Soyinka, Tinubu and police withdrawal from VIPs

Usually, criticisms from Professor Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature (1986), can be pretty caustic. He is a perennial critic of governments who never shied away from telling it as it is to power, whenever he sees something wrong. Right from the civilian regime of the First Republic to the military regimes and to what we have now, Soyinka has proven that he would not kowtow and be obsequious to power. He was the angry young man of his era, in the 1960s and 70s. His activism had always been expressed in several ways through his writings, speeches, and actions.

In 1965, during the Western Nigerian contentious election, he was reported to have held up a radio station in Ibadan with a gun to prevent it from broadcasting the message of Premier S L Akintola, whom he strongly disapproved of. During the Nigerian Civil War, the military regime put him away for almost two years in solitary confinement for his relentless criticism. It was from his incarceration that he famously wrote his book The Man Died, which made scurrilous attacks on General Yakubu Gowon’s regime.

It was, therefore, not surprising that he took on this government over what he regarded as a sloppy implementation of President Tinubu’s directive to the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) to recover police officers serving VIPs and redeploy them to general policing. Soyinka had come across Seyi, President Tinubu’s son, in a hotel in Lagos and was astounded by the size of his security escorts. He recounted this story at an event last week at the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism. He said that it was “an excessively large security battalion sufficient to take over a small country.” Soyinka was so piqued that he went further to report the matter to the National Security Adviser (NSA), hoping that it would be brought to the notice of the President.

Soyinka is a stern critic. Yet the language conveying his opprobrium was un-Soyinka. It was mellow, more or less, like a grandfather scolding his favourite grandson. I guess it was out of habit that this had to come off his chest. After all, the Tinubu administration had done all it could to bring Soyinka close to it, including naming the newly renovated National Theatre in Iganmu, Lagos, after him. It demonstrates that the leopard cannot change its spots.

The problem of police officers serving VIPs has been with us for a very long time. It is a sore that we have unduly allowed to fester. Over time, it has defied presidential orders. Every successive presidency issues directives to the IGP to recall police officers from VIPs, yet the orders are consistently spurned. The Seyi Tinubu’s scenario is a typical example of why these orders are challenging to implement. Public officials, of all hues, including their relations, have come to feel entitled to police protection. This feeling of entitlement is even worse at the very top.

Someone who lives in the Maitama District neighbourhood intimated me that when a top-level official goes to work each day from his official residence, the sheer size of his entourage, filled with police escorts, is as if he is going to the war front. His itinerary passes through the bustling Maitama Farmers Market, and whenever his entourage passes, shoppers are constantly thrown into a great deal of agitation. The total bedlam ensuing from the daily crossing of his entourage can only be imagined.

We need to start by trimming the size of convoys of our top public officers, by eliminating some, if possible. The undue buffer police officers provide for our public officers needs to be eliminated. After all, most of our leaders are elected. They need the constant rub of their electorate. Thereafter, we can go down to deal with the abuse of posting police officers to wait on every Tom, Dick and Harry who has the money to throw around. It is neither here nor there to posit that the Nigerian Police Force generates funds by sending its officers on these revenue-generating assignments to give cover to persons that might well be dubious. The government has money to maintain the army, but why can it not find the money to support the police force, which is even more crucial to public peace?

In the distant past, there must have been a document clearly stating who deserves police protection and, probably, the number to be deployed. What to do now would be to go to the archives, dust off that document, and update it to reflect current realities. From my perspective, it is needless for the President to assume the role of the approving authority. That’s for the IGP to handle. The President would be too busy and would end up pushing such requests to the Chief of Staff, who would then ask one of the desk officers to handle them. Before you know it, we will be back to where we started.

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