OLUBUNMI TUNJI-OJO MUST HEAR THIS

TUNDE OLUSUNLE is alarmed by the exploitative charges of NSCDC on security services

I received an invite last December to join a delegation of elders and leaders from my sociocultural group, to visit the governor of my state. That the proposed meeting intended to discuss with the governor among others, the disturbing security situation in my district and the decrepit state of infrastructure thereof, appealed to me. I have said repeatedly in my writings, that road travel had been my preferred means of intra-country movement, before insecurity cast a pall on the nation’s land space. I’ve always been fortunate with the quality and comportment of my personal drivers and never had issues commuting by land from the nation’s capital to distances like Lagos, Ibadan, Ado-Ekiti, Ilorin, Lokoja, Port Harcourt, Yenagoa, Umuahia, Owerri, Enugu, Makurdi and so on. Indeed, those of us from Nigeria’s geopolitical “North Central” have limited travel options to our destinations in Benue, Kogi, Nasarawa, Niger and Plateau. The well-to-do accessing Kwara State can avail themselves of the international airport in Ilorin, but would still need to drive to major towns like Offa, Oro, Omu-Aran, Jebba, Lafiaji, Okuta, some of which are longer than three hours from the airport.

Contemporary security dynamics compelled me to consider security coverage for a trip to a state capital which once-upon-a-time was a predictable two-hour drive from Abuja. It is so very depressing to speak about the health of public infrastructure and security in the past tense within just a few years. As Director of Information and Public Affairs to the enigmatic “first and second” democratically elected governor of Kogi State, Prince Abubakar Audu, back in 1992, Abuja was the alternate playground of my friends and I whenever we were bored in Lokoja. We got into a *Peugeot 504 Bestline,* the much envied state car at the time, left the Kogi State capital at about 7pm, drove to the erstwhile *Nicon Noga Hilton Hotel,* (now Transcorp Hilton), had our fill of revelry and were back to Lokoja before office hours the next morning.

If we had any concerns at all, it was neither the condition of the road nor the fear of abduction. It was the concern about whether the driver, among we revellers who we designated for a particular leg of the trip, would not get drowsy on the wheels At times of such nostalgic thought, the titles of two classics, speedily flash on the screen of the mind. These are the American writer Karl Maeir’s book on Nigeria, *This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis,* published in 2000, and our own pace-setting Chinua Achebe’s *There was a Country* released in 2012, just about six months before the demise of Africa’s most venerated master storyteller. All of these sound like very remote fiction when you share these reminiscences with the *Gen Z* generation.

I have had no need for security accompaniment for a while now, perhaps because most of my destinations are served by airports. The buildings some of us were coaxed to erect in our home communities decades back, have become museum pieces, no thanks to security paranoia and degenerate infrastructure. Back in the days, former Health Minister, Professor Eyitayo Lambo pioneered and sustained an annual healthcare visitation programme in my hometown. Medical professionals from the diaspora joined local volunteers for a one-week per year on-site encampment in our place to offer a broad range of medical services, including intricate surgeries. This attracted residents from adjoining communities who eagerly looked forward to every edition. No security coverage whatsoever was ever needed to transport the volunteers or to safeguard them in our community during the years the medical outreach lasted.

Those years, I happily allowed free use of my property by the volunteers, like many well-meaning members of the elite from our homestead. Indeed, I often travelled from Abuja and stayed around to support Prof Lambo and his wife, Dr (Mrs) Esther Lambo who poured themselves wholly and totally into the initiative. Lambo, an Emeritus Professor of Economics, committedly stayed through surgeries to ensure the procedures went right. Effectively, however, these country homes have become monuments to waste and conduits for recurrent resource drain. Indeed, to simulate human presence in my premises back home, I voluntarily ceded a section of the estate to senior personnel of a government department, which has occupied that part for nearly one decade now. This is how far we have come as a nation.

In the years I occasionally needed armed security escorts for my journeys, I interfaced specifically with the Nigeria Police Force, (NPF). Despite its challenges, it is an organisation which is rooted in tradition, whose standard operating procedures one is very familiar with. A formal application, detailing the specific purpose for which the police accompaniment is needed; the destination; duration of stay and the number of personnel required, is usually written. This is usually addressed to the officer with jurisdiction to give approval. This could be the Inspector-General of Police, (IGP); the Deputy Inspector-General of Police, (Operations), (DIG Ops), or the Commissioner of Police, (CP), as the case may be. The request is processed and the applicant is advised about the official allowances due to the escorts. My experience has always been that the applicant for police escorts provides a serviceable vehicle or vehicles to transport the team. It is as straightforward as that.

In the aftermath of the presidential directive withdrawing policemen from escort duties for very important personalities, (VIPs), last November and the concession of the responsibilities to the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, (NSCDC), I made inquiries so I could be assigned armed men to escort me to neighbouring Kogi State. It was supposed to be a one night trip, such that I would travel on a Thursday afternoon and return before dusk the next day. I was given a bill for *one million naira* broken down as follows:

Allowance for five armed men for two days at N50,000 each per day: N500,000.00

Fuelling of a Toyota Hilux truck and Service charge: N500,000.00

I was scandalised. So I needed to pay one million to a government-owned security department to be escorted to the capital of my state. Never in my decades of engagement with the police were my ears so badly assaulted. I gave up that trip.

I lost an uncle, Emeritus Professor Albert Anjorin last December and I desired to participate in his farewells which were scheduled for Kogi and Kwara states respectively. I would need to be on the road for about four days so once again I considered travelling with armed security. This time, I spoke with a different person in the NSCDC, expecting a different response from what I got in November. I would later receive a bill of *two million, two hundred thousand naira,* (N2,200,000.00), which was itemised as follows:

Allowance for five men at N50,000.00 per day for four days: N1,000,000.00

Service charge and vehicle: N1,200,000.00 (The VIP is to bear the cost of fuelling and maintenance of the vehicle in the course of the duration of the trip).

Of course I gave up on the Kogi State segment of my uncle’s final rites of passage and flew to Ilorin to participate in the Kwara State programmes.

Herein lies my dilemma, and the consternation of many Nigerians like me. The person who sent me the earlier bill of N1million which would have taken me to Lokoja and back, included a footnote to wit: *The presidential directive on the withdrawal of policemen from VIP duties has already heightened the rate of requests.* The implication here is that the decision to direct the culling of the police from dignitaries and the political class by the President at the height of the nation’s security crisis, was impulsive. There was no thinking through, especially from the perspective of almost commensurate replacement. That they are uniform-wearing and arms-bearing does not make the NSCDC equal substitutes for the police. There are differences in the focus, scope and depth of training for both services.

It is a measure of the aggregate quality of the training of our police force and their demonstrated capacity that they’ve almost always returned home with medals from many international operations they have participated in. There are of course the rotten eggs who extort helpless road users, profile innocent youngsters who spots a particular hairstyle or has a laptop or sophisticated mobile device as *yahoo boys* or herd unsuspecting citizens at gunpoint to teller machines to empty their bank accounts after violating the privacy of information stored in their electronic devices. There are those who murder their victims after stealing from them, ostensibly to conceal their crime. That fraction is not the police I’ve engaged with in several decades now.

Again, are the charges being imposed on those who request for the services of personnel of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, (NSCDC), officially approved and documented? Who determined that a non-commissioned civil defence personnel is entitled to a daily travel allowance of N50,000.00? What is a Director in the Federal Civil Service paid as night allowance? Are the so called “administrative charges” and “service charges,” receipted and paid to the treasury of the government? Aren’t the leadership and commanders of the NSCDC complicitly taking opportunistic advantage of the de-emphasis on the police for escort schedules, to exploit vulnerable Nigerians in a get-rich-quick scheme as part of pervading multisectoral corruption?

Despite controversies about participation in, and certification by the National Youth Service Corps, (NYSC), Nigeria’s Minister for Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, is one of the bright lights of the administration of President Bola Tinubu. He has instantiated fundamental digitised improvements in the quality and issuance time of the Nigerian international passport. He is encouraging literacy amongst Nigerian prisoners, giving them a new orientation to sustain educational self-improvement even while in the gulag, so that no periods of their lives will be totally lost. Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo must take an interest in the depressing racketeering going on in the NSCDC, many of which top brass deserve to be sacked for various cases of certificate forgery which are being swept aside. Our institutions must be governed by rational, relatable guidelines, not the whimsical, impulsive conjurations of morally duplicitous officials.

Olusunle, PhD, Fellow of the Association of Nigerian Authors, (FANA), teaches Creative Writing at the University of Abuja