By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
When Olusegun Obasanjo returned as the president of Nigeria in May 1999, according to Mohammed Dikko (MD) Yusuf, a former Inspector-General of Police, (IGP) he “inherited a Police Force that was poorly equipped, decimated in numerical strength, deprived of necessary logistics, and lacking, as it were, moral and public support necessary for effective performance and the enhancement of the security of the nation.”
Former IGP, MD Yusuf said these in the report he submitted in 2008 to President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua as the Chair of the second Presidential Commission on Police Reform to report in as many years. Headed by former Deputy Inspector-General of Police (DIG), Muhammadu Danmadami, the first submitted its report in May 2006 to President Yar’Adua’s predecessor and benefactor, President Olusegun Obasanjo. In August 2012, another retired DIG, Parry Osayande, reported to President Goodluck Jonathan as the chair a third Presidential Commission on Police Reform to report in the six years between 2006-2012. The ritual of these reports achieved one thing: they crystallized a diagnosis of the problems of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) and they are many.
When President Obasanjo returned to power as a civilian 1999 after 15 unbroken years of military rule, there were an estimated 137,000 personnel in the NPF, representing a police-to-population ratio of approximately 1:876.5. The UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) recommends a ratio of 222 per 100,000 or 1:450.
To address what he believed was a serious shortfall in police personnel, President Obasanjo directed the recruitment of 200,000 additional police personnel over five years from 2000 to 2004 at the rate of 40,000 recruits every year. By 2003, the police population was estimated to be 260,000 and by 2005, Human Rights Watch estimated that Nigeria had 325,000 police personnel.
President Obasanjo deserves credit for identifying the situation with the NPF as a priority and giving attention proactively to the need to fix it. In a mere five years straddling his two presidential terms, he had managed to completely redress the deficit of police-to-population ratio in the country. In 2007, the NPF claimed reported that it had achieved a police-to-population ratio of approximately 1:400, based on an estimated force strength of about 360,000 police officers. At the beginning of President Yar’Adua’s tenure in 2008, this had climbed modestly to 370,900.
But this came at a cost. At the time, all the training institutions in the NPF could only accommodate an intake of 14,000 per year. With no additional investments to upgrade police training institutions, it meant that standards of training, doctrine and orientation had to be sacrificed in the expedited recruitment. When he reported in 2008, MD Yusuf pointed out three consequences that have come to haunt the Force since then.
First, the expedited recruitment was “carried out in a very unwholesome manner without adherence to the established rules and guidelines governing the screening and recruitment of candidates”, which led to an influx of “suspected criminals, people with physical deformities, doubtful background, over-aged and educationally unqualified barely literate entrants into the Police Force.” This “grossly compromised standards and resulted in widespread abuse of established procedure”, resulting in “the enlistment of unsuitable candidates…. many of whose suitability to wear the respected uniform of the Force is in doubt.”
Second, it transpired that many politicians had used the opportunity to insinuate elements from their private networks of violence into the force for future political gain. As a result, the expedited recruitment created an internal market in the outsourcing of police assets. In its 2008 report, the MD Yusuf Presidential Commission on Police Reform estimated that 27% percent of police personnel were engaged in personal guard and protective duties for private individuals and VIPs, thereby creating a situation in which “the rich and powerful behave with impunity because of police protection.” When it reported in 2012, the Parry Osayande Presidential Commission on Police Reform put this proportion at over one-third.
Third, the Force was chronically underfunded to the extent that, as IGP Ibrahim Kpotun Idris pointed out in 2017, “budgetary allocations on paper [were] insufficient to meet the financial needs of the Force, [and] the actual releases are far below what is budgeted.” As a result, the outsourcing of police personnel for guard duties became a subsistence and wellbeing supplement for the officers so deployed and a source of revenue for the commanding officers deploying them, who were often privately rewarded for doing so but also got through that to secure the patronage of their rich and politically connected benefactors.
This is the structure that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu did not appear to have taken account of in designing his recent directive to the Inspector-General of Police to withdraw “police officers guarding VIPs for core police duties.” Four days after this directive, on 27 November, the IGP proudly announced that 11,566 of officers and men under his command had been ordered withdrawn in compliance with the directive. He cleverly failed to say how many had complied. Olusegun Adeniyi, who served as presidential spokesperson when MD Yusuf submitted his report in 2008, warned firmly that the police officers “may not obey” the president or their Inspector-General.
In his directive, President Tinubu had, somewhat naively, added that “VIPs who want police protection will now request well-armed personnel from the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps.” The result will be that officer of the NSCDC across the board will now make more money at the expense of the police personnel whom they will be replacing.
A presidential directive cannot fix this political economy of policing in Nigeria. That requires imaginative and committed commitment of time and leadership. Police personnel depend on the crumbs from the table of VIP benefactors for survival and subsistence. With no functional police training facilities, Many of them have been denied exposure to basic training, formation, and professionalism. They are unlikely to see their uniforms as evidence of a bond to get killed in a gun-fight with Ansaru, Boko Haram, Mahmuda, or any of the number of nihilist groups that now afflict the country.
For many police officers, desertion will be a better alternative than compliance with the order. There will be no capacity to replace the number of officers who could choose to do that. For the leadership of the Force, therefore, discretion is likely to be the better part of valour. Moreover, the Force itself relies on the market that it has created in the commercialization of its human assets for significant informal funding.
For President Tinubu, this is evidence of a failure that he must own. It is not as if the crisis of insecurity in Nigeria is one that he was unaware of before he assumed office. On the contrary, he had weighed in on the matter repeatedly both as an opposition leader and as a senior member of the ruling APC before 2023. Yet, since assuming office over 30 months ago, he has failed to identify the issue as a priority or to address it with the forcefulness and imagination required. Many now believe that he is issuing incomprehensible and untheorized directives under pressure from the fulminations of a foreign leader.
The presidency is not one job. It is many jobs in one. Some of those roles are delegable. But the job of Commander-In-Chief is not. As president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu has excelled in the delegable dimensions of the office. But he has been mostly missing in action in relation to the non-delegable aspects of the presidency. In his most recent directives, he has been found out. It is well possible that his presidency will come to be defined by how he re-tools. That could begin with finding his way to coherence on the issue of police reform.
A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
