By OLATUNJI OLOLADE

Monday, August 16, 2021, around 5.16 am, Adekunle Razaq stepped out of his home in Obawole, Iju, Lagos, in a rush for an early Chemistry class at the University of Lagos (UNILAG). At 5.52 am, he was “jail bound.”

A zealous police sergeant had found him “guilty” of a serious crime and pronounced him fit for the cell.

“He stopped us and requested for my cousin’s vehicle papers. When he discovered that the papers were complete, he glowered at me and requested for my identity card. I didn’t have it with me but I told him I had an electronic copy of it. As I scrolled through my phone to show him, he grabbed it from me and started going through my phone,” said Razaq.

Rifling through the phone, the policeman soon found supposedly incriminating evidence against the 18-year-old, a website allegedly frequented by Yahoo Boys (internet fraudsters) seeking dates with older, foreign women.

The policeman seized the phone, ignoring the teenager’s protest that he had no right to pore through his phone or seize it. He labelled Razaq a “notorious Yahoo Boy” and commandeered their vehicle to his police post in Ogudu.

There, he hurled the teenager out of the car and marched him into the station. “You are in very big trouble. You are going straight to jail!” said the officer.

Flustered, the second year student of Chemistry at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), pleaded with the policeman, stressing that he wasn’t an internet fraudster. But the latter was impervious to his plea. Determinedly, he commandeered their vehicle and guided it to their station in Ogudu.

There, the 18-year-old was extorted of the sum of N5, 000, leaving him with a paltry N1, 500 to last him for the month. Things were tight at home and he was only able to scrounge N6,500 as his pocket money. But parting with N5,000 out of the money seemed more reasonable than daring the police officers, whose menacing ardour instilled fear into him. It beat getting locked up in a police cell and having trumped up charges levelled against him, said the 18-year-old.

Razaq was lucky, no doubt. In 1993, Ayotunde Adesola, a graduate in computer science from the University of Lagos, was picked off the street by operatives of the defunct Special Anti-robbery Squad (SARS), and accused of being in a local gang. In an attempt to make him confess, officers poured irritant powder on his face while beating him, the Lagos-based Civil Liberties Organization reported. During this era, General Sani Abacha ruled the country with an iron fist, crushing protests and opposition activists.

Still the same old story

About one year after hundreds of Nigerians took to the streets to protest misconduct and unfair treatment by the police, officers of the Nigeria Police are still found wanting in their engagement with the public.

For instance, Monsurat Ojuade, 18, was killed around 1 pm, on Friday, September 11, after bullet fired by a trigger-happy police sergeant, Sgt. Samuel Phillips, hit her in her family compound in Lagos.

The teenager was hit by a stray bullet, while a team of detectives from the State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID), Panti, wnet to effect the arrest of a robbery suspect in Ijeshatedo area of the State.

Although, concerted efforts were made to save Ojuade, she died on the way to the hospital.

While the Commissioner of Police, Hakeem Odumosu, regretted the incident, describing it as avoidable incident, the culprit, Sgt. Phillips, has since been dismissed from the force and detained for trial.

“This, it is believed, will serve as a deterrent to others who do not act professionally in the course of their duties,” said police spokesperson, Ajisebutu Adekunle, a Chief Superintendent of Police (CSP).

But while the police accepted blame for Ojuade’s death, it contended accusations of its complicity in the killing of Jumoke, 25, who was allegedly hit by a stray bullet on Saturday, July 3, while police officers tried to disperse the crowd, during a rally by Yoruba Nation agitators, at the Gani Fawehinmi Freedom Park at Ojota. She reportedly died on the spot.

The first of four children while operatives dispatched to the venue reportedly fired gunshots, tear gas canisters and water cannons to disperse the demonstrators and journalists shortly after the rally took off.

Jumoke was reported to be displaying drinks at her boss’ shop in a compound close to the rally ground when security men chased some agitators into the premises amid shootings.

She was said to have been hit by a stray bullet, which ripped through her stomach and left a deep hole. Her corpse was later taken away in a police van.

The police, however, denied responsibility, saying its officers never fired a “single live bullet” at the rally.

“The said corpse was found wrapped and abandoned at a distance, far from Ojota venue of the rally, behind MRS Filling Station, inward Maryland, on the other side of the venue, with dried blood stains suggesting that the corpse is not fresh…After a close look at the corpse, a wound suspectedly sustained from a sharp object was seen on it,” the police had said in a statement.

Crisis birthed by fake news

In October, a video that appeared to show an unprovoked killing by a SARS officer went viral, kicking off a wave of social media protests and live demonstrations. Thousands of Nigerians, mostly youths, trooped to the streets to protest years of unfair treatment by the police. The video that triggered the protests was recorded and shared on social media on October 3, 2020, by one Prince Nicholas. Nicholas, while driving from Ughelli to a wedding party in Warri, Delta State, reportedly saw the police toss out a young man from their patrol truck and recorded the incident from a distance.

“They don kill the boy o. Safe Delta Ughelli. The boy don die o,” he said while chasing after the police vehicle belonging to the Operation Safe Delta unit of the Delta State Police Command.

Nicholas posted the video on social media, and went on to the wedding party where he later got word that the victim did not die. He deleted the video from his Facebook the next day, on October 4, posting an update that the victim did not die. But he was no longer in control of the narrative.

When that video was shared on Twitter late on October 3, some falsely twitted that the operatives of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) shot the young man to death.

At the backdrop of widespread outrage against the police, Festus Keyamo, the Minister of State for Labour and Employment, sought to clarify the misinformation on October 4, announcing that the young man, Joshua Ambrose, was not dead, and that the SARS unit wasn’t involved. The police claimed the victim jumped out of the vehicle himself, after he had been arrested, but he said that he was pushed by the police officers. Keyamo promised that the conduct of the officers would be investigated, but stressed that the video online misrepresented facts.

The Ughelli incident triggered pent up dissent against the SARS unit into angst, leading to protests in a couple of states and Abuja. In Ughelli, the catalyst to the unrest, police corporal, Etaga Stanley, was killed at a protest in Ughelli on October 8 for allegedly shooting a young protester in the leg.

Later that night, the police harassment of peaceful protesters demonstrating overnight at the Lagos House of Assembly fueled more public interest, and the #EndSARS campaign entered its full-blown nationwide phase.

Among the protesters’ five core demands is to increase police salary so that they are adequately compensated for protecting lives and property of citizens. However, not a few citizens doubted the possibility of that happening amid the COVID-19 crisis and the economic stagnancy it imposed.

On October 20, at the peak of the protest, soldiers fired on crowds of protesters at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos thus escalating the situation.

‘Retweet aggressively!’

While the social media proved useful to the cause of the protesters, it soon became a repository of misinformation and channel for spreading fake news.

Several random photos of alleged victims of #EndSARS crisis, some of them reportedly murdered, were promptly refuted by the alleged deceased who came out to say they were still alive.

Spreaders of such misinformaton on Twitter were known to urge other users of the platform and share and ‘Retweet aggressively” such misinformation.

For instance, a random picture of a man carrying a body wrapped in bloodstained Nigerian flag was circulated as one of the casualties of the Lekki toll gate shooting but it was promptly refuted with explanation that it was actually the still shot of a drama presentation by corp members.

Another random photo of a young woman crying during a demonstration in Enugu went viral after someone had claimed on Twitter that police killed three of her brothers in one day.

The woman involved, Ugwu Blessing Ugochukwu, subsequently refuted it as a lie that had nothing to do with her, said Samson Toromade, a journalist. Another false claim that was widely shared on social media at the time said protesters holding the Nigerian flag would be immune from being attacked by security forces.

This claim was tragically proven to be false when Nigerian Army troops fired on peaceful protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos on October 20, the event that effectively marked the end of the street demonstrations.

Numerous social media posts also falsely claimed that the United Nations (UN) would be compelled to stage an intervention in Nigeria if the people protested for more than 30 days.

An analysis by Dubawa, a fact-checking outfit, found that social media users, celebrities, and influencers were the source of 83% of disinformation and misinformation regarding the #EndSARS protests, and Twitter was the major platform used to spread them.

Beginning of the end…

Since it was created in 1992 to combat armed robbery and other violent crimes, officers of the unit have been accused as serial perpetrators of harassment, extortion, torture, and extra-judicial murder.

But before it attained notoriety for human rights violation and extrajudicial killings, SARS fought violent crimes including armed robbery and kidnapping. The group evolved over time from a special outfit created by different state commands to address specific violent crime such as armed robbery, kidnapping, communal violence and religious violence. In each state, SARS was under the criminal investigations department of the police command.

The Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS) had a nationwide mandate and was under the Federal Criminal Investigation Department (FCID) Abuja. The unit’s lack of respect for human rights that led to its proscription by Nigeria’s incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari.

At the time of SARS’ creation, armed robbery was rampant in cities like Lagos. In 1992, the Superintendent of Police, Simeon Danladi Midenda, was tasked with forming a unit that would operate independently and surreptitiously in order to ambush robbers. (A separate but similar anti-robbery force had been created in 1984.)

“The secret behind the successes of the original SARS was its facelessness and its mode of operation,” Midenda told a Lagos-based newspaper, in 2017. “We operated in plain clothes and used plain vehicles that could not be associated with security or any government agency.”

Midenda says that SARS did have some early successes in capturing armed bandits. But reports of success were soon accompanied by reports of abuse of power.

In 1993, Ayotunde Adesola, a graduate in computer science from the University of Lagos, was picked off the street by SARS and accused of being in a local gang. In an attempt to make him confess, officers poured irritant powder on his face while beating him, the Lagos-based Civil Liberties Organization reported. During this era, General Sani Abacha ruled the country with an iron fist, crushing protests and opposition activists; he was accused of many violations and abuses by global human rights organizations.

A pattern soon emerged of SARS extorting civilians or detaining and torturing them into giving confessions.