Time to dismantle mobile revenue collection joints in Southeast

What may look like the military, police, customs, and Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) checkpoints randomly located almost per kilometer distance in the southeast roads are indeed avenues to collect money from road users indiscriminately and in broad daylight. The primary purpose of their deployment is nothing to write home about, and they are completely unaccounted for.

The statistics of casualties figures keep rising for those non-compliant road users who adamantly would not spare their hard-earned funds to the coffers of these uniform exploitation men. They paid the supreme price. They were shot dead.

This notwithstanding, it will rather amount to an exaggeration to conclude that the bodies of the Nigerian law enforcement agencies are dysfunctional or disoriented. Within the limited working enhancements infrastructure at their disposal, they have been rated topnotch in most of the international engagements. Perhaps, on account of this inherent capacity, one wonders why this potential is not being brought to bear particularly in the Southeast region to fight bandits. 

In place of this, the people of Southeastern Nigeria have long been subjected to all manner of distressing and desponding maltreatment by different security personnel on their roads. For example, from the Sagamu axis along Lagos Benin road all through to Onitcha Asaba bridge end, for fear of sounding immodest, there are not less than 75 combined forces checkpoints. It can be disgusting at times.

It is an open secret that senior police officers desperately lobby with mouth-watering amounts of money just to gain favorable benefits of deployment to South Eastern and South-South states including Lagos State. One senior officer had argued with me that even in the Northern region states of recent, the ongoing booming but clandestine natural resources deals have also provided a windfall threshold for the knowledgeable service top echelon to stuff their pockets with fleeting funds.

These things are the very background factors undermining the effective fight against corruption and crimes in the country. The federal government has the sole responsibility of intervention to discourage these deadly trends and sanitise the security system.

A nation where the production sector rates abysmally poor; a country where the security situation has drastically deteriorated and in its lowest ebb; a nation where bandits rule supreme in the northern region, it is embarrassing and reprehensible that security bodies turn themselves as scare mongers to the people. Provide security on the average in any nation, and more than 50 per cent of the myriads of the national ills are settled.  

The consequences of the ongoing extortion on Southeast roads by filthy lucre highly thirsty officers can be devastating.  First, it gives room for volatility among the vibrant youth in the region. This is especially true when they have the privileged knowledge that their sister regions in northern and western Nigeria are not subjected to this strange coercion of stealing from the public by the field forces at checkpoints in the eastern region.

Peradventure, what has always been responsible for the low figures in recruitment in the Nigeria Police Force remains this regional oppression policy. There was a deafening silence in response to this topic with the immediate past Police Service Commission Chairman Chief Solomon Arase when this writer engaged him. When he gathered the strength to utter a word, “I will get back to you later” was his lame-duck reply. Of course, that too was the end of it to date.

One does not need to also look too far at what might have instigated the anti-security forces and facilities’ aggression by irredentist elements in South Eastern Nigeria. This ugly trend discourse has been a recurring issue in the region and has claimed innocent civilian casualties.

Efforts to register the public outcry fall on deaf ears of the relevant authorities as the trigger-happy officers go scot-free and are never brought to book. Sometimes before the election of the incumbent governor of Anambra State Charles Chukwuma Soludo, when the then-state Commissioner of Police CP Monday Kuryas was deployed, I visited Anambra State. It was also at this time that the destruction of police and military facilities became rampant and regular.

My private investigation revealed that the anti-police sentiments were not unprovoked. While I tried to arrange a meeting between the CP and the youth leaders in the state, it was aborted by the sudden transfer of the hardworking Commissioner of Police.

Wisdom demands that if you sincerely intend to tackle effects, first give attention to the causes. Therefore, it will only amount to dancing around it, beating about the bush by focusing only on the repercussions factors while playing unmindful of the deep-rooted incitement. For how long more can we pretend to be ignorant of these ongoing before we can confront the monster head-on? How many more deaths and destruction will be endured before the needful are undertaken?

When every passenger is forced to disembark from their commuter vehicles upon reaching any military checkpoints and treks long distances past the blockage joints in the southeast speaks volumes of the inhumane approach meted out to unsuspecting members of the public.

They look at anyone as a potential attacker and thus treat everyone alike. Unless some remedial measures are taken, things will go from bad to worse. This is not the first time a voice has been raised. It remained how the concerned authorities are responding.

Orajiaku can be reached via: [email protected]