Testimony of a Police Commissioner
By Femi Olugbile
You have never met him, but your impression of CP Fatai Owoseni, who was Commissioner of Police in Lagos from 2015 to 2017, garnered from his comportment and public pronouncements, has always been strongly positive.
Owoseni was born in Lagos. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in International Studies and Diplomacy from the University of Benin, and later a Diploma in Police Management from the University of Jos.
After joining the Nigeria Police, he underwent various trainings, including local staff training and capacity building at the Nigeria Police College Jos and trainings on emergency response operations, disaster management, law and judicial reform, and community policing. These trainings were garnered in places as far afield as China, Singapore, Italy, USA and China.
Within the force, he rose through the ranks, becoming Commissioner of Police Lagos State, and later Commissioner of Police, Benue State. He retired from the Nigeria Police Force in January 2019.
He did not allow the grass to grow under his feet. He continued to work as a Security Consultant, and later in the same year was appointed as Special Adviser on Security Matters by the Governor of Oyo State.
In some of his public statements, he has stopped just short of ‘bursting the speaker’ – a street slang for disclosing delicate secrets that others would rather keep under wraps, such as how he was eventually relieved of his post as CP in Benue State in the heat of the farmer-herder crisis because he refused to carry out superior orders that he considered to be against the public interest and the nation’s Constitution.
Recently you came across a video interview, in Yoruba, of a now civilianised Owoseni, discussing the Police, his life in it, and what he thinks the issues are. His candour is compelling, and the discussion riveting.
When he joined the Police in 1984, at his first posting in Sagamu, the Police had land rovers and lorries for moving its staff to their places of daily deployment. There was a fuel dump to service the force, and there were workshops stocking the spare parts for police vehicles. There was even ‘information money’ under the control of the DPO for rewarding ‘informants’ who helped the police to prevent or solve crimes. Junior ranks were given two pairs of uniforms and shoes free. Officers’ uniforms were imported from England and were subsidised fifty percent. Members of other forces, including the Army, befriended the Police so they could procure subsidised shoes. Policemen transferred to new stations received ’28 days allowance in lieu of notice’. All the neighbourhood hotels tried to be in the good books of the DPO so they could be assigned to accommodate newly posted officers. There was money allocated to feed inmates in police cells.
Nowadays, junior police buy their own uniforms, cardigans and raincoats, he reveals. Their shoes are ragged and not standardised. Even where there are vehicles for official duty, they often contribute money for fuel.
‘How do you want to treat people as animals and not expect bad behaviour?’ he asks rhetorically.
Different security agencies have been extracted from the Police and their conditions elevated above the primary force.
DPO’s receive a token every quarter, not enough to fuel vehicles even for a week.
He is not justifying the extortion and bad behaviour of a minority, but these are compelling issues, in his eyes, especially because Nigerians like to compare their Police with their counterparts abroad.
In his early days, riots were controlled with tear gas and water cannon. Nowadays riot-control equipment is all guns. The policeman, when he feels endangered, reacts the only way he can. He shoots.
The Police have no Union to push their case.
His earnings from his foreign postings were several multiples of his other career earnings, including his income as a Commissioner of Police. He is not shy to disclose his monthly pension – seventy thousand naira – the minimum wage.
Not to join the bandwagon of bribery and corruption is a personal choice every policeman has to make for himself.
As CP in Benue, when a policeman was killed on duty, he would run to the State Governor to beg for money to supplement the contributions of the fallen man’s colleagues which would be used to transport the body to his hometown in Abeokuta, or wherever. The official ‘allowance’ was hardly enough to buy a coffin.
The interviewer remarks that the youths of the nation have in the past tried to be the voice of voiceless Policemen, especially the junior ranks, by coming out on the streets to protest with demands that included the welfare of policemen. She is referring to the ENDSARS protests. Owoseni concedes that while there may have been ENDSARS protesters with genuine intentions to help society and the Police, many infiltrators were ‘Yahoo’ and sundry miscreants, enabled by the protests, pursuing their own ends. He tells of two policemen who were killed in Ibadan and their testicles eaten by the mob. The confessed culprits were arrested, but later freed. Were the dead police not human beings?
This is baggage that ‘DJ Switch’ and the other apostles of ENDSARS, sanctimonious to this day, have refused to own.
He is not sure mental testing, as proposed by some people, should be restricted to policemen – the whole society is deranged.
He tells the story of a policeman he once arrested for not saluting his convoy as it passed. When he talked with him later, he learned his children had been ejected from school back home in Jalingo, and he had no money to pay his house rent. He had painstakingly gone to the station to put down the gun he used to guard a bank before returning to the street, still in uniform, to mope.
It is all rather depressing, put alongside the deplorable state of police accommodation everyone could see all over the country.
What you take away from Owoseni’s testimony is the question he has not asked. Can Nigeria begin a root-and-branch recreation to get the Police that it truly wants for its own Security? And it is not just about salaries.
