Tunde Leye: Enforcing the law within the law (Y! FrontPage)

by Tunde Leye

tunde-leye1

There are thousands of Nigerians languishing in illegal detention, some tortured, and some killed. One wonders if the Boko Haram members that are freed in the numerous jailbreaks reported by the media were detained under the ambits of the law. Law enforcement must never be done outside the confines of the law, otherwise it becomes terrorising the people.

In January 2012, Nigerians who had been anticipating New Year celebrations with rice and chicken woke up to a different New Year gift – the president announced the removal of fuel subsidy. This came after denials in the preceding months by the government that it had such plans. Top government officials, including the then CBN Governor (who has since made a volte face and told Nigerians he has changed his mind on the matter, conveniently after his fallout with the government) got on the media, trying their best to convince Nigerians that the subsidy removal was in the best interest of the poor people in Nigeria.

The people did not buy it. In an unprecedented manner, Nigerians came out in huge numbers to protest the policy. The protests were social media led and spontaneous, not following the usual pattern of labour organizations calling strikes and leading the move. The government had never experienced that type of pushback from the Nigerian people; they were at loss as to how to end the protests. Then the security forces were rolled out, and sixteen people lost their lives. Ademola, a young tailor in Ogba, Lagos, was shot by the police while playing football on the empty roads. Until today, no policeman has been put on trial for any of the deaths.

Anyone who has been on Nigerian twitter for the last few days will be familiar with the twitter-led #FreeCiaxon movement. The summary is this – during the attempted jailbreak by detained Boko Haram members at the SSS Headquarters in Abuja, a young man, Yusuf Isiaka who works in the PHCN facility opposite the place livetweeted the event from his twitter handle @ciaxon. He even had physical contact with the soldiers, giving water to one as shown in one of the pictures he tweeted. Then he was arrested by the SSS and detained for 10days, before the news broke. Again, young Nigerians took the matter up on twitter, and the protests began to gather. The government however moved quicker this time (sic) and quickly released Yusuf before the protests escalated onto the streets. It would seem they had learnt from the Occupy Nigeria experience in this regards.

In 2009, Boko Haram went on rampage in Maiduguri, after disagreements with the new helmet policy of the then governor of Borno State Ali Modu Sherrif. The army was called in to quell the riots and restore peace. Mohammed Yusuf, the Boko Haram leader was arrested by the army and handed over to the police alive. Footage available on Youtube shows that he was killed extra-judicially after this. The Boko Haram insurgency under his successor Shekau has since grown into a raging inferno that threatens to consume the whole North East.

A thread runs through the three examples I have given above. Our security agents are not subject to the law of consequences. If I kill someone, there is a repercussion – I would be prosecuted for murder. If I detain someone against their will, I would be prosecuted for kidnapping. You see, many people do not do these things, not because they are inherently good people, but because they are afraid of the repercussions. Our security agents however have a sense that if they killed someone extra-judicially, detained someone illegally, invaded people’s privacies or tortured citizens, nothing would happened. And they have a long list of examples of such occurrences in the past to bolster this belief. Almost every Nigerian that you speak with has one story of an encounter with security agents that have violated their rights and blatantly dealt with citizens illegally without repercussion. Yusuf Isiaka was lucky that his case was taken up on social media. In spite of an initial denial by the SSS spokeswoman, he was eventually released as pressure mounted and protests loomed. However, do citizens have to continually resort to protests and civil disturbances before our government treats its citizens properly?

Al Capone, one of the most notorious gangsters of the American prohibition era was known to have committed several murders but the police could not pick him up, because they didn’t have facts to hold him on. He was eventually arrested and jailed on tax evasion charges, because the police could prove this. It is not that the American police were less corrupt in that era than their Nigerian counterparts are today. In fact, they were a lot more corrupt. But they would never arrest and detain a citizen unless they had the legal grounds to do so, because there were severe consequences on any policeman that did so.

There are thousands of Nigerians languishing in illegal detention, some tortured, and some killed. One wonders if the Boko Haram members that are freed in the numerous jailbreaks reported by the media were detained under the ambits of the law. Law enforcement must never be done outside the confines of the law, otherwise it becomes terrorising the people. The government should have a monopoly of force. This force can however become a bad thing once it is not regulated. I often wonder if Boko Haram would have become what it is today if Mohammed Yusuf had not been killed that day, and in that cold blooded manner.

We should not have to resort to protests to free citizens from law enforcement agencies. It is an anomaly. Officials must be made to face the music where they are found to have contravened the laws in dealing with the citizens. And the government can begin this chapter with two very current matters – the Apo killings and the detention of Yusuf Isiaka a.k.a @ciaxon.

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Tunde Leye tweets from @TundeLeye

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

 

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