The police as our friend (or fiend?) ; In the Lion’s den: @ Upper Iweka by 10pm! - Ik Muo, PhD

I know that you are all awaiting my views on the  recent Supreme Cult judgement,  the implications going forward and the advent of full-blown BATiocracy as facilitated by COURTocracy in Nigeria. Well let me first free the pipeline so as the create enough space for  BATist affairs. However, I note that the presidential election tribunal judgement occurred at the same time as Nigerians were celebrating the P& ID judgement. In the first instance, Nigeria got a ‘stay of execution’  due to some previously  undiscovered evidence. Secondly,  Justice Knowles threw out the matter  because ‘the awards( liability and quantum) were obtained by fraud which was contrary to public policy’. I will leave it at that for now!

Nigerian Police Force spokespersons and top officials  will always tell you that the police is your friend. Frank Odita, whom I knew personally and Frank Mbah( whom I encountered  in the market square) did everything to assure us of the friendliness of our police. The current PPRO, Mr Adejobi, is also trying the convince us. However, there is a wide gap between what is and what ought to be! (I think that is what Economists term positive and normative economics or what strategists call espoused and operative objectives).   I am not a very boastful person but today, I boast that very few non-professional drivers have encountered the Nigerian Police Force in action( the Good, bad, ugly and messy) on our roads as much as I have had. In the good old days,  as a banker-bachelor based in Enugu, with my good old 504GR/AC( An3705ED,cost  N8800),when the mind was willing and the body strong, when the roads were safe and fuel cost a few kobo a litre, I drove around Nigeria  on several occasions. On one occasion, I drove from Enugu to Jos/Vom to Bauchi to Azare to Gombe to Maidugiri via Biu to Kano to Kaduna to Abuja to Ikare to Benin  to Warri to PH to Aba to Owerri and back to Enugu. This took about one month.  I had worked at Jos, Kaduna and Kano and as a ‘village man’ that I have always been, I drove regularly from those locations to my ancestral home whenever   necessary and even  when unnecessary!

Thirty  years ago, I relocated to Lagos, a city that I had once  loathed  with passion( because of its traffic and disorderliness), and since then   plying the Lagos-Onitsha route has became my ‘daily bread’.  All along, I have seen the police in their various colours, at their best and at their worst and at times, in their Zeburudayaist (buffoonery) moods as when a policeman in Kaduna charged me with ‘attempted jamming’ (attempting to jam him) and when another around Okigwe accused me of having an irregular plate-number. However, of late, the policemen- those on the road- so threw away the good and exhibited more of the bad and ugly, that I decided not to drive again on the Lagos-Onitsha expressway. That was when  on an occasion, I encountered 102 police toll-gates and on another, I spent more time to cross the Niger-Bridge than I spent from Lagos-Asaba.  But I still visited Igbo-Ukwu regularly. I was not trekking neither was I flying; I outsourced all the hassles to the commercial Sienna mini-busses.

 The other day (11/10/23) however, I had a need to drive down  to the east and I saw what has become of our perfidious friends, our fiends as they interface with their customers. The number of police toll-gates on the road from Ijebu-Ode to Onitsha  were( and still are) so uncountable that you need to see it so as to believe and appreciate. From Ijebu-Ode to Ore, they were stationed after every one kilometre, to the extent that while one set of policemen was ‘attending’ to you, you  would behold the next set close bye and that was why on that particular day, the IjebuOde-Ore route that usually took about 90 minutes, took 3  whole hours-and there was no hold-up. All of them had a sole objective: to optimise their EPV (earnings per vehicle), by all means fair and foul. Some would beg you, some would delay you, some would ask for papers that were no longer in existence and some would charge you of offences that did not exist in our books. But I watched people driving bye  easily with unnumbered vehicles! Anyway, come along with me as I share my experiences on that day, when Ijebu-Ode to Onitsha that ordinarily took 5 hours, ended up ‘costing’ me and my emergency driver, about 9 hours.

 By the time I left Ijebuo-Ode around  10 am due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances, I had expected that the road would be freer. It would have been but for the antics of our ‘fiends’ of the Nigerian Police Force. On that trip, my vehicle was stopped  on all the  toll-gates but subjected to SAS or WUC ( Stop and Search;Wetin U Carry) for more than 50 times but I will share with you a few of the experiences with our fiends. Immediately we left Ijebuo-Ode, one of the policemen stopped us and  said oga your boy needs to drink water! Luckily, I had an extra bottle of water, which I gladly handed over to him. However his colleague  did not find it funny; he accused me of being mean and wicked! Mean and wicked? But he asked for water! As we were approaching Ore, one of them asked where we were headed to and  when I told him Anambra, he told me that he hated Imo people the most! A federal officer, working on a federal highway, saying that he hated a particular set of people. In shock, I asked him why and he explained that they had not been able to control ‘these boys’. By these boys, he meant the UGM and I wondered how an Imo man or woman would checkmate the known and unknown gunmen who were and are also terrorising them.  I asked one of them why he allowed all the vehicles before me to pass but stopped mine. He wanted to show his power and importance and  asked  are you above the law? I agreed with him that  he had a legitimate right to search and he started foraging through my papers and found out that I am a lecturer. He then declared gleefully that he would chop my money as I had chopped his hand-out money. I retorted that I had never chopped handout money from him or from anybody and he said that even if I did not, my ‘brothers’ chopped his money in 2013/2014 at UNIBEN where he graduated in Public Administration. So, this one was educated up to University level!

 Around Agbor, one of them got tired of searching the booth and asked for my CMR and allocation of plate-number. I told him that I did not have those documents and that without them, I could not have registered the car that been on the road for  the 4^th year running. I also told him that I didn’t need this stress as I had been on the road since morning. He ‘calmed down’ and assured me that he would not want to bother me since he saw that I was an elder but that I should just help us fuel us vehicle with N15000. And I shouted at him: N15000?  Have I fuelled my own car?  As he was  acting ‘you will see’, I went into the car and brought out ALL the  papers he could possibly ask for in this world and the world to come. He rudely shoved  them back at me in frustration and disappointment!

 At the next toll-gate,  they started harassing the driver as usual and I alighted from the vehicle and asked the one who appeared to be the leader: ‘What exactly are you looking for? At this age and stage, do you think that  I have stollen this 4^th hand car or that I am on my way to a thieving operation’? He retorted  ‘I must do my duty’! After Isele-Ukwu, one of them stopped us, peeped inside and exchanged greetings with me and then asked the driver to open the booth.  However when I came down from the vehicle he asked in a surprised tone: were you inside this car?  When I responded in the affirmative he replied: please go! How could somebody who saw and greeted me turn round to ask me if I were inside the car? One of them looked into the car and said: ‘I have seen that you are an ‘agbalagba’ and  also a chief. I don’t know how to ask of anything from you. Go well’ and I thanked him and we left. Some of them simply greeted: ‘your boys are here’ or ‘anything for the boys’ and I replied that in this BATified economy, I did not even have enough not to talk of something for the boys! That’s is a snippet of my experience travelling from Ijebu-Ode to Onitsha on Friday, 11/10/23.

 Few days later, the  Police PRO issued a statement that ‘policemen who trot guns at Nigerians in order to extort them  are not different from armed robbers’! So, what do we call all these who humiliated, delayed, and deliberately made things difficult  for travellers so as to extract some ‘water’ from them, and they are all armed?  It is a rape scenario because people are FORCED to give! They are armed and they are extorting (modified robbing) and they therefore  should be classified as armed robbers as per the declaration by the PPRO

When we were growing up, the Igbo term for bribery was ‘aka-azu’( literarily, back-hand, what you give behind your back)  which means what one is so ashamed to do it that he did it in secret. At that time, the policemen or the officers receiving should not even know what  they were offered. Today, it is ‘aka-ihu’( front-hand) as the policemen would collect the money, look at it very well to confirm  the denomination and its genuineness and  even  give change to the drivers,  while issuing them numbers to quote on the next trip to indicate that they had done clearance for the day. If you are in doubt, go and VERIFY at IjebuOde- Ibadan or Amawbia-Ekwulobia roads or any preferred road all over the country. If all or almost all of the policemen in our highways are now ‘armed robbers’, what then should we do? Should we adopt the Liberia option, when President Ellen Sirleff Johnson sacked all the staff of their Central Bank?

 

Son of Man in the lions’ den: @ Upper Iweka Road, Onitsha by10pm!

 I  have just detailed my experiences with our friendly fiends in Police uniform and how their irritating ‘wetin u carry’ extended my journey  from Ijebu ode to Onitsha by  extra  3 hours. Beyond the police   extortion-induced disturbances, which has now become the ‘new-normal’, the first major harrowing experience I had on the trip was when, in an attempt to evade the horrible  Benin bypass, with its craters and holdups, we got marooned in one obscure  Edo village at the middle of nowhere .

The beautiful Benin Bypass boulevard!

One driver diverted with the boldness of somebody who knew the way. He was followed by another vehicle and then, we joined them.  At a certain place however, the man started asking villagers for the way forward and that was how we meandered until we came to a dead end. There was nobody at sight and the road was so muddy that  we did not know  which direction to go. Even going back was impossible because of the stress it had taken us to get to that spot.  So, we parked and switched off the engine. The drivers had to go and test the depth of the watery gully with their legs to see how safe it was and they trekked more than a kilometre to ascertain whether to continue and how to navigate. While we were parked at the middle of nowhere, I was the only one left in the vehicle ( other passengers  had joined the  Ultimate Search)and to say that I was mortally frightened was an understatement.  Eventually, we made it but this was just a taste of what is to come!

We got to Asaba late and my emergency driver disembarked and  boarded a bus  back to Lagos. I took over the steering and a few minutes later, one of my tyres started producing a screechy and discomforting noise and exactly under the infamous Upper-Iweka  flyover,     I had a flat tyre! By that time, it was already dark and everybody was in a hurry to escape from that  dangerous axis. A lot of ideas and questions were running around my head: the  physical stress of changing the tyre, the ‘health’ of  the spare tyre, availability of a vulcaniser, my safety and the safety of my belongings, and whether I would leave  that place in peace and in  one piece. However, that I am writing this evidences  the fact that I left there in peace and in one piece.

 I dragged the car with all the squeaky noise towards the Romchi Mass Transit Park, where I saw  a vulcaniser’s shop but unfortunately, the man did not even come to work that day. Immediately I stopped there, one agbero came around,  cordoned off the axis, assured me of his assistance and warned others to keep off.  A woman selling by the roadside advised me to move towards the place where Romchi security personnel were positioned since all the boys hanging around me could not be trusted. I did so but immediately the agbero boy and the security started quarrelling about who was in-charge of the spot where I parked. I pacified the security fellow that I just wanted to change my tyre and he calmed down. It was then that we discovered that my jack was faulty just as a jack I borrowed from somebody was also faulty. I had borrowed another from a Romchi driver when my friend-agbero came with a fully operational jack and reprimanded me for bothering myself since he assured me that he would help. It then followed that the special ‘key’  with which to unlock my tyre was missing, as the vulcaniser who worked on the tyre the day before did not return it. By then I was sure that it was the machination of the village people but I wont let them have the last laugh! My new found friend   did everything to remove the tyre and when it failed, he  asked for transport  fare to go in search of a vulcaniser. I gave him N1000 and he DISAPPEARED.  I was disappointed, not because he disappeared with N1000 but because his role in ‘cooling my temper’ and all the genuine assistance he had rendered was worth much more than that amount.

 Before long, another group emerged with the support of one security man. They did everything to lose the tyre, and when it failed, they  went to town to bring a mechanic who succeeded in fixing the spare tyre, which mercifully was in good shape. I don’t think I have used it  since I bought the car 3 years ago. By that time, it was past 9pm; it was pitch dark, everywhere was lonely but I had become more relaxed as I decided to take things as they were. I also found that none of these  area boys was trying to do anything funny inside or around the car, In any case, the car was fully locked through out this ‘special operation’.

 They group then asked me to do the right thing and I gave then N4000. And then they all started telling me why it should be more than N4000. One reminded me that he loaned me the jack; another complained that his wheel-spanner was damaged in the process while another reminded me that I had not yet settled the mechanic. So, I added another N2000. Actually, I would have given them more money but I did not want to open my ‘vault’ in their very before and so I decided to give them wat was readily available in my pocket. At this point the mechanic, Nnaemeka asked me to just enter my car and depart from the environment. He must have read the atmosphere and felt that it was becoming toxic. He assured all of them, especially the owner of the wheel-spanner that he would settle him and that they should not worry about his own rewards.  I gave the security men N1000 and one of them scoffed at the amount; a mere N1000. But the other one, whom I met when I came there  at first was compassionate and pleaded with his colleague to accept whatever I gave them because ‘the man had seen enough wahala today’. At this point, it was getting very late and the place was getting more and more deserted  and the mechanic literarily pushed me into the car and asked me to leave. It was around 10pm. I took his number but unfortunately, I misplaced it. I hope to visit there one of these days to see if I could locate him.

 That was how I survived at the dreaded upper Iweka Road axis at night. I was alone against this horde of what we usually call miscreants. But they were more helpful and compassionate than the policemen who were paid with our money. I saw the other side of these street boys. I witnessed their display of empathy and solidarity with a fellow human being in distress. It was the Lords doing! Indeed ‘My  God sent his angel and he shut the mouths of the lion; they did not hurt me (Daniel,6:22)’ I drove through the dangerous Uke-Ideani-Nnobi axis, through the lonely Afor Nnobi and Eke-Awka-Etiti markets and got home around 11pm. I was the only one on the road though  I met one or two other cars and my fear-index rose astronomically whenever any of these cars came bye. Indeed, it was the lords doing!!! However if you are looking for someone who had been to the lion’s den and lived to tell the tale, then here am I!

·         The following day, I had to buy another jack and another tyre since the tyre was destroyed as I drove for up 500 meters  while the tyre was down and out

 

 - Ik Muo, PhD. FCIB. Department of Business Administration, OOU, Ago-Iwoye. 08033026624

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