The challenges before Tunji Disu, By Semiu Okanlawon

For now, I doubt if anyone can raise a very strong case against Disu as the new acting Inspector General of Police. However, how he tackles these issues in addition to a new orientation for the force he now leads remain the very challenges that will make or mar his reputation. I wish him well in his new assignment.

I cannot claim to know the newly appointed acting Inspector General of Police, Rilwan Olatunji Disu, so well. Therefore, I leave writings such as “The Tunji Disu I know” to his family members, those who grew up with him in his 59 years of earthly sojourn, his school mates, his service cohorts and members of the various religious, social and professional bodies to which he belongs.

The closest I have come with the new boss of the Nigerian Police Force was in the year 2017, when we were both awardees of the Lagos Council of the Nigerian Union of Journalists.

At that event held at the Blue Roof hall of the Lagos State Television premises on Agidingbi, Ikeja, Lagos, we engaged in a brief chat, during which we exchanged views about the security situation in Lagos at the time. I recall vividly that we also talked about relationships and interactions between journalism and policing, leading us to dwell briefly on how the two professions could firm up collaborations, reduce friction – knowing that policemen have the responsibility to protect the society – the same society that journalists want to protect by exposing human rights infractions, a huge chunk of which come from some overzealous, corrupt and unprofessional operatives within that force.

But my knowledge of Disu as a fine officer, a thoroughbred professional, and urbane man predated my encounter with him.

For an officer who had led the Lagos State special security outfit, Rapid Respond Squad (RRS), from 2015 till the day we met in 2017, there was no way my probing eyes and minds would not have scrutinised, at a very close range, a police officer who decided to name his special squad “The Good Guys.”

Just look at that! Wasn’t that a conscious decision to sever the force from the archetypal framing as a band of gun-totting, weird, “wetin you carry,” and “wetin you bring for us” gangsters? Those were some of the ugly impressions about men of the Nigerian Police Force, which had been etched in the psyche of the average Nigerian.

Imagine the long, scary narratives of a serving National Youths Service Scheme member in Lagos who was accosted with his girlfriend, coerced for money, wrongly accused of fraud, driven around Lagos for about six hours, with his girlfriend jumping out of a moving vehicle out fears that these were not policemen but kidnappers.

Disu’s “The Good Guys” enforced the law much more responsibly, while being friendly to citizens.

Through partnerships, community engagement, crime prevention and law enforcement, Disu’s “The Good Guys” made good use of crime mapping, identifying critical hotspots in the state and providing specialised strategies to handle them.

It was under Disu that you would see policemen rendering help to people, with the critical instance of a woman in labour during the COVID-19 lockdown, who was taken to the hospital by operatives.

Speaking less but acting more, Disu was assigned to lead the Police Intelligence Response Team (IRT) on 2 August, 2021, after the inglorious exit of Abba Kyari from that elite wing of the force.

There isn’t any doubt that on and off the camera, President Bola Tinubu must have set the goals for Disu.
Settling down to work is therefore the only next thing for this unassuming officer in the face of the multiform security challenges that Nigeria currently faces.

He has come at a time that Nigerians are demanding professionalism, fairplay, firmness, innovation and, if you like, steeze, in confronting security challenges.

I am certain that the acting Inspector General of Police, amidst the euphoria of his appointment, must have noticed the uproar of an alleged human rights abuse saga involving the Minister of Works, Senator Dave Umahi and a business woman, Mrs Tracy Ohiri.

As the allegations go, Ohiri, a promotional items merchant, had been contracted (though I have not seen the contract papers) to produce and deliver some campaign materials ahead of Umahi’s contest for the governorship of Ebonyi State.

Cumulatively, we are now told that the total debt Mr Umahi owes Ohiri is in the region of ₦250 million, having been factoring in other possible additions, including the breach of contract and interests on a yearly basis.

Not only has Mr Umahi allegedly failed to fulfil his own side of the bargain, he also allegedly made sexual advances at Ohiri, a married woman, and did not stop at that, Mrs Ohiri claimed that he threatened her; telling her that the fate that befell some NELAN engineers in the state would befall her if she did not stop demanding for the payment of her money.

The case of the NELAN engineers is one that has been unwittingly re-opened and which is to be treated separately, judiciously and firmly.

For the records, and as the story goes, five engineers were said to be working with Enugu-based NELAN Consulting Engineers, a consultant to the African Development Bank (AfDB).

Reports had it that the five were abducted on 3rd November 2021 during their inspection of works at the Ring Road project at Effium in Ebonyi State.

It was also reported then that there had been allegations of threats from Governor Umahi against the lead consultant and managing director, Nelson Onyemeh.

The governor, it was said, had confirmed that the five engineers were abducted by the notorious Ezza Warriors, before being killed and buried in Ebonyi State.

The names of the victims were given as Engineer Nelson Onyemeh (lead consultant and chief executive officer of the engineering firm) from Ihiala in Anambra State; Engineer Ernest Edeani from Nkanu in Enugu State; Ikechukwu Ejiofor from Umunya in Oyi Local Government Area of Anambra State; Engineer Samuel Aneke from Nkanu in Enugu-East Local Government Area of Enugu State; and Engineer Stanley Nwazulum from Amawbia in Awka-South Local Government Area of Anambra State.

The new acting Inspector General of Police should reopen this case and tell Nigerians what truly happened. Indeed, the onus is on the police to unravel why since 2021, the mysterious disappearance of five engineers was never taken to be a source of concern, and it took the alleged continued harassments of a woman to bring this issue back to life.

For more than a decade, the allegedly unpaid debt lingered. But Ohiri claimed that she could no longer keep quiet after things went down for her, with her children’s school fees remaining unpaid, her father getting sick and eventually dying, and her inability to raise the needed funds to attend to critical family challenges, while she had funds that were allegedly locked down by a man who would rather see her in his bed as the price for the payment of her money.

The last four days have been intense, with protests in Abuja. These were to secure the release of the woman, after policemen allegedly acting on the orders of the minister brought her face-to-face with Umahi at the Federal Capital Territory Command headquarters.

But that scenario, which human rights activist, Omoyele Sowore claimed was to present the minister with an unfair advantage to further harass, coerce and intimidate Ohiri into forgetting her money or possibly succumbing to his alleged sexual advances, was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. The session turned rowdy, with Umahi hurriedly leaving the venue.

There have been protests, while many police officers have been fingered as alleged tools in the hands of the minister to suppress the truth and cower the businesswoman into submission.

The above and many more instances of alleged human rights abuse by men of the force are a litmus test for Disu. How he steps into lingering, unresolved cases of murder, disappearances, illegal arrests and detentions immediately, with the unbiased details of his findings made available to Nigerians, has the potential to assure of the fair sense of duty he brings to the table as Nigeria’s 23rd indigenous police boss.

The 2027 general elections are just ahead! What will policing 2027 and the journey to it look like? Nigeria’s political history is replete with the power of incumbency, which is majorly anchored around the deployment of security forces for the suppression and intimidation of the opposition.

Samuel Igba, in his paper, “Federalism and Policing in Nigeria: Colonial Continuities and Contemporary Complexities,” notes “that police ineffectiveness in Nigeria since the 1999 democratisation is deeply rooted in elite political influence over policing – a legacy tracing back to colonial rule.”

Those who witnessed the 1983 general elections will easily tell you that they saw in action how a party in power, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), abused its control of the federal police to force its way to ‘victory,’ culminating in a revolt that engulfed many parts of the current South-West region of Nigeria then. I witnessed the burning of houses, cars and indeed, human beings at the time.

That was the era in which the police had a wing whose brutality earned it the tag of “Kill and Go.”

The patterns have not changed. In 2014, the federal police was deployed to ensure that the opposition All Progressives Congress was forced out of power by the Goodluck Jonathan-led federal administration. It was an open siege that was however resisted by the Rauf Aregbesola-led APC government in Osun State.

With the appointment of Disu, anti-government thinkers are sure to wait to see how the new acting Inspector General of Police programmes himself to show his allegiance to Nigeria and not to the party in power.

Feelings of suspicions are more likely to be fuelled by the reality that Disu was once an Aide de Camp to President Bola Tinubu, when he was the governor of Lagos State.

Before 2027, there will be off-season elections in Ekiti and Osun this year. While the ruling party in Ekiti might not have a very strong opposition requiring federal help, the case of Osun is totally different.

The three-way impending battle in Osun has the APC desperately seeking a return to power through its flagbearer, Bola Oyebamiji. It has as formidable opponents, the incumbent Governor Ademola Adeleke, who is holding the Accord Party flag on one side, and the Rauf Aregbesola-backed African Democratic Congress (ADC), with Najeem Salam, a former House of Assembly speaker, as its candidate.

Governor Adeleke was pushed into the Accord Party, having been ‘bounced’ by the APC stalwarts who said he was not needed to reclaim Osun.

The people of that state witnessed the invasion of the state by federal police agents in 2014. Will there be a repeat of the 2014 saga under the watch and command of Disu?

For now, I doubt if anyone can raise a very strong case against Disu as the new acting Inspector General of Police. However, how he tackles these issues in addition to a new orientation for the force he now leads remain the very challenges that will make or mar his reputation. I wish him well in his new assignment.

Semiu Okanlawon, the publisher of NPO Reports, is also the CEO, S-OK Advisory and Media Limited, Lagos and can be reached through [email protected]