a female cop in 2016 is a reference. Denying arm-carrying police of his emolument can drive him to the edge to do the unthinkable because of his fiery emotion precipitated by unjust denial. No wonder some of them used guns meant to protect innocent people to attack same people.

The Maiduguri strike is an indication that there are pockets of demotivated cops around the country with bottled up grievances. Only the brave ones had come into the open to express their frustrations. The police force is not a unionized body and ordinarily, does not protest or strike because esprit de corps is entrenched in its rank-and-file. It is when the authority does not treat the cops with normality that aberrations of this kind, like the Maiduguri protest, happens.

Before the embers of police demotivation scale up to a crisis, the appropriate levels and offices of Nigerian government should rise to give our cops the right treatment they deserve. We have lost more than enough lives to insecurity during President Buhari’s tenure that was avoidable.

Enough is enough!

 © Tawfiq Abdullah

Facebook: Tawfiq Ola Abdullah

Instagram: tawfiqolaabdullah

Twitter: @AbdullahTawfiq

Linkedin: Tawfiq Abdullah

About Me
I am a marketer, communicator, and blogger. I worked extensively in the private sector as a business executive and organizational communicator, precisely in sales training. I bagged a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and English from Olabisi Onabanjo University, a Chartered Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing from the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN), an MBA from the Lagos State University. I am an associate of NIMN and currently living in Lafayette, Louisiana where I am about to defend my Master’s thesis to bag the MS Communication degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.