DOUBLE whammy is what the English will call it. But for Fela, its ‘c-o-n-f-u-s-i-o-n breaki boni’ because ‘deadi bodi geti aksident’ as he put it in his album, ‘Confusion Break Bone’.
That’s the situation in which the Nigeria Police finds itself today- a no-win, what you might call, a lose-lose situation, one of double jeopardy.
The confusion that is unfolding before us, to continue with that Fela metaphor, has moved beyond the mortuary, the police station or indeed, the Ikeja Police College, to envelope the entire Police Force and no doubt Nigeria itself. As an organisation, the Nigeria Police has for long been a corpse or at best a living-dead. What Fela in a related but different context had called ‘zombie’.
But tormentors of the Police, it appears, won’t be content unless and until it is dead. This follows the judgement by an Abuja High Court practically sending the alleged thief of the Police Pension Fund home, happy and free.
Or what do you call a fine of less than a million Naira for a crime of N22 billion? But that was all the Nigerian State, all thanks to Justice(?) Abubakar Talba, demanded of John Yusuf, one of the men behind the multi-billion Naira Police Pension Fund theft. The foolishness of the judgement became clear when the culprit didn’t blink before paying the miserable fine right in the court premises and was on his way home- before he was hurled back into detention by the EFCC in a move that would as likely as not be a painful replay of the national farce that had just terminated in Mr. Talba’s court. Yusuf apparently came prepared, knowing he was taking the lead in a court room melodrama.
After that chest-thumping that no other country but America fights corruption harder than Nigeria (only God knows why America is the measuring rod for this interminable fight), I guess President Goodluck Jonathan can now sit back in feline complacency with a bowl of fish pepper soup and cassava loaf congratulating himself on how well his transformational government is winning the corruption war.
The ongoing police saga started when Channels Television transmitted to our national shame the squalor in which police recruits in the Ikeja Police College live at Nigeria’s leading training school for police personnel.
In what looked like an expression of his righteous anger at the state of things at the college, President Jonathan made an unscheduled flash visit to the place. Apparently discomfited, the President wondered how potential law enforcers could be made to live like ‘poultry chicken’.
But right in the same breath the President sought to know how Channels ‘penetrated’ the gates of a college which open grounds are rented out for profit to members of the public any day of the week.
Everybody, except the President, knows many security organisations in Nigeria, from military to paramilitary units, rent out their officers’ mess, halls and other open spaces to members of the public and their own relations for social events.
That is the way they get by, with a little change on the side, in this age of privatisation. How this simple fact of daily existence eludes our President is a measure of his disconnect from what goes on around him. Oh yes, Uncle Joe sure needs to smell the coffee more often.
The President had hardly left the Police College when words started filtering in of heads (certainly of those who allowed the penetration of the Berlin Wall at the Police College) rolling. Bemused and angry Nigerians have since been wondering what caused the presidential u-turn.
While still thinking of what to make of all this and how to digest the constipating bile from presidential guts, in came the judgement from the Abuja court presided over by Mr. Talba.
He had been looking into the case of men who abused their position and stole nearly N30 billion of the pension contributions of police officers.
The same people who, after leaving police training pigsties misnamed colleges like the one in Ikeja, get into poorly paid, poorly kitted and ill-equipped constabulary- the little pension that the few lucky of the millions of these forsaken victims entrusted with the security of us all- the pittance of a pension they are able to gather over a period ranging from between two to three decades are then stolen from them by people employed to manage the funds. Yusuf initially confessed to stealing about N22 billion of these funds. Arrested and charged he plea-bargained with the EFCC only to get to court to submit a no-guilty plea.
The EFCC that allowed the plea bargain in the first place then had the stupid task of arresting him on a far less serious charge of not disclosing his interest in a nondescript company obviously used in perpetrating his criminal entanglements.
This is yet another one of those in-your-face judicial pronouncements increasingly blurted out by judicial officers on pay rolls different from Abuja’s. A poor ordinary Nigerian steals a hundred Naira worth of vegetables and bags a couple of years in jail, with or without an option of fine.
The big thieves steal scores of billions of Naira and are sent home with a pat on the back. Mr. Talba surely wants to put deluded Nigerians who pretend to have opinions in matters of this nature in their place.
That nothing would happen hereafter is an indication that we truly do not count in the matter. As citizens we do not matter; as electorates we are a BIG cipher.
This same Mr. Talba mishandled the Kenny Martins case in November 2009 when he absolved him of charges pertaining to the mismanagement of the Police Equipment Foundation Fund. The funds involved were also in their billions of Naira.
At this point we need to ask the Nigerian Judicial Council if some judges are actually retained to handle certain kinds of cases.
What specially qualifies Mr. Talba to hear suits involving theft of police funds that run into billions of Naira? Would he also continue to hear suits involving the police when he becomes Chief Judge of Adamawa State, as reports have it? What is really happening here?
Now the EFCC wants us to believe it has no hand in the judicial reprieving of criminals but is continually entangled in plea bargains, can Ibrahim Lamorde tell Nigerians why they should take the EFCC seriously?
Only a few years back the EFCC had such meaningless arrangement with Lucky Igbinedion, former governor of Edo State, accused of helping himself to billions of Naira from his state’s treasury.
The police have had it! In training they live in s—t holes; work in penury and at retirement have no pension. Confusion don break bone; na double wahala for deadi bodi.
Source:Vanguard