The Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) is a dreaded controversial unit of the Nigeria Police Force. It is a unit under the Force Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department headed by the Deputy Inspector General of Police Anthony Ogbizi. The DIG receives its directives from the Inspector General of Police. SARS, as it is popularly called, is known for extortion, torture, framing up suspects and even blackmail.
Some officers of the F-SARS have been known to be overzealous, terrorising weak and powerless Nigerians. In the past, some youths have been killed by the officers either through torture or stray bullets in a broad daylight and brazen manner. To possess a laptop, be a youth, spot dreadlocks or tattoos are some of the easiest ways for the F-SARS men to brand anyone a Yahoo Boy (Internet fraudster). They do it so lawlessly that youths scamper for safety merely seeing them in their usually rented commercial buses. Many of them don’t do any other job than to wake up in the morning, brandish guns and stay at strategic junctions to arrest youths indiscriminately and brand them as Yahoo Boys.
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With the latest round of protest to #EndSARS, Nigerians need to know the origin of the rogue unit that has served to terrorise a large section of the populace, especially young people.
The Nigerian Police has a history of extrajudicial murders. One of the most notorious was on 6 September 1992 when an Army Colonel, Israel Ridnam, was at a traffic jam caused by a police checkpoint in Lagos. Colonel Rindam got out of his car to ascertain what the problem was, and was promptly shot to death by the policemen who had set up the checkpoint. He was in mufti, but his beret was on the dashboard of his car, so upon realising that they had killed a soldier, the murderous policemen took to their heels.
Colonel Rindam’s murder was one in a series of murders by police officers. On 15 May 1991, Dr Nwogu Okere, a General Manager at Klinstine Limited, a building contractor, was killed by policemen who trailed him to a petrol station in Gbagada, Lagos. On 27 May 1991, Andy Esiri, Kayode Oladimeji, and US-based athlete, Ndubuisi ‘Dele’ Ojo were killed when policemen opened fire at them at a checkpoint while they were travelling in Esiri’s car. Ganiyu Yekini, a Danfo Driver, was shot dead by a policeman at a checkpoint over a ₦10 bribe in February 1992. A 52-year old widow, Fidelia Oguonu, was murdered by a police constable at a checkpoint at Oba Junction, Anambra State on 20 September 1992. The difference between Esiri, Oguonu, Ojo, Oladimeji and many others on the one hand, and Rindam on the other, was that Rindam had men with guns who could respond on his behalf, and respond they did.
In retaliation for Rindam’s murder, soldiers took to the streets of Lagos searching out and shooting any policeman they could find. So the police abandoned the streets and hid in their barracks. Remember that this was 1992, cash machines were a decade in the future, so most people still moved around with huge sums of cash, giving the robbers a vacuum that they could exploit, and exploit it they did. Robbers had a field day in Lagos, operating with impunity.
It took two weeks of talks led by Colonel Fred Chijuka on the one hand, and Aliyu Attah, the Inspector General of Police on the other, before the military and police authorities succeeded in convincing the soldiers to return to their barracks and for the police to come back to the roads. By that time, it was too late. Armed robbers were in control in Lagos and the likes of Shina Rambo could not easily be dislodged.
So in response, the then Inspector General of Police, Attah looked to a Superintendent of Police called Simeon Danladi Midenda, who was at the time in charge of the Anti-Robbery Unit in Benin, Edo State. Midenda had a reputation as an effective crime fighter and had kept robbers out of Benin since the Anini affair of a few years before. Midenda arrived in Lagos, and met three different groups, the Alagbon Close CID, Panti Street CID, and Zone 2 Command tasked with fighting robbery, and in his opinion, doing a poor job of it. His solution was to take the best of them and create the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, SARS.
Regardless of what anyone may say or believe, the notoriety of F-SARS men is worrisome. The protest against them is justified especially when the number of lives lost to their indiscriminate shootings by the men of the unit is put into retrospect. Some time ago, a young man was killed at a viewing centre in Lagos and the strident calls for #EndSARS trended. It also repeated itself days back when someone in Delta State was reportedly shot by the officers. The victim is said to be alive though but the excesses are what Nigerians couldn’t bear any longer hence the renewed calls for the scrapping of the unit.
Some actors and musicians in the country have also joined their voices to the clamour with planned protests in the offing and some other individuals have advocated that the total scrapping of the unit is not the way out even as the police leadership has introduced some reforms into their operation including banning the officers from donning mufti.
In truth, activities of the SARS men are too much to bear. They comb streets across some states in the country arresting youths at will and extorting money from them. There is even a new trend of riding on commercial vehicles and randomly arresting youths. It is inconceivable that some policemen under whatever guise would make it a duty to leave their stations and go looking for youths to extort money from. Some of them even compel their victims to transfer money into their accounts and they had been caught with transfer transactions as evidence. They have now devised another means of taking their victims to ATM points to withdraw money for them to free themselves. It is completely barbaric! Now that the transfer gimmick is no longer safe for them, they resorted to ATM withdrawals having seized belongings of their victims pending when the withdrawals are made and the money handed over.
The reality is that the police as presently constituted is a sham. Those who clamour for state police are right and it is better that the entire force is reformed to accommodate the strident calls for state police. Most of these policemen are only after pecuniary benefits and not a bit interested in the core mandate of securing lives and property of the citizens. It is terrible that the president of the country, President Muhammadu Buhari and the Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Adamu are all in the know of these atrocities and chose to look the other way. This shows how the country is run by completely incompetent individuals.
The noise over SARS is overwhelming and it is very necessary for the whole unit to be completely disbanded to save the face of the force that has absolutely lost its bearing and policing goal. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and the Minister of Youth and Sports, Sunday Dare, have also lent their voices to the matter but it should take more than these contributions to actually calm the frayed nerves of Nigerians. The President has to take a stand on disbanding the notorious SARS unit and the Inspector General of Police has to follow suit.
Nigerian youths cannot continue to be treated as criminals in their own land by some misguided police officers who have lost touch with standard policing. That a man has guns does not give him the liberty to molest others. Taxpayers’ money is being used to pay their salaries and it’s important for them to focus wholly on the mandate of policing they signed for and not molesting and snuffing the lives out of innocent individuals.
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK
