FSARS or SARS: My position sirs

By Dapo Thomas

SARS was established in 1992 as a unit of necessity in view of the peculiar circumstances that were prevalent at that time. The Commissioner of Police in Lagos State at that time, Simeon Dalandi Midenda had to come up with this ingenious creation in order not to leave the entire state in a state of anarchy. Prior to the establishment of this Unit, Col. Rindam, a Nigerian Army officer was killed by the Police at a check-point in Lagos. His death provoked a retaliatory action by the Nigerian Army as all its officers and men swooped into the streets in search of any policeman they could lay their hands on. This made most of the policemen to stay away from work and from the streets. Some even resigned from the Force. Consequently, there were yawning security lapses which had to be addressed if the entire state was not going to be in security quandary considering the manner at which crime rate rose. Midenda then started a unit called Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) with about 15 men to stem the horrendous drift in the security architecture. Still wary of the presence of soldiers in town and the need to protect the lives of his men, Midenda directed his men to move around in mufti to prevent them from being identified by the lurking soldiers.
This is why SARS operatives don’t wear police uniforms. Anyway, after series of meetings by the top echelons of all the security agencies including the military, a truce was reached and the regular police returned to their duty posts. But rather than disband SARS, it became one of the 14 units of the Force Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department specifically saddled with the power to detain, investigate and prosecute people involved in armed robbery and kidnapping and other forms of crimes. In addition to these functions, when cybercrimes became endemic in Nigeria in the early part of the 21st century, SARS was drafted to handle them because of the kind of training they are exposed to in crime detection and management. Initially, they made tremendous progress in this respect but with time, SARS officers grew wings and began seeing themselves as special gods that could not be controlled. The officers went beserk hunting and taunting young guys in copy-cat attires and 50 Cent adornments. They went gaga arresting and hounding the youths they found in sight mostly those wearing what they considered weird clothes. Instead of trying to improve its crime detection technology and strategy, SARS reclined into assumptive psychology and persecutorial criminology. They humiliated, tortured, maimed, extorted, wasted and killed some of the youths in their custody for failing to cooperate or play ball.
These atrocious and monstrous activities reached a crescendo with the low and mighty in the society protesting against SARS human rights violations, extra-judicial killings and youth-hate.

As a result of the actions and campaigns of Amnesty International which exposed the heinous activities of the unit, SARS became a national embarrassment. Acting on this pariah status, the Acting President, Prof Yemi Osinbajo directed the IGP Ibrahim Idris in August 2018 to reform the Unit in whichever way he could to re-inject sanity into the Unit. This reform was what led to the renaming of the Unit to FSARS.

Almost a year after, another outcry from both international and local communities led to the decentralization of SARS again in 2019. This time it was from IGP Mohammed Adamu who directed the DIG Force Criminal Investigation Department and state Commissioners of Police to take charge and be ready to be held accountable and responsible for the actions of their men in their respective states.

The latest outbursts and protests trailing IGP’s Ibrahim Idris’ latest directive to SARS to stop indiscriminate search and harassment of citizens especially the youths are gradually yielding positive results. The IGP condemned the activities of his men which have brought the Police into disrepute with members of the public. However, rather than elicit excitement, IGP Idris’ directive only provoked more protests and condemnations from different sections of the country, calling for complete scrapping of SARS.

The spate of protests and uproar against SARS received the attention of the Federal Government as President Muhammadu Buhari invited the IGP to Aso Rock to brief him on the situation. It was at the end of the briefing that it became obvious that the federal government did not have any plans to scrap SARS. Here is what the President tweeted:” I met again with the IGP tonight. Our determination to reform the police should never be in doubt. I am being briefed regularly on the reform efforts ongoing to end police brutality and unethical conduct and ensure that the Police are fully accountable to the people.”

With this, the President has given the protesters a veiled response to their call for the scrapping of SARS. It will not happen. I suspected that this was going to be the position of government. I envisage that this response was not going to be popular with Nigerians especially the youths who were mostly the victims of SARS and I don’t expect it to be popular in view of the atrocities of SARS operatives. For strategic reasons, the scrapping of SARS at this time will create a flourishing market for cybercrime operators. Being a very technical and specialized crime, it will require the deployment of new officers that would have to be properly trained in this field of crime. This definitely will take time, gulp more resources, require new intelligence network, psychological make-up and professional re-orientation. This doesn’t come overnight. The only reason SARS can be scrapped is if we can all agree through a referendum that cybercrime is no longer a crime. For as long as it remains a crime, SARS stays. The failure of SARS and their professional somersault is a metaphor for the general failure and degeneracy of the Nigerian state and its institutions. Whatever crimes and atrocities SARS is perpetrating at their own level are a manifestation of the grand infamy and iniquities that go on in villa of power. SARS is just a micro evil in the pyramid of evil structure that forms the template of our national decadence. If you say SARS is a failure, tell me, what has not failed in Nigeria. Has the government itself, SARS employer, not failed the nation by diminishing the value of the personality of its decadent humanity? Whatever torture SARS’ victims go through in the hands of SARS is what the citizens are also going through psychologically in the hands of the government. In fact, the actions or inaction of this government have systematically depreciated our citizenship. Tell me, what torture could be more than gradual dehumanization of a citizen whose faith in a government has been betrayed several times in several years.

If the government decides to scrap SARS, those who are going to perform their functions, will they not be Nigerians? Are they going to be saints from heaven?. Are we saying those ones are not going to relapse into such indulgent excesses like SARS? For as long as those who will take over from SARS will be Nigerians, it is delusional to expect complete institutional transformation and ecclesiastical exorcism.

Like every rotten system and institution in Nigeria, what should be done to SARS is a reformative overhaul of the Unit that will purge it of all its iniquities. Except the top echelons of the Police want to pretend that they do not know the bad eggs in the Unit, I am sure they do. Those among them whose records of performance are scandalous, disgraceful, damaging and below par should be dismissed summarily if necessary. Those with manageable records of several warnings and reprimands can be given orderly room trials to determine their post-reprimand behaviour. Those of them with excellent professional records and nil misdemeanors should be retained and motivated with career palliatives and commendation letters. When officers excel in their duties by the numbers of crimes they have burst or robbery cases they have nipped in the bud or numbers of kidnappers they have arrested, they should receive automatic rewards for their gallantry. Lack of such professional rewards or palliatives may lead to frustration. There is no doubt about it that some of these officers transfer their frustrations to their jobs. Otherwise, why should some sane police operatives decide to waste the lives of innocent youths simply because of their hairstyles, razz jeans, 50 Cent jewelry, sketchers and fine phone sets? Apart from the fact that a police officer is supposed to have the fear of GOD before”wasting” human life, I do not think there is anywhere in their training manual which allows a policeman to summarily terminate the life of an unarmed suspect. Agreed that Yahoo plus or Yahoo minus is a crime, are the punishments not specified in our penal codes? It is sheer arrogance, insanity, power-drunkeness, depression and frustration that will make you to kill a fellow human being.
I agree with the President that SARS should be reformed not scrapped. But to go about the reforms, there is the need to involve core professionals in cybercrime detection and management to assist the Police in the re-training of his personnel on how to go about their work without necessarily subjecting every citizen with laptop to street demonstration and humiliation. There should be sincerity of purpose. The top brass should not politicize the Unit by putting their kinsmen who know little or who lack the professional expertise in cybercrime, kidnapping and armed robbery in the Unit. Again, the name SARS should be changed. What is the point of reforming SARS the man without reforming SARS the name when there is obvious symbiotic evil cooperation between the two of them? For once, let the Police do a redemptive cleansing of its image by getting this one right by doing a perfect job.