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No Nigerian is surprised or feels offended when the issues of corruption or extra judicial killings are linked with the Nigeria Police. In fact, the surprise is for any denial of these atrocities to be made, and this often happens when senior police officers say the police is not corrupt nor involved in extra judicial killings.

It was therefore like a fresh air in a polluted atmosphere when the chairman of the Police Service Commission, Parry Osayande on a visit to police formations in Ibadan, Oyo State, and Abeokuta, Ogun State, came out to acknowledge that the force is guilty of many malfeasances it has been accused of.

Mr. Osayande in what could be termed a true confession admitted that the image of the police has been battered through the unwholesome activities of some of its men in uniform. He regretted that the uniform and the profession have generally lost respect and glamour.

In a rather candid and truthful manner, he said, “There are extra judicial killings in the Nigeria police. We are involved and engaged in extra judicial killings, even rape, and other forms of corruption. We use our power unlawfully. We are brutal. We are involved in torture and intimidation of members of the public. We are involved in illegal road block activities.”

If we dissect these words one by one, we are going to have a lot to agree with Mr. Osayande. On extra judicial killings alone, the incident that readily comes to mind is the mindless killing of the leader of the Boko Haram insurrections.

Mohammed Yusuf was captured alive by soldiers who were called in when the police couldn’t overpower his men. He was then handed over to the police only for them to claim that he was killed in a shootout. The circumstances surrounding his killing still remain a mystery as the panel set up to probe it has not made public its findings.
Mr. Yusuf’s case is of public knowledge just because of the high profile nature of it.

There are thousands of other innocent citizens who have been killed in police cells across the country.
The other issues raised by Mr. Osayande in his treatise concerns morale and how the police is viewed by the society.

In calling the attention of the police authorities to these he said, “Everyday people are laughing at us. How would your children feel if other children are discussing the corrupt activities of their parents? We are now talking to ourselves, in order to change. Before we can change, we have to know what is wrong with us.”

In truth, we all know what is wrong with the police, at least in a way. The argument has always revolved around the issue of poor remuneration and conditions of service. However, in recent years there have been attempts and efforts by government to tackle this by increasing their pay.
But this has not in any way helped to resolve the endemic corruption that has permeated the service of the police force. It is not a hidden fact that children of police men are taunted by their colleagues in school because they see what their parents do at road blocks.

Mr. Osayande’s words are biting but true. But the task of reforming the police is that of all and not for him or the chief of police alone. It is a collective task. This has, however, been made less tasking since Mr. Osayande and the top echelons of the police have not claimed any ignorance.

There is an urgent need to take a critical look at the curriculum of what they teach new recruits in the Police College and other training schools. It should also interest the authorities to find out why the police that we deride at home go abroad and get good commendation for the country. Is it that we send our best products abroad and leave the dregs to police our society?

Finally, it is important for us to re-orientate the members of the police and for them to live up to the saying that the police is your friend. It is the duty of Mr. Osayande and his team to fashion out a way to make the institution more respectable.

For the past week,
the airspace above most of the UK and continental Europe has been
closed. Who would have thought that what terrorism and war could not
achieve since the skies opened to man with the first flight in 1800,
the force of nature could.

Who would have
thought that the eruption of a volcano, with an almost unpronounceable
name, Eyjafjallajokull, in a small island famous for its white
silica-mud and bathing in the Blue Lagoon Mud, and infamous for its
bank that trapped the deposits of UK local councils, could have such a
reality-altering and economically devastating impact on a 21st century
world.

One of the major
cultural differences between the Western world and the rest of the
world is our relationship with nature and our attitude towards it.

To be generous to
the West, as outlined in Kluckholn and Strodtbeck’ dimensions of
culture, is that some people believe that we “should live in harmony
with nature, preserving and supporting it. Others (and perhaps a
majority now) see nature as our servant and supplier. This view allows
us to plunder it without concern. In other parts of life this
translates into the use of all kinds of resources and whether it is
used up or sustained.” Living harmoniously with nature involves
controlling it to some extent. This attitude is largely predicated upon
the premise that with planning, preparation, and the investment of a
whole lot of money, they can avert, mitigate or cope with whatever
nature throws at them.

Lately, with
unstoppable bush fires, destructive landslides, raging storms and
shattering earthquakes, that confidence is gradually being eroded.

This time, coming
on the heels of recovery from a man-made financial crisis, governments
are struggling and sometimes failing to cushion and prepare for the
effects on their citizens and local economies of this natural disaster.

There have been
several indicators that life, as we know it, has substantially changed.
Firstly, why should failing mortgages in the Unites States affect my
local bank and the availability of loans for my business?

Iceland can attest
to the fact that they never thought they would be so hard hit. This was
just the precursor to the potential downside of what it means to be a
global village.

Downside of global village

Another indicator
is how plastic waste and industrial pollutants thrown in inland creeks
make their way onto the coastline of the Bight of Benin, and across
national borders further afield.

Now, the combined
effects of an ash-cloud emanating from an island has closed the skies
over almost all of continental Europe and putt paid to all the plans we
had for the past seven days.

People are talking
about the negative impact on the airline industry, on the hospitality
industry. They are also talking about profiteering on trapped
passengers in the hotels, car hire companies, trains and ferries.

Lately, the focus
has shifted to the significant impact on industry, agriculture, and
retail owing to the unavailability of air cargo services. It got me
thinking. Yes, some of our governors and ministers are trapped in
Europe. Others are trapped here on their way to Europe, including
foreign students who returned home for Easter and cannot get back now
that term has started.

Look inwards

This has been a
lesson in self-sufficiency for every nation. In the event of a
disastrous event that isolates us from other nations, or from other
continents, can we feed ourselves? Can we tool and equip ourselves and
can we heal, educate, trade within our borders, sustain our businesses,
retain Internet access? The world really has globalised, but have we
all continentalised, and regionalised? Are we saying that there are
insufficient markets in Africa for the cut flowers and green beans from
east Africa?

Multinationals are
here precisely because Nigeria alone is a massive market – not just for
goods and services, but for human and material resources too.

In medical
emergencies, until recently, our VIPs flew themselves to the UK,
Germany and the US. Lately, they fly to the Middle East, India and
South Africa. But if our borders were closed and the skies were a no-go
zone, even with billions of dollars, the air ambulance would not make
it.

Where would we be
able to get quality medical care? Where would those trapped foreign
students enrol to gain a similar standard of education to what they
have abroad? Are we prepared or even now preparing for that eventuality?

Our religious
community must be ecstatic. We are fond of phrases such as “God
willing”, “Insha Allah”, “Deo Volente (D.V.)”, “L’agbara Olorun;” but
for how many people are they more than just turns of phrase, or habits?

They take on a new
poignancy now. The consulting gynaecologist who was due to start his
job at a UK hospital, last Tuesday, did not tell them he would be there
by “God’s grace.” He is only one of a multitude whose plans have come
to nought. God willing, we will reach the destination tomorrow that we
are planning and working towards today.

Question: Since
democracy through the electoral process is so clearly not going to be
the engine to the progress that we seek, at least in the short term,
should we pin our hopes on a technocracy and just leave the scoundrels
to fight it out? Could it work? Could you have a civil service and
agencies to regulate healthcare, power supply, oil revenue, security
and infrastructure, all the bodies required to manage and administer a
country, functioning on their own insulated from our undisciplined
political process, thus ensuring that worthy servants would be
fortified against the virus that has corrupted the political class?

It might even work
if we got ourselves a savvy president, who had a goal, was committed to
improving the country and enough gumption to realise that leadership
requires strategy and thinking and with the wisdom to surround himself
with those with the smarts to transform his vision into reality.

There’s a whole
tanker load of ifs there. Looking at it more carefully I can see it is
an overloaded tanker, very much like the one I saw two months ago,
sprawled helplessly on its side, giant wheels sticking in the air,
halfway across the Ibadan highway. Too big for man or machine to set to
rights it had caused the mother of all traffic jams on a Saturday
evening.

It was the
explanation for why hordes of people clad in aso ebi, families eager to
get home to start the evening meal were picking their way in between
the stalled cars. Clogging up the nonexistent sidewalks, bumping into
the cramped street hawkers, they wrestled their way through the motor
park touts, drivers, conductors and okadas in a vain effort to beat the
darkness and get home.

It took five hours
to travel a stretch of road that would have taken less than fifteen
minutes. There were gallant individuals, not state traffic officers or
policemen, none of those who you would have thought had direct
responsibility to do something about the situation, who came out of
their cars and attempted to assert some order in the chaos.

Whosai? The grid
was locked and I imagined it to be so all the way up that single feeder
for the fuel caravans going south to north. In simple English that
constitutes a security matter, not so? An accident occurs on the road
that is the vital link for crucial supplies of food and fuel across the
country.

Convoys of tankers
pull to the side of the road, I use this term euphemistically, drivers
lock up and go to find themselves some food and shelter because they
know from experience it is going to be a long wait. Their fellow
Nigerians simply regird their loins because there is no one to call, no
future in waiting for help and life must go on.

There was no
fussing or fighting, yes some cursing and raised voices, but nobody
went crazy with frustration and anger because their day had been
destroyed, a precious weekend of rest ruined, meetings abandoned, hard
earned money down the drain. Women tightened their wrappers, gripped
children harder; men rolled their sokotos and hit the road, walking
where they could find a foothold.

Hence this ramble, wondering what possible interim solution can be found to the Nigerian enigma because we really deserve one.

I remember an
expression of my grandmother’s about being faced with problems. It
went: you have two issues; one is always bigger and more important than
the other. Choices, priorities, action; that is the message.

This week Parry
Osayande, a former deputy inspector general of police and current
chairman of the Police Service Commission announced some changes in
promotion policy in the Force. He said seniority; merit and
availability of vacancies would now be critera for promotion in the
force. Candidates would be tested through written exams on the
responsibilities of modern day policing.

Those who failed
the first time would have just one more chance. Then Osayande said
something even more telling. “There is extra judicial killing in the
Nigeria police. We are involved and engaged in extra judicial killings,
even rape, and other forms of corruption. We use our power unlawfully.
We are brutal. We are involved in torture and intimidation of members
of the public. We are involved in illegal roadblock activities.

“These are the
things we have noticed, and everyday people are laughing at us. How
would your children feel if other children are discussing the corrupt
activities of their parents? We are now talking to ourselves, in order
to change. Before we can change, we have to know what is wrong with
us.”

This is a major
indictment of the police force coming from one who has served at the
very top of it. It paints a picture of a force very much like that
helpless problematic tanker causing mayhem and chaos in people’s lives;
murderers in uniform.

It is a remarkable admission and hopefully heralds the dawn of a new
day Mr. Osayande has seized on the bigger problem and has resolved, if
he is to be believed, on a way to tackle it. More power to him in
putting his words into action.

It is exactly over
familiarity with the dog that in my case breeds my utter contempt for
the idea of eating dog meat.How I am possibly expected to eat some
domesticable constantly salivating animal that smells like a dank rug,
eats its own fecal matter, licks its privates and has the capacity to
exercise an uncanny intrinsic intuition, is beyond my culinary
comprehension.
It just does not
feel right to eat dog.

It does not therefore follow that I am one of
those people who would sleep in the same bed with a dog, play chess
with the dog and then take it to the South of France on holiday.
I have absolutely no desire for dog companionship. I have not yet even perfected my fellowship with human beings. If there is
something hypocritical about attempting to determine which animal to
eat or not to eat by the animal’s intelligence, affability to human
beings, hygiene and other unpredictable parameters then let it be so.
And by the way, I have the utmost respect for the moral courage or
self-righteousness or strength of conviction or whatever, that it takes
for the vegetarian/vegan to say an unshakable “No” to placing himself at
the apex of the food chain and eating everything beneath him.
Until further
notice I am a meat eater, not a liberal one, but nonetheless one.

My
sensibilities are easily offended and I still constantly wonder whether
since one is not eating dog, one should also not eat pork since pigs
are said to be the most intelligent “domestic” animals in the world,
and since George Orwell’s allegorical Animal Farm considers them so
intelligent to be worthy representatives of our domineering and
presumptuous humanity.

The reality is that
Nigerians eat dog, and to the degree of “well well”. In the same manner
that we eat monkey and horse and camel and deer, and goat and beef,
whatever meat presents itself and appeals to us. It is probably more
psychologically honest and healthy to admit this than to say one eats
one meat and not another.
We Nigerians generally tend to have a nonjudgmental straightforward relationship to our meat.
We have the capacity to view the slaughtering of the animal and still eat its meat without any iota of remorse.
As harrowing as it
may be for someone from another culture to be presented a dish called
Isi-Ewu with eyeballs, brains, tongue and parts of the skull of a goat
so brazenly tossed with vegetables, to us it is completely commonplace,
and completely delicious.

I believe that
people like myself who have urban dwellers’ hang-ups about eating dog
are in the context of Nigeria, a minority. Dog meat is being consumed
in Plateau and Gombe, in Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Abuja and in Ondo, and
these are only the states that are consistently documented.
In Cross River
State, dog meat is affectionately referred to as 404, where it is a
serious delicacy. Sit-outs on Hawkins Street in Calabar South, and in
an area called Adiabo are renowned for their dog meat prepared in
special sauces. Dog is not cooked in stews, since like Isi-Ewu, or
Suya, it is the not an accompaniment to a meal, rather a delicacy
deserving of all the attention worthy to be paid a main course. People
who go to the mentioned joints often do so specifically to eat dog.

Why 404? I asked
Nsor Nyambi, whose witty exposes on Calabar and Cross River have helped
me navigate the culture as well as have a good laugh. “…Because dogs
run with speed like the 404” he said.

The 404 is of
course the Peugeot sedan (“pijo” in Nigerian lingua franca and “piyot”,
soft “t” in CrossRiverian articulation) that my generation caught a
passing glimpse of before the more enduring 504. At the time, the 404
sedan was considered very fast indeed, and when Crossriverians were
searching for a worthy comparison for the speed of a running dog, 404
was the exaggerated equivalent. And I suppose there is some wicked
irony in terming a type of meat running meat; running as fast as a car,
yet not outrunning the eater.

As to whether
Nigerians who eat dog are 100% comfortable with the idea, I wonder why
if it is so, that no one I have asked if they eat dog has ever given me
a straightforward “yes”.
It is always “those Akwa Ibom people” or “those Ondo town people”.
And those rare people who admit to eating it don’t do so without
looking mischievous, and they never just eat because they enjoy doing
so. They eat it because it is a cure for malaria, or it wards off Juju
or it improves your sex drive…