Quizzes

Stacks

Shows

Podcasts

Newsletters

Naira Life

Love Life

Hustleprint

Love Currency

Sunken Ships

What She Said

My Bro

So You Don’t Have To

Interview With…

Zikoko Memes

Jollof Road

Cholera Outbreak Update

Follow our socials

  • The Nigeria police extorting innocent Nigerians isn’t news. It has gotten so bad over the years that they have grown bolder with their moves. Insisting civilians make a cash transfer to their personal account or taking them to withdraw money at an ATM.  Today, I spoke with 6 Nigerian women about their encounter with the Nigerian police.

    Sarah

    I was going to Ikorodu so I had to use the bus from Ojota. I wore a baggy jumper and a crop top that was just over my belly. When I got to Ojota garage, the agberos there started catcalling me. This alerted the police that had a check-up stand around the area. A policeman approached me and tried to arrest me. I was not having it. Meanwhile, the agberos and petty traders were still roaring in “righteous indignation”. He told me to go speak to his boss in the Hilux. I went, greeted the man, told him I wasn’t sure why everyone was shouting nor why I was being interrogated by his officer. He started laughing, casually opened a canister of teargas and emptied it on my forehead and face and then told me to go. My face and eyes burned the whole day.

    Elizabeth

    My friends and I went clubbing. On our way back, the Police stopped our car and threatened to take us to the police station. Now that I think about it, I am not sure if they were really policemen or SARS officers because they weren’t wearing any uniform and they came in a rickety bus. Anyway, they put us in their bus and start driving around. Our male friends in another car called us and start freaking out. The police people said they were taking all of us because we were prostitutes and didn’t have ID. Money came out and they let us go. I heard some girls got arrested and slept in a cell. 

    Regina

    I wasn’t sure if they were police or SARS cause they weren’t wearing a uniform but I know it was past midnight and I was attending a house party with my girlfriends. When they flagged out car down, I was scared because they were holding guns and we had recreational marijuana on us. They flagged our car down and our of reflex or fear I get jamming the doors locked when the bolt driver tried to open it. They searched the car and couldn’t find anything.

    After calling us prostitutes and focusing squarely on us and not even the Bolt driver, they decided to search us. I didn’t quite get it until one tried to touch me and I swerved. My friend got on her knees and started pleading in Yoruba, trying to get all friendly with them. I wasn’t going to allow them to touch us some type of way but I wasn’t going to kneel down either. The whole experience was just horrible. They took our 10k and called us lesbians. I later found the weed under the passenger seat lmao. I knew my Yoruba mother’s prayers on my head was working.

    Habibat

    I was returning from a party with my girlfriends when the police stopped us. I could tell from his slurred speech that he had been drinking. He called us prostitutes and told us to come down from our uber. He searched my bag looking for drugs and then pointed his gun at me. Saying it was us Arewa girls that like to stay naked under our jalamia. There was traffic along that berger road because of us. His colleagues had to step in and apologise for his behaviour. Even then, he kept pointing his gun at me talking about wasting prostitutes like me. It didn’t matter that I had a long flowing gown and my scarf on.

    Nana-Aisha

     I was on my way back home from the mall, where I went to buy new headphones. As I turned to Agidingbi, in Ikeja, I noticed some random bus following me. I didn’t think too much of it until the bus started speeding up towards me. Because I am paranoid as hell I turned away from my initial way home, and they followed. That’s when I was sure they were trailing me I sent my location to my friends and a description of the bus in case something happened to me. It was getting ridiculous after a few more turns so I parked. 

    As soon as I parked, one of them jumped in front of my car and pointed his gun at me. Another one tried to open the door to my car but it was locked. Then they started shouting, “why were you running?” I was so confused, I was like “why were you following me?” They said something about how I fit the description of an accomplice for some yahoo boys around the area because of my nose ring and face.

    They didn’t even do the routine Nigerian police “may we meet you,” they just asked me to open my car door and get out. I mean, I had to because they had guns. They then proceeded to turn my car upside down in the name of a stop and search. It was so annoying. I remember asking what they were looking for and worrying that they’d plant drugs in my car or something, they didn’t even have an answer.

    When they couldn’t find anything, they tried to search my body and insisted I opened my phone for them to check for “evidence”. They saw that I had shared my location with friends and they also saw an article I had been sharing with my contacts from the day before. It was that period a member of the TECH community accused SARS officers of extorting him, I had covered the story. It was so weird because SARS stopped me and saw my article about ENDSARS. 

    I identified myself as a journalist. The article pissed them off so much they let me go.

    Abigail

    So I went to computer village one time with my cousin. We were about to leave when a man, that wasn’t in uniform, stopped us and asked where we were going. We said we were going home. He asked for our phones and after going through it asked where I got the money to buy an Iphone. I told him my mother bought it for me.

    He started talking about taking me to the police station for questioning. I didn’t argue with him. I said “okay but I’d have to call my mom first.” He asked who my mother was and I told him to wait that he’ll soon find out. He started fidgeting and asked me to just settle him. Luckily, I didn’t have any cash on me. He asked me to withdraw and I said I didn’t have a card. I had to open my purse to show him the 200 Naira in it. He still took the money. 

    Names were changed to protect the identity of the women.

    Recommended: 8 Nigerians Recount Their Ordeals With The Nigerian Police

  • Citizen is a column that explains how the government’s policies fucks citizens and how we can unfuck ourselves.

    Nothing symbolises how dysfunctional Nigeria has become like the terrorism that is carried out daily by faceless officers of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). See, I know we still don’t have 24-hour electricity 60 years after Independence. I know our roads are shite and our hospitals are crappy. But how can some criminals keep terrorising Nigerians because they’re an “Anti-Robbery Squad”? Worse, the government just keeps dancing around the issue without doing something symbolic to solve the problem.

    In this article, I will write about the history of SARS itself, and why it was nothing more than a makeshift squad to solve robbery crimes when the police ran away from the streets of Lagos because soldiers were chasing them.

    (Wait, what?)

    The Killing of Colonel Rimdan

    On the night of September 6 September 1992, Ezra Rimdan, a colonel in the Nigerian Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), Minna, was returning from a visit to an army general in Ikoyi, Lagos. On getting to Herbert Macaulay Road, Yaba, he met a police checkpoint and his driver was ordered to halt, after which he was ordered out of the car.

    Soon, in another notorious case of extra-judicial killings by members of the Nigerian Police Force, he was shot dead by the officers on duty. However, unknown to the police, they had just killed an army officer, and they took to their heels when they realised this.

    Of course, soldiers were furious, and a full-blown war began between Nigerian soldiers and the Nigerian police. Police officers all across Lagos withdrew from checkpoints and literally hid in their barracks, for fear of being killed by soldiers in reprisal attacks.

    It took two weeks of talks led by Brigadier Fred Chijuka, the Director of Defence Information at that time, and other influential soldiers to settle the discord. The three policemen involved in that killing were also sentenced for murder.

    The Invention of SARS

    You must be wondering, “So how does this killing have anything to do with SARS?”. Just hold on (we’re going home).

    Remember that the police were inactive for two weeks because they were afraid? Well, robbers exploited this opportunity to do what they do best. Notorious armed robbers like “Shina Rambo” took control of the streets of Lagos, looting and maiming with reckless abandon.

    It was in a bid to solve this crisis that SARS came into the picture. Simeon Danladi Midenda, who was in charge of the Anti-Robbery Unit at the State Criminal Investigation Department in Benin was drafted in by the then Inspector-General of Police, Alhaji Aliyu Attah, to combat the spate of robbery in Lagos that had quadrupled after the Lagos police fled their job.

    Because Assistant Commissioner of Police Simeon Midenda had done a great job at bringing robbers to their knees in Benin, there was confidence that he could handle the robbers in Lagos.

    When ACP Midenda got to Lagos, he met three senior police officers: the Commissioner of Police in Lagos, James Danbaba. Mike Okiro, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Lagos) Operations, and Abdulyekini Adeoye, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Lagos) Administration. All three told him to set up an anti-robbery team capable of chasing out armed robbers from Lagos. According to Midenda: “To start with, fifteen fully armed men and two plain coloured Peugeot station wagons were given to me.”

    Read: Is the DSS Abusing It’s Powers?

    Note that there were already anti-robbery squads at the time. In Lagos alone, there were three. One at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Alagbon, one attached to the Zone two command, and a third one at the Panti Criminal Investigation Department (CID). So, to differentiate his own anti-robbery squad, Mindenda added “Special” to the squad and called his new team “Special Anti-Robbery Squad” (SARS). They wore plain clothes, drove plain vehicles and could not be identified as government officers.

    And that was how SARS was born.

    SARS On The Beat (And On The Kill)

    To be honest, SARS was very effective in its earliest days. Because they wore plain clothes and carried themselves like “ordinary Nigerians”, it was hard for armed robbers to identify or escape them.

    What SARS would do was wait for traditional policemen to chase robbers, after which they would spring up on the robbers at designated points. The robbers would feed them with information about other robberies, and they would use this intelligence to solve other previous and forthcoming robberies.

    But this bread and butter situation changed when ACP Midenda was moved from Lagos to the Criminal Investigation Department, Umuahia, in 2002. Many state police commands started their own SARS department, oftentimes without giving them proper orientation, and the original SARS vision was lost.

    Today, SARS has become a menace to every Ikechukwu, Sleek and Kolade Johnson, stealing and looting from the same Nigerians they are supposed to protect.

    What Can We Learn From This Story?

    In December 2017, IGP Ibrahim Idris, concerned about the dastardly acts being perpetrated by SARS, directed that the outfit be re-organised under the office of a Commissioner of Police, who would be the overall head of the Federal Anti-Robbery Squad nationwide under the Department of Operations, Force Headquarters, Abuja. This was after a call to action by then Acting President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo.

    Remember that states police commands started having their own SARS commands after the success of Midenda’s SARS squad in Lagos. This decision, made by IGP Idris in 2017, was to put an end to the rot that happened in the system after SARS got decentralised in states. He hoped that the ungodly activities of SARS could be reduced if they were all brought under one command, thus the reason for the F-SARS (Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad).

    In recent years, it is clear that this move has not worked. It is clear that reorganisation is not the solution to the SARS menace and SARS will do bad things under whatever command.

    The way I see it, a state of emergency needs to be declared on the Nigerian Police. All of them, including SARS. Our police are not well paid, are poorly trained and are easily the worst people in the Nigerian society. The World Internal Security and Police Index International even rated our police the worst in the world. The worst in the actual world!

    So, you can see that we are in a crisis. It’s not just SARS, it’s the entire police. It stinks and needs reforms. Serious ones. Until then, nobody is safe.

    Check back every weekday for more Zikoko Citizen stories.