Government slams police over crime, rights violations

“Regrettably, the Nigeria Police Force has not reciprocated the gesture of government by way of commitment to duty and responsibility to this calling,” Police Minister Ibrahim Lame told top police officers at a meeting.

“The current rate of crime across the nation, rising cases of extra-judicial killings, human rights violations, robberies, high profile assassination and deliberate failure to comply with government directives are testimony to the sheer incapacity or wilful defiance of police high command” to government directives, Lame said.

He did not give current crime statistics in Africa’s most populous nation.

Lame said the “current security situation in the country, to say the least, is condemnable and unacceptable to the government and good citizens of our great nation.”

He urged the police chiefs to rise up to their responsibility, adding that no responsible government would fold its arm and watch helplessly as its citizens are being maimed or cut down in their prime with police in place.

Dozens of Nigerian journalists and politicians, including a serving justice minister, have been assassinated in the past 20 years and the police have failed to shed light on their killings.

Lame gave the police two weeks to draw up a “practical work plan” indicating programmes and projects with implementation timelines from 2010 to 2015.

Nigeria’s under-funded and under-equipped police is often criticised for corruption, inefficiency, human rights violations and extra-judicial killings.

Global rights watchdog Amnesty International last month urged Nigeria’s Acting President Goodluck Jonathan to set up an independent body to probe what it said were routine “unlawful killings” by the country’s police.

The London-based rights body has alleged that Nigerian police carry out hundreds of extra-judicial killings every year, with only those who could afford bribes guaranteed safe from execution or torture.

“The Nigerian police routinely kill people in cold blood without fear of punishment. This must stop,” the group’s Africa director Erwin van der Borght said in a statement.

“The government must ensure that all killings are investigated, that the findings are made public and perpetrators of unlawful killings are brought to justice,” he said.

In a damning report released in December, the group alleged: “The Nigeria Police Force is responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings and enforced disappearances every year.”