•Again, police ordered to withdraw personnel from VIPs

President Bola Tinubu’s directive to the police high command to withdraw about 100,000 police personnel from VIP security duties, and in its stead develop a community policing strategy, is a welcome idea that must be followed through. Minister of Police Affairs, Imaan Suleiman-Ibrahim, revealed this at a two-day management retreat at the Ministry of Police Affairs.

The directive followed the deluge of requests for policemen by some influential Nigerians. The force has begun the process of recruiting the next batch of policemen.

Nigeria is one of the most under-policed countries in the world. Ironically, in the last 10 years, the country has also become one of the most insecure, as a result of the activities of Boko Haram, ISWAP, bandits, kidnappers, murderous herdsmen and all sorts of social miscreants that have made the country insecure. As a result of their nefarious activities, some foreign governments have issued warnings to their citizens to limit their movements in the country or avoid visiting certain states entirely.

But the directive to withdraw police personnel from VIPs is not new.

After his inauguration in 2015, former President Muhammadu Buhari instructed that policemen attached to VIPs be withdrawn. Sunday Arase was the then Inspector-General of Police (IGP). Later, Ibrahim Idris made the same call in 2018. In 2020, Mohammed Adamu, the then IGP also gave the same order shortly after the #EndSARS incident. In 2021, IGP Baba Alkali Usman gave the same order.

None of the past instructions worked. This then makes us assume that the latest directive might end up a mere routine.

But we do not have to go through this route because there is an urgent need for errors of the past to be corrected. Maintenance of law and order is one good prerequisite for a functional democracy. The idea that VIPs that are supposed to serve the people are so scared of their own security to demand and pay for extra security at the expense of the general population should be unacceptable. The people have been shortchanged by those who they elect as leaders but who turn around to monopolise the services of the police personnel, leaving them vulnerable to the social ills that the elected ought to work at fighting.

The sad part of the whole process of police personnel being attached to VIPs is the image that brings to the force. At some point, there were videos of such personnel carrying handbags for some women or holding umbrellas for men, making them more of domestic servants than law enforcement officers. Some incidents of such police personnel being physically assaulted by their employers have also been reported and this is definitely bad for the image of the police.

The police must be the police of every citizen and not just policemen for those who can afford to pay extra for their services. It makes better strategic and tactical sense to police communities rather than allow some citizens monopolise the services of policemen. It even gives a very bad optics that police personnel hang around VIPs in public, and man their houses to the exclusion of the general public. There is probably nowhere else where there is as much abuse of the services of policemen as is seen in Nigeria.

There must be a structural reorganisation of the system such that people who access power at any level would be made to be responsible enough not to have a sense of exclusive entitlement to policing. There must be an urgent solution to make the country more functional to reduce crimes which overstretch police duties. The people are as important as the VIPs that demand exclusive protection from a police force that is not even up to the UN benchmark for policing ratio.

We commend the fact that the force is planning to recruit more personnel but training them takes time and as such, the already trained ones must be maximally deployed to work for every citizen. Monopolising the police by VIPs fuels impunity and devalues the police force. The essence of government is the protection of lives and property, and the police force is crucial in achieving these objectives.

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