If you see a lone Nigerian cop walking along a street, with or without a gun slung on his tired shoulder, his uniform faded from much washing and many hours in the sun, the soles of his boots half gone, his face etched with worry from adjudicating in endless local disputes with his allowances unpaid, his promotion delayed and his impending posting to a harsher location, and you hide in one corner and take a shot at him, what political, strategic, tactical or military point have you made?
I am just wondering because of the many attacks in recent times on police stations, security check points, prisons and even a state police headquarters in some states, occasioned by the secessionist IPOB’s “shoot-at-sight” order against cops. Add to that the killing of an army officer and ten soldiers at Konshisha in Benue State last week, and Boko Haram’s continuing attacks on security and civilian targets in the North East. If you maim or kill a policeman or even a soldier, in what way has that brought you closer to your goal of reviving Biafra, producing an Igbo president in 2023, settling Tiv community grudges against Idoma neighbours, ending the Presidency’s “taking sides with Fulani herdsmen” or even bringing to fruition Boko Haram’s so far elusive 12-year-old quest to create an Islamic Caliphate on the ruins of Nigeria?
I am just wondering. Are policemen and soldiers the tools of oppression in Nigeria as alleged, or are they among oppression’s many victims? I first harboured this thought during my four months’ hospitalisation at Dala Orthopaedic Hospital, Kano in 1986. I found myself lying next to a double leg amputee, who turned out to be a serving police sergeant. He told me his pathetic story. From his station in Minna, he was sent on special election duty to Oyo State during the 1983 general election. He was part of a police platoon guarding the FEDECO office in Ile-Ife when UPN thugs came charging at them in a van. His mates dived out of the way just in time, but the vehicle ran over his legs. Both legs were amputated at Ife General Hospital, but that was the last time he saw any policeman.
With the help of a nurse, he posted a letter to his wife in Minna. The wife was heavily pregnant and could not go, so she retrieved their eldest daughter, who was in Form I in a boarding secondary school, and sent her to Ife. It was this small girl that managed to find her father, took him to the motor park and brought him home to Minna. All his letters to the police went unanswered but three years later, due to NPF’s disorganization, his name appeared on a signal inviting senior sergeants to appear in Kaduna for interview to inspector. That was how a Police Commissioner saw him, heard his story, and sent him to Dala for treatment.
Now, assuming you saw a man like that in Owerri or in Bama and you shot him, do you think it is skin off the Federal Government’s nose? Soldiers may be in slightly better state than policemen, though not by much. Joining the army is supposed to be a highly idealistic and very patriotic calling. These days however, all the young men who ask me if I “know someone” who can help them to join the army are not motivated by idealism. Given the paucity of jobs, young lads keep their ears open for news of any opening. They only think of the salary, not the potentially supreme sacrifice.
The army has a whole command for training and doctrine, but it often looks like Boko Haram, IPOB, the Konshisha ragtag warriors and even the Northwestern bandits have more effective methods of indoctrination these days. Once material lure replaced higher values as the motivation for joining the military and police, low motivation crept in. Maybe we are not alone in this. I read a book many years ago about how, prior to 1945, Japanese soldiers were indoctrinated with and were ready to die in the name of the Emperor. After 1945, with American Occupation instructors watching, Japanese Self-Defence Force drill sergeants changed their admonition to recruits at parades. Instead of “Are you ready to die for the Emperor?”, they said, “Do you want TV sets?” The recruits will answer, “Hai!” “Do you want refrigerators?” “Hai!” “Do you want gas cookers?” “Hai!” How will anyone fight a war motivated by TV sets and gas cookers?
I do not know what drill sergeants shout at the Depot in Zaria. It is probably more idealistic than TVs and cookers, but motivation and indoctrination is apparently lower than it was during the Civil War. I knew one soldier who came to Kaduna on annual leave from Jos in the 1990s. He deserted; when I asked him what will happen if Army Provosts came for him, he said no one will come for him. That was a shock to me because I remembered what happened in 1970 when our neighbour in Jega deserted the war front and ran back home. A Landrover full of red-bereted Army Provosts traced him, dragged him from under his mother’s bed, thoroughly beat him up, locked him up in a water-logged police cell overnight, then threw him into the Landrover the next day and drove away. Maybe because that was wartime.
Anyway, if anyone wants to settle scores with the Presidency, remedy charges of political marginalization, protest the lack of infrastructure in his community, demand resource control, avenge for alleged presidential partisanship in communal quarrels, secede from Nigeria and set up his own Republic or even secede from Africa, I urge him to find better ways of doing it than shooting at soldiers and policemen at check points. Or even, as in Konshisha, hijacking a bus load of soldiers, carrying them into the bush and killing them. It will not advance your cause one inch and could invite terrible reprisals. You will then be left to shout that soldiers killed innocent civilians, as if the soldiers you killed were also not innocent.
Boko Haram in particular regularly boasts in propaganda videos that God is on its side because its cause is righteous. At least in the modern day, war is not won by the righteousness of one’s cause. Nigerian Army also has one highly eloquent Muslim cleric. We see videos of him, in his uniform, profusely quoting Qur’anic verses and assuring troops that God is on their side. Between the Army and Boko Haram, we do not know whose cause is just in God’s eyes. There was this commander in Frederick Forsyth’s novel Day of the Jackal who said God is on the side of the bigger battalions. To Boko Haram’s chagrin, that appears to be the case in our North East.
