Inspector General of Police, Mr. Solomon Ehigiator
Arase, in this interview, says policing Nigeria
effectively is not about large numbers or building of a
big technological operation laden with big machinery, but
about tact, thinking out of the box and applying
available, easy to acquire technology as well as
training and motivating the manpower.
With security challenges and criminality facing the
nation, what should the citizenry expect under your
watch?
I have come in at a very defining moment in our
national life and I know that the expectations are high.
I have been in the system for quite some time too, and
I have been in very strategic positions in the force.
The Nigeria Police houses the best you can have in the
system, but I think that what we have not been able to
do over the years is to build on the capacity of our
officers. So, one of the areas I am very interested in
is trying to de-segregate our needs assessment and look
at the areas where we should lay emphasis on, and give
my officers training that would make them perform; be
it administration operations, investigation or
intelligence. Whichever of those areas we want to look
at, we should be able to develop the capacity of the
officers to deliver on their mandate.
The other area is our relationship and the public
perception of the Nigeria Police. We have a negative
public perception, whether rightly or wrongly.
Perception is a subjective issue, but there are some
certain things that members of the public expect a good
policeman to do. They would not want a police officer
to be corrupt; they would want him to be civil; they
would want him to be polite; they would want him to
treat Nigerians with respect. And if the tax payers
feel their money is spent on you as of right, they will
demand a lot of things from you. At the same time, we
will be able to see how we can connect with the
community.
There is no police force in the world that can perform
without information from members of the community.
So you must be able to win the confidence of the
community for you to be able to get that information. I
think it’s going to be a two – way thing; we want to
look at our society, all the strategic stakeholders, the
non-state actors and say, ‘look, this is your police
force, you cannot go and bring a police force from
anywhere else in the world’.
If you look at policing in Europe, America or
Britain, they have gone through this process of
redefining, remodelling and it’s not a fixed thing.
Members of the public should also learn to be very
patient with the police. I will give you an example.
Maybe a murder case occurs. Nigerians are very
anxious for the police to get it resolved and they don’t
take into consideration the limitations that police are
working with. When you talk about the depth of the
average policeman, the professionalism, it is not enough
for him to confront the issues he is dealing with
especially since there is no technical platform to back it
up.
If you go through central London in a period of maybe
three to four hours, you are captured within the
system, and in case anything happens, it’s just to zero
in there. That is why the Metropolitan Police has 90
percent success rate in terms of homicide cases because
you cannot do it and escape the eagle eye of their
surveillance system. Intelligence is key and I don’t
want a situation where people are detained
unnecessarily.
I expect that my policemen are sufficiently trained to
say if a case is reported to them they are able to
gather evidential proof. In bank robberies for example,
you can get records from the banks or corporate
affairs; you assemble these things before you invite
suspects. That way you limit the pre-trial detention
period of suspects because if you invite somebody and
keep him in custody and then start looking for evidence,
the period you have kept him there is very long and the
relations come and start asking for bail. Once they
start asking for bail, the corruption circle is enabled
because to grant that bail you start putting conditions
here and there.
In the final analysis, money changes hands.
So those
areas where I know are capable of exposing my
officers to corruption, I want to remove them from the
system. I have already directed that on no account
should anybody be invited to any police station when
you don’t have sufficient evidence; if you have the
evidence and you confront the person within 48 hours,
you should be able to make up your mind if the truth is
being told or you should keep the person in custody.
What do you have to say on the belief that compared
to Nigeria’s population, the number of policemen is
small and equipment not enough?
You can never have sufficient policemen to police 170
million Nigerians. People always brag about the United
Nations ratio. Even that one you can only situate it
against societies that already have a very good
technical platform like the one i talked about in the
USA and Britain. We don’t have the technical
platform, so no matter what people try to do now, what
you do is feasibility policing; your ability to do
prediction policing where you position your men
strategically so that you give that psychological
reassurance that the society is being policed.
For Abuja for example, instead of dotting the whole
streets with police officers, you can position
strategically so that anywhere you go or by the time
you are driving from Shehu Shagari Way to the
other place, you see them at the junction; you go the
other way, you see them at a junction; it does not
presuppose that you have sufficient manpower and
there is no police force in the world that would ever
say they have sufficient manpower to police and that is
why community partnership in policing is very, very
important to win the confidence of the community; when
you do that, half of your job is done.
Somebody sees a
person who has packed for a long period in a lonely
street or somewhere, he picks a phone and calls the
nearest police officer. But here most of us don’t care,
as far as it does not affect you.
During your maiden address to police officers, you
emphasized the use of technology. How do you intend to
achieve this with the cash crunch facing the Federal
Government?
I will give you an example. I set up the intelligence
laboratory in the Nigeria Police. The intelligence
department had become moribund after about 30 years
of the excision of the NSO to form what you now
know as the State Security Service (SSS). Since
then, we have not been able to emplace a department to
drive policing through predictive concept and it took us
about two years to redirect what intelligence is all
about.
My ability to train the officers to know that they can
always ascertain the trends and patterns of crime,
crime mappings in their various states and divisions
and area commands has improved investigation a lot.
For instance, as I sit down here, with the intelligence
department that we set up some 2 years ago, we can
give you statistics of kidnapping cases, the manpower
wastages by operational loses; we can locate and tell
you where those crimes are prevalent; what are the
types of crimes that are prevalent in those areas.
When we talk about technology, you think about
warehousing a big building like this with heavy
machines. It is not so, it is about thinking outside the
box. We said we were going to set up intelligence lab,
we got a server, we got computer systems, we trained
the men, we gave them phones, put them on Skype.
So all my information collectors in all the states of the
federation, once they get information, they send it to me
and it hits my intelligence lab. The intelligence lab., the
boys there who analyse start drawing the graphs,
putting it in intelligible form so that if you are going to
my office, you can see it being expressed both
graphically and otherwise. So, when you talk about
technology driving this thing, it is not about something
too big, it’s about the mindset of the officers who are
going to operate the system. If crime has become
scientific and technological, then the response to it is for
the officers who are supposed to respond to it to be
mentally mobile
. They should be in a situation where they should be
able to think outside the box. The technology I am
talking about is very simple. We migrated from
intelligence laboratory, from finger printing, in a short
while, into an automated system where we want to give
you your character certificate. What does it cost us?
A laptop, a camcorder, the biometric machine. I now
said how many cases do they report in the force on a
daily basis; on a weekly basis?; because when I came
I said ‘you are not going to investigate land cases;
commercial transactions; you are not going to
investigate civil cases because those are the areas you
carry people, you lock them up and another person is
somewhere demolishing the person’s house especially in
Lagos’.
Reform is something people always react negatively to,
the men there, some of them went haywire; they wrote
some newspapers. I have asked them not to move
anywhere to go and investigate cases. I said I am
going to open a case tracking and analysis centre. I got
the UNODC to fix the thing there. So, for any case
that is reported, I endorse it to them, to go into that
case tracking and analysis data base centre.
On weekly basis, as they complain I was not allowing
them to do cases, I would roll out the statistics of the
cases given to the SFU, the federal SARS, general
investigation and ask them to give me the report on
those cases because it is not enough for you to take a
case, obtain statement from the complainant, obtain
statement from the suspect, you release him on bail,
you close the file and keep it somewhere. We insisted
that all cases, whether you are going to categorise
them as malicious, vexatious or something that can be
prosecuted, must be carried out to their conclusion and
technology is there in the Force CID, in the
intelligence department. So when i talk about platform,
it is not something that you conjure from the moon. The
small technology that you need to perform effectively as
a police officer is easy to access.
Road blocks are a recurring decimal as far as the
Nigeria Police is concerned. How do you intend to
deal with this?
I have dismantled them. I have set up a taskforce with
12 vehicles for the six geo-political zones that are co-
terminus with the ones that have been supervised by the
various DIGS and all I have asked them to do is a
very simple task, ‘I pay your bills, I gave you the
vehicle, I fuel it and you go there wherever you see
those road blocks, remove them from the highway and
just note where they are and hold the commissioner of
police responsible’ because I have already directed I
will hold the Area Commander responsible and I will
hold the Divisional Police Officer responsible.
Secondly, they are supposed to go to the cells to
inquire when people kept there were arrested, for what
offence, how long have they been there, do they meet the
prosecutors’ standard of keeping those people in our
facilities. We don’t intend to harass any policeman on
the highway but you just have to say that these things
are point of corruption. And corruption is intolerable,
but then we are not saying we are going to leave the
public space vacant, we have the Federal Highway
Patrol which all the state commissioners are supposed
to oversee.
So, in case of distress, the vacuum that may have been
created by the removal of those road blocks, we have
vehicles that have been given to all state commands,
and I have also asked them to give me where those
vehicles are located so that if there is any serious
crime on any highway, I hold the commissioner who
said he has deployed on those highway responsible. You
cannot remove road blocks and say you are not going to
police; it is our statutory responsibility to police the
public space.
On equipping the police, the economic downturn that is
outside is something I cannot speak about. I can only
articulate the needs of the police but I don’t have the
resources directly. We have other departments that
oversight the police, the Ministry of Police Affairs,
the Senate Committee; the Police Service Commission
is for recruitment and discipline. Operationally, it’s
outside the way but the ones that impinge directly on
the operational capacity of the police is the ministry
because they are the ones who keep our money as
oversight function.
On corruption, a policeman is corrupt because he is
not sure of the future. If he thinks that his future is not
guaranteed, the tendency to be corrupt is high and also
don’t forget that corruption is pathological. Once you
are corrupt, if I put you where they distribute
stationery, you will still steal it. We have areas where
we can touch the lives of our officers especially the
rank and file, we have a cooperative society, we have
mortgage institution; we have the microfinance bank to
dispense welfare programmes. In our works
department, we have been able to attract the best brains
we can get from the system; there are quantity
surveyors, there are civil engineers.
Now we have an investment department; why can’t we
get finance from our mortgage institution and the
cooperative society and do direct labour stuff? Now
we are going to build some houses for our workforce.
We are thinking about two-bedroom apartment
somewhere where they would not have to pay N2.5-
N3 million if it is direct labour. We also have a
scholarship scheme for children of the rank and file. If
you have bright children, we can give scholarship to
not more than two of them in police secondary school or
any other place you want them to go to; the Turkish
International School has given us a slot too. There are
small things you can use to motivate your workforce.
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