Beyond #EndSARS -By Sesugh Akume

After the successful Revolution of Roses in Georgia, November 2003, the people elected the 36-year-old Mikheil Saakashvili president in January 2004, then the youngest president in Europe. This transcendental, transformative leader soon got down to business. By July 2004 his searchlight reached the police, he and his team considered reforming it, but reforming it was going to be slow, expensive, the results couldn’t be guaranteed, and it could be dangerous even. He therefore decided to do the only pragmatic thing: he completely tore down the police and rebuilt it from scratch.

The Georgia police was a terrible mess: they collected monies from citizens that ended up in private pockets, they killed people without following any process, dumped their bodies in mortuaries and moved on, there were no consequences. Some officials had ties with those they were set up to fight, some entered the service with forged papers, the police was a terror and feared as well as hated. The whole system and their operations were opaque. Nobody trusted the police.

When Saakashvili commenced his police revolution, every single person in the system was screened. By the time the process was over 85% of them were purged out with fresh people from outside recruited. Nobody was spared from the top down. When he was done with the cleansing, their pay was increased and their conditions of service greatly enhanced, this went a long way. They were then properly oriented and trained, they generally became another police service altogether. Everything changed down to the architecture of their police stations and the internal settings of their work spaces.

What was it about the Georgia police that we haven’t experienced with the Nigeria police? Only that with the Georgia police I don’t think you could go to a police station and see a generator set that was on chained to a pole to prevent its theft, as is a normal occurrence in Nigeria. Nor would they type letterheads and produce official police documents in a nearby business centre.

The Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) is a unit of this rogue police force gone rogue. What do you do with such a unit, considering what the parent body itself needs to undergo if we were serious?

The Nigeria police can’t be reformed, neither does anyone want to reform it, I posit. Between 2006 and 2012 3 different presidents commissioned 3 different presidential panels on police reforms which recommended far-reaching changes. There’s also a 90-page report of 2012 by a reform team from the CSO community (I shared it here on my wall). That’s at least 4 reports full of recommendations to patch the police up, gathering dust. Today the Nigeria police is adjudged the worst in the world; who in their right mind would argue against this? Recall that the police chief Ibrahim Kpotun Idris just recently told a senate committee that he’s at liberty to fornicate with any serving police female under his watch, no law stops him. He was there to answer to charges that the police through various rackets take in 10 billion naira monthly, which goes into private pockets.

By 2006 Georgia’s police became one of the best in the world and has remained so till date. It’s an institution everybody wants to study. There’s hardly anyone committed to seeing how a police service can be renewed who doesn’t refer to the Georgia story to learn and be inspired. Their police is more highly rated than the country itself. Georgia’s police has been consistently higher in Transparency International’s and other global rankings than the country. The people feel that the police is more trustworthy, more transparent, etc.

Nigeria deserves no less. Virtually every institution and sector in Nigeria needs to be torn and systematically rebuilt from scratch. That’ll be my suggested solution. I know that some day, a group of service-oriented, selfless, sacrificial people will come on board whose overarching desire won’t be getting second term in office, or to enjoy perquisites, but to do the right thing by taking bold, sometimes costly, but the appropriate decisions to set things properly as they should be. We simply can’t continue like this.