Ugbabe Boniface Amedu
That Nigeria has both abundant material and human resources to make her great is not contestable. And that through a cruel conspiracy of both centrifugal and centripetal forces, engineered principally by renegade elements, the nation has remained virtually stagnant is not in doubt either.
Little wonder, Prof. Sola Adeyeye once said: “The bright stars that lit the Nigerian firmament in 1960 remain eclipsed by the hideous umbra of profligate banditry as Nigeria engages in “forbacky” dance-that is dancing forward and backward and ending at the exact spot where it started.”
It is within this context that former Inspector General of Police Alhaji Ibrahim Coomassie’s recent comment that the existence of both the Nigeria Civil Defence and Security Corps and the Peace Corps of Nigeria are unconstitutional, should be situated.
The former IGP and Chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), who was reported to have stated this when he was presented with an Ahmadu Bello University’s Excellence Award 2017 in Zaria by students of the institution, equally faulted the constitutionality of floating the Civil Defence and Peace Corps.
It is rather shocking that a supposedly enlightened individual like Coomassie, with a rich pedigree as the nation’s former police czar, would expose such a crass ignorance with such comment that has no basis in law. If the Civil Defence that is a creation of an Act of Parliament and the Peace Corps, which Bill has already been passed by Parliament, can be so derogatorily described as if they are illegal entities beggars belief!
Coomassie, with due respect, did not stop at describing both thriving organizations as unconstitutional, but proceeded to sidetrack the truth when he said that the work being done by Civil Defence and Peace Corps was the prerogative of the police. It is indeed a sad commentary that the former respected police chief would elect to misinform such enlightened nay impressionable youths as students of ABU, Zaria. It shows that he is not quite abreast of the mandates of both Civil Defence and the Peace Corps.
With this latest classical act of misinformation from Mallam Coomassie, is anyone still surprised where the present leadership of the Police Force derived its unfortunate bravado from via ignoring potent previous court judgments in favour of the Peace Corps and still going ahead to invade its premises, arresting and arraigning its leader, Dr. Dickson Akoh, in court?
If the former IG, who is supposed to be an elder statesman expected to look at issues dispassionately and who younger elements in the Police Force in particular and the public should look up to for direction in life, can deliberately (?) obfuscate issues in such weird manner for reasons best known to him, then the hope for a better society is fast eroding.
A high preponderance of Nigerians hold the opinion that if the former police chief had done what he ought to while in office, perhaps the nation’s foremost law enforcement agency would not have degenerated to its present embarrassing level, where high-tech corruption, disobedience to lawful court orders and primitive intimidation of law abiding citizenry are currently the norm.
Mr. Eric Osagie, Managing Director, The Sun newspaper, in an article “Akambi vs Thousand Demons” published in National Interest newspaper of October 7, 2000, wrote disparagingly about the rampart corruption in Police Force: “The joke is that even if God spends a second here with us, Nigerians will attempt to compromise Him.
The Nigeria Police Force (NPF) is a veritable personification of all that is wrong with us as a people and as a country. It has become the metaphor for all the corruption in the land. Someone once said the NPF was created the day corruption was born. Another said, if it is possible, the Nigeria police would collect bribe even from a corpse.”
It appears that in Coomassie’s desperate bid to defend the constitutional mandate of his former constituency, he inadvertently turned himself into a fiction designer with specialization in lie embroidery. But he must be told in no uncertain terms that the ugly truth starring everyone in the face today is that Nigeria is currently under-policed.
With a manpower 370,000, out of which over 100,000 are attached to VIPs, with some of them carrying handbags for the wives of these VIPs and even running ridiculous errands for them like going to the market to buy soup ingredients (called chefeni in Hausa), the remaining personnel cannot make any positive mark in the nation’s security architecture.
While Civil Defence and Peace Corps have acquitted themselves creditably in the discharge of their respective mandates, the same cannot be said of the police, which Nigerians have long given up on. In the light of this stinging reality, the desirability of the existence of both organizations is not in doubt.
Juxtaposing what has been happening in the Peace Corps of Nigeria in the last few weeks with this latest outburst of the former IGP, it is easy to discern where the travails of the Corps are coming from. It is becoming tragically obvious that few sadists have refused to see any redeeming feature in what the PCN is doing to empower the long neglected Nigerian youths. To this set of people, there is no limit to smearing people’s integrity.
One of the things we cherish in Nigeria is freedom of speech, but unfortunately, scant attention is paid to the rights of others, especially people’s right not to be defamed, libeled and scandalized. A society where people initiate and spread malicious rumours against others, because they happen to enjoy God’s abundant grace through enormous contributions to their societies is alarming.
Instead in engaging in this kind of unhelpful pontificating, Coomassie should embrace the more productive venture of advising his former constituency against its abrasive style of abridging the rights of innocent Nigerians with impunity in the name of settling phantom scores.
Amedu, a concerned Nigerian, wrote from Jikwoyi, Abuja
