A fellow is reported to have a predilection for cursing. In his defense, he rails: ‘ko ni da fun gbogbo awon to ni mo n se’pe’ (it will not be well with all those who accuse me of cursing). You could call this a lesson in farce, maybe. Perhaps a demonstration of uncouthness. Or maybe that of an inexcusable, lamentable character. Regardless of which appeals to you and first, you can’t deny the presence of either a chronic lack of self-introspection or an unceasing disregard for any sense of propriety, civility, and even that dubious social antic: ‘optics’. Now, imagine if this were an analogy of something or someone—which it is—then you must agree that thing/someone must be devious, unrepentant and smug, sanctimonious and disrespectful, and perhaps even self-seeking or self-centered. Now, imagine this was your country’s police force, or a unit within it, and the accusation was the killing of civilians and citizens. It stops being a farce, right? Right!
The Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit within the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), tasked in the main with safeguarding the society, responding to theft, and, specifically, repelling the spate of robbery activities in the country by applying themselves particularly to those situations, has become a rogue squad. Simultaneously constituting nuisance on the streets and menacing the youth population already threatened by appallingly woeful governance, they not only fail to perform these duties, but also contribute to the jeopardy by imperiling the lives of youths both in broad-day light and in plain sight. Countless testimonies—if they can even be called that for how tragic they are and how they move you straight to tears—continue to blow up social media from victims brutalized by this rogue unit. #endsars.com saturates with endless narratives of police brutality that will leave you miserably dejected, emptied of hope, and paralyzed in fear of the Nigerian police, of Nigeria, and of the Nigerian government that has allowed both to degenerate to this level of moral depravity and has allowed this inhumane viciousness to spiral onward like a restless, headless ghost, wantonly crashing into and the lives of Nigerian citizens. Inhuman because, here is an ultra-mix of animal behavior, like the revolutionary Fela once said in respect of Nigerian national security forces, and modern savagery.
Further attesting to the animality and inhumanity of this unit are several stories proliferating on social media that, I dare say, requires a special kind of evil to be matched and toppled elsewhere in the world. My initial intention was to upload with this article some of the tweets and pictures by victims that speak directly to the moribund nature of Nigeria’s national security and the fate of Nigerian youths at the hands of the police. But the wickedness I saw spoke of so much evil, so much pain, so much unprovoked and unjustified malice that I slam my phone on my bed in anger each time, unable to scroll further. Each time I tried to persist in this endeavor, I found myself mad with pain, sad in anger.
Turning the citizenry to its targets; maiming, extorting, killing, and thieving from those whom it has been charged to protect, SARS has shown itself as a cosmetic outlasting its due date, but left to rot by the same negligence that created it, so that it has festered and become a cancer. SARS’ officers extort money, threaten to shoot you while adding that notorious phrase ‘and nothing go happen’. They rob you blind, and even have devices for your ATM cards—for those who do not trade in Bitcoin that is. Sometimes, as if led by the spirit of a goat, they might whisk you to a nearby ATM so you cough out hard-earned cash. A few times, highly unlikely, they let you go, perhaps after a few smacks here and there. This unit and its officers profile youths for profit. They chase this demographic, even in cases where they are in motion, just to rob them blind, and blatantly so, like armed robbers—they even act and look so.
In one of my several and very unpleasant encounters with them, I was pursued while on a bike as if I was a fleeing fugitive. They kept commanding the rider, on whose bike I was, to stop, with total disregard for safety for either of us, just because I had a laptop bag and wore jewelry—their weakness. They threatened to arrest me and lug me off to the station—like I was cassava sack—because they had nothing to take, ransacking my bag and my phone as if they had right to them, looking to extort me like criminals. Even experienced hoodlums do not manifest such brazen criminality. Sadly, many have been killed this way. Some kidnapped—as this is the right word to describe their methods—framed with trumped up charges. Others have been ‘disappeared’, left to rot in jails. As if we were all beasts in a jungle! No sense of rights, civility, or manners whatsoever.
Yet, you should know that those narratives you will find on endsars.com, regardless of how hard they grip your soul and jolt you to the horrid realities Nigerian youths have had to contend with, only constitute a miniscule portion of the grave injustice meted out to the populace. The abundance of heart-rending experiences that have found release from the youth population within the one-week of the #endsars protest establishes one fact: the Nigeria Police Force does not deserve that name. The stories are enough to leave you breathless each time they pop up on your feed, sleepless for many nights as they gatecrash your sanity, and dejected for days as you begin to ask yourself, “wetin gan sef”? I have just described my #endsars protest experience: I have not had a decent sleep since the protests started, compounded with the fact of Nigerian police reacting with more brutal force to quell what is obviously a peaceful protests. If I were not living in the country, my first question would be: who responds to charges of gross misconduct, unjustifiable cruelty, sickening abuse of power, extortion, extra-judicial and wanton killing with those same actions? If I were not living here, I would have said this is unbelievable. But staying through to their colors, Nigerian police attacked civil protesters—and continue to do so.
Those they could get their hands on, they pummeled and dragged across the streets like dogs, pilling them up in a corner in their stations like garbage. Disregarding the rule of law and becoming a law onto themselves, they wave aside their penchant to unlawfully arrest protestors as if it were nothing, requiring the presence of countless lawyers, statesmen, a sitting governor, and the whole of Nigerian youth twitter to release illegally detained persons. “Wetin na”!
Two particular videos left me broken. The first is that in which a girl making a recording with her mobile phone is visibly dragged across the street to be flogged and battered by a host of policemen already happily thrashing fellow citizens whose crime apparently was to protest police brutality. Shameful irony, no? Watching the same video, you would see able bodied men in police uniform prancing and leaping about like joyless kids whose definition of purpose in a moment of National crisis is to pound their frustrations into innocent victims. Utter shameless chaos. The other video is of a visibly distressed protester narrating how the Nigerian police stood aside as they were attacked by thugs brandishing machetes and stabbing people. Not only that—they laughed and jested throughout the ordeal as these protesters ran about in fear, blood visibly gushing out of some, as others favored deep knife wounds to mortal injuries.
Pause. Let’s even hypothesize that the Nigerian police has the wherewithal to decidedly remove itself from undesirable confrontations—because this is Nigeria and because, sadly, they can in fact do that, emboldened by a highly dysfunctional system lacking accountability. Is quelling mayhem provoked and sustained by bandits and thugs not the province of police expertise? The truth is, you will never see the police in such threatening situations or in any situation whatsoever that fails to assure profit. The police are there to rob you dry. This is not slander: the reality is there for you to see. Just use the hashtag. And if you find yourself screaming “wetin na” or “wetin gan sef” in disgust or annoyance, just know Nigerian youths have been screaming that since about five years back, all to the deaf ears of the Nigerian government. It is what has brought us here.
Even if you were the unbelieving type, irredeemably cynical of everything from humanity to democracy, the Nigerian police brutality has still got to tickle you wrongly. Because it is just plain evil, as it goes beyond committing a wrong even. The Police know it. The Nigerian government knows this. Both know, but won’t do any significant thing or are slow to action because one is often complicit and the other derives some sickening sense of worth from it all. It is why, despite the audio claims to #Endsars and police brutality, Nigerian youths are still being clobbered on the streets, arrested for protesting for their future, and charged to court the very next day with trumped up charges and impunity. Nigeria does not make sense in this regard, and you cannot make it make sense, unless you embrace your “wetin gan sef” spirit entirely and yell, wetin na!—which is what the Nigerian youth has been about since the start of the protest.
Nigerian youths have found this spirit, borrowed it, trapped it within their hearts, and drawn it into their fingers as their bodies live it on the streets from Lagos to Benin. It is the spirit of frustration, of rebelling against being killed by those paid to protect them. The spirit of having zero basic resources and yet being robbed for that little they have fought the odds to provide themselves. It is the spirit of standing up against brutes in police uniforms. It is the spirit in that video where a young man is been assaulted and punched relentlessly by a military officer, pleading and begging while others watch on, till he, frustrated, picks up a machete and chases away the brute pretending as an officer of the law. I dare say that in Nigeria, you wouldn’t be lacking were you to search for facts to corroborate a claim that Nigerian police personnel are brutes. No pretense for their inhumanity. Zero. Even if one were to lack decency, surely optics should perform the saving grace. But that is reaching too far. The Nigeria Police Force lacks subtlety as much as they lack optics.
But wait let’s talk about NPF’s kind of optics:
To save face and starve off accusations of brutality and abuse of law and power, Nigerian police respond to protest with more brutality. Imagine whacking an old woman for inquiry about the whereabouts of her illegally arrested son. This would have been a pity and embarrassing if not utterly devilish and satanic.
#Endsars may be many things—and that itself is an argument not relevant now or tomorrow. But I know it is the youth’s coup de grace, perhaps the first in a series of many. Whichever it is, we have reached that “wetin gan sef” moment, willingly embraced its errant spirit against dogma, oppression, and zero accountability, and it is here to stare down that mad goat flourishing in the heart of tyranny and b(l)eating in the heart of Nigerian leaders and its henchmen masquerading as the NPF and SARS. And we all know how you deal with goats.
By Dami Lare
A Brutalized Youth. Frustrated Citizen
