The police on the police.
If Nigerians expect the police to renew their vigour in combating crime anytime soon, they will have to wait for much longer.
Chairman of the Police Service Commission, Parry Osayande, a former policeman himself who rose to the rank of Deputy Inspector- General before retiring, said the demons afflicting the police are so many that he did not seem confident they can be put in subjection quickly.
Some of those demons, he said, were made by the police themselves, while the rest were the handiwork of an unreflective Federal Government.
Osayande offered his candid perspectives during the visit two days ago of Senator Paulinus Nwogu-led Senate Committee on Police Affairs to the Commission’s office in Abuja.
It must be puzzling that the commission chairman said many harsh things about the police leadership, including their administrative inertia, indefensible and inexplicable corruption, and woeful deployment methods.
For instance, out of 321,250 policemen, claimed Osayande, about 100,000 catered to private individuals, leaving the vast majority of Nigerians policed by constables.
He also scathingly dismissed the Federal Government’s disruptive creation of competing agencies such as the EFCC, ICPC, NSCDC and FRSC, all of which he said had bled the police of attention and funding.
It is difficult to fault Osayande’s appreciation of the problems confronting the Nigeria Police. He not only has a reputation for candour, he also left the Police Force with an even solider reputation, which is probably why he is still relevant today.
But while it is in the powers of the police establishment to correct many of their own ills, and they have strangely been remiss in doing it, it is harder to understand why they should complain about the other quasi-police organisations excised from them and designed to fill the gap left by police dereliction of duty over the years.
Indeed, the main dilemma that will confront friends of the police is whether to support the scrapping of the quasi-police organisations in order to prepare them for incorporation into the police; or to first get the police reinvented as a responsible, patriotic and effective law enforcement organisation.
It would be easier for the police to help resolve that dilemma. For if they lost some powers in the past few decades or so to other agencies, there is nothing that says a few more cannot be taken from them and given to their better neighbours.
Chairman of the Police Service Commission, Parry Osayande, a former policeman himself who rose to the rank of Deputy Inspector- General before retiring, said the demons afflicting the police are so many that he did not seem confident they can be put in subjection quickly.
Some of those demons, he said, were made by the police themselves, while the rest were the handiwork of an unreflective Federal Government.
Osayande offered his candid perspectives during the visit two days ago of Senator Paulinus Nwogu-led Senate Committee on Police Affairs to the Commission’s office in Abuja.
It must be puzzling that the commission chairman said many harsh things about the police leadership, including their administrative inertia, indefensible and inexplicable corruption, and woeful deployment methods.
For instance, out of 321,250 policemen, claimed Osayande, about 100,000 catered to private individuals, leaving the vast majority of Nigerians policed by constables.
He also scathingly dismissed the Federal Government’s disruptive creation of competing agencies such as the EFCC, ICPC, NSCDC and FRSC, all of which he said had bled the police of attention and funding.
It is difficult to fault Osayande’s appreciation of the problems confronting the Nigeria Police. He not only has a reputation for candour, he also left the Police Force with an even solider reputation, which is probably why he is still relevant today.
But while it is in the powers of the police establishment to correct many of their own ills, and they have strangely been remiss in doing it, it is harder to understand why they should complain about the other quasi-police organisations excised from them and designed to fill the gap left by police dereliction of duty over the years.
Indeed, the main dilemma that will confront friends of the police is whether to support the scrapping of the quasi-police organisations in order to prepare them for incorporation into the police; or to first get the police reinvented as a responsible, patriotic and effective law enforcement organisation.
It would be easier for the police to help resolve that dilemma. For if they lost some powers in the past few decades or so to other agencies, there is nothing that says a few more cannot be taken from them and given to their better neighbours.
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