Area! Area!! Morn Sir!!! I deem it necessary to write you this letter because I consider you my friend even though you have never demonstrated that you see me as one. Yes, you say it often, “The Police is your friend”, especially when you are on TV or radio, yet throughout this year, I haven’t seen anything that showed we are friends. The year is almost ended, still I never saw you anywhere near my house to find out if I was under any form of security threat. Not that you did that last year or the year before or even since I was born, but I had expected that you would be able to realize that one day.

My knowledge of the meaning of policing is that it involves the enforcement of law and the protection of citizens’ lives and property.What I have come to know as your role is the total neglect of the man on the street. You don’t care about the life of the common man; you don’t make any effort to protect his property. You mount road blocks strictly to oppress him. You extort money from him and fire bullets straight into him if he dares challenge your right to order that he gives you money. I have heard innumerable cases of those you sent to their early graves for failing to give you N20 or N50 at the check point. On the contrary, the house of the political office holder has become the alter of your worship. You have been converted to his slave. You work exceptionally hard at currying the favour of his house girl for food and his sons and daughters for money. You are always in the market or the salon with his wife; as if that is what you were recruited for.

Last week, you pushed your over-zealousness to the realm of the absurd, and after what you mistook for success in that regard, you even went ahead to rant the ridiculous, promising a repetition of such feat with even a worse approach. You unleashed terror on the peace-loving citizens of Lagos who were exercising their legitimate right of dissent on a policy they consider harsh from the Lagos State Government. That you clamped down on people who love peace in that manner actually shows your lack of appreciation for peace. And that threat, from you, of how you will brutalize whoever protests against the removal of fuel subsidy, must be a joke. I don’t think you understand what is at stake here.

Rather than condemn you, I have always been among those who think you deserve to be understood, pitied and therefore appreciated. Can you look at the picture above? I cringed when I saw it. It amplified what I had been saying since – that even those you worship are the ones who reduced you to beggars and stripped your job of any jot of dignity. I watch you on the various check points you have made your workstations and pity your mental bondage. Your uniforms get torn and you are the one who replaces them. The last time you had a complete kit from the government was during your recruitment process. I see your men go on bathroom slippers and torn uniforms, and I wonder why your “Big Ogas” delight in making a mockery of an ordinarily noble profession.

Have you asked yourself why armed robbers use weapons more sophisticated than yours? Does it not bother you that you have become endangered species simply because you have the unenviable challenge of facing criminals who deploy better ammunitions? Have you not wondered why we vote so much money for security in our annual budgets, yet such huge votes do not translate to better equipment of you and your colleagues. The answer is corruption!
Corruption of those who send you to mount road blocks and make returns to them is the challenge you have. That has caused your institution to take a sharp descent into the sorry stateof disrepute. You know that many Nigerians do not like you. They see you as their enemy.

Let me go back to that scenario depicted in the above picture. Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu was docked by the Code of Conduct Tribunal. During one of the hearings, Action Congress of Nigeria members reportedly splashed money at your men. And the picture above is what happened. The day this picture made the headlines, I got to my office and your colleagues there called my attention to it. One of them said, “if to say them dey pay us well, our people no go do this kain shameful thing”. I couldn’t agree less. The next day, I read that your biggest oga was planning to prosecute your colleagues who simply scrambled for free money. He was sounding like he didn’t know that a hungry man cares less about dignity.

I have been to your Barracks and saw that the walls of demarcation between where you are housed and the rest of Nigerians could not stop the raging poverty in the land from being your guest. Your schools are in sorry states, just like any other government school out there. You stay in houses built by the government, yet you can agree with me that those houses fall outside the definition of decency. How equipped are the hospitals you use? You know these truths. I am not talking about your “Ogas”, I am referring to you, my friend in the rank-and-file.

Officer, most of those people you assaulted during the Lekki Toll Protest are more educated than you. Their protest against the payment of the toll wasn’t an assertion and acceptance of poverty. They are not poor. They can pay, but they openly demonstrated their disgust against injustice by their own government. That was patriotism. That was a better demonstration of patriotism than what you did. Yours was barefaced servitude and shameless patronage. You should have appreciated their patriotism with your civility. But again, I won’t blame you. Those who are only interested in what they could corner into their private pockets from our commonwealth do not bother themselves with making you civil. They prefer you crude. The more uncivil you are, they think, the more you will serve their sinister purposes.

To My Friend, The Police