Date Published: 11/07/10

Crime Eradication and The Nation: A Nigerian Scenario

By Uka K. O. Ugwa (swiftresponseuk@yahoo.co.uk)

+234 803 601 9934

Were you at a political campaign or glanced through a party manifesto recently? Did the reassuring promises made by contenders to our exalted seats of their possession of the magic wand capable of eradicating crime from our regions and homes baffle you? In the Nigeria of their promise, looters of our national treasury would have all been banished to Haiti to make up for their loss in humans to a thoughtless earthquake and, recently, devastating typhoons (Their loot could revamp the Central American island in a matter of days). The armed robbers and assassins would all drop their guns and make up the lists of our national sports teams. The pickpockets would all give up the trade and take up messenger works in our ministries. Militants and kidnappers would all denounce the acts and enroll for vocational trainings at Obubra. Human traffickers and ritualists would all retrace their steps and take up shops at government model markets to sell household items, after returning those still in their captivity to their clans. After encountering the Holy Spirit and confessing their sins at the Redemption Camp, Canaan Land or at the Synagogue, drug peddlers and 419ers would all become missionary relief workers at Northern Sudan, Baghdad and wherever diehard jihadists are stopping their ears dumb and still pressing for an unattainable conquest. Smugglers and vandals would all turn new leaves and get absorbed at Baba Iyabo’s labour camp (or is it Otta farm he christened it?) Commercial sex workers and baby factory operators would stop desecrating our lands and join Supporters Clubs of our national sports teams as cheerleaders. Imposters would all become their real selves and apply their craftiness as marketers of made in Nigeria goods at Ariaria and Otu Nkwo markets. Pirates and manufacturers of substandard products would all receive government incentives and start giving us products matched internationally in all standards. Ghost workers would all resurrect and leave the payrolls of our malfunctioning ministries and parastatals. Defaulters of road traffic laws would all pay heed to road signs and FRSC’s advices and appreciate that life has no duplicate. Street urchins would let Danfo and Molue drivers be and swear by the name of Sango never to foment troubles at our motor parks and bus terminals. Wife and husband snatchers would all respect the sanctity of the holy matrimony and sheathe their organs between their thighs. Their spouse-battering counterparts would all enroll for formal training at Samuel Peters’ Boxing Academy to unleash vengeance on the Klitschko clan. Fake and self-anointed men of God would encounter the supremacy of the Most High and survivors among them (if any) would take up jobs at our general hospitals as morgue attendants. Public utility workers (especially the PHCN men) would confess their decades of insincerity and inefficiency to the Nigerian public and start living up to their billings after returning all they stole from us through tariffs on services not delivered. Infidels would become environment-friendly and stop littering our streets and drainage systems.

What would become of Nigeria if petty and large scale sinners all come to repentance, overnight? I posed this question to my police friend’s fifteen-year-old son while we both watched a religious programme on TV where this famous preacher prayed and commanded total healing on the ills of the Nigerian state. ‘Daddy will have no work to do and start following us to church,’ he replied, grinning. His response triggered an array of thoughts within me and the result is this piece you are reading.

Each time governments reassure us of their preparedness to transform ours to a crime-free society, I ponder if absolute eradication of crime from societies would serve the purpose for which it is intended or rather create a more complex and insolvable scenario. My little friend was right to say the police would have no more work to do possibly after they, too, would have owned up to a million and one unlawful detentions and even killing of citizens, raping and impregnating of suspects, abetting of crimes, betrayal of trust, etc. The army would do same by confessing to raping and killing of women and children and raiding our banks in commando styles with arms meant to guard our territorial bounds. Lawyers (prosecuting & defence counsels) NDLEA, NAFDAC, EFCC, ICPC, Prison Warders, Civil Defence, KAI, FRSC, LASTMA, LAWMA, and all the uniformed citizens who approximately constitute over 10% of our entire population (i.e. over 15million people) would all follow suit by confiding in the rest of us who had long given up our old ways and now left them idling in their posts with no Nigerians to harass, arrest, quiz, detain, torture, prosecute, cross-question, convict, detain, imprison and execute. No Odi or Zaki Biam to be raided. No MASSOB to keep Aso Rock sitting on the edge. No OPC to keep the west politically audible. No Maurice Iwu or Ayoka Adebayo to concoct poll results and brazenly ask anyone not satisfied with the abracadabra to go rot in hell (sorry in court) No Boko Haram to take our attentions temporarily away from keeping watch on a Yar’Adua mummified in a Saudi hospital. All external forces including seemingly toothless Cameroon and Libya’s nosy Ghadaffi would swear to a treaty never to poke-nose or threaten our sovereignty. No Iwuchukwu to courier heroin to Singapore and be beheaded. No Okechukwu to import contrabands that would be confiscated and distributed among customs officers and cronies. Oluwole merchants would all donate their duplicating machines to our schools for the handicapped. Suicide-bound Farouk Mutallab would denounce Islam and all the orgies of the Al-Qaeda camp and return into the waiting arms of Primate Akinola at a state banquet in the National Christian Centre, Abuja. During elections, we’d all be made to queue and be counted behind those we want to lead us, so no ballot boxes to be snatched or stuffed with thumb-printed voter cards. All the high fences and iron gates that adorn our residential landscape would be levelled and replaced with captivating floral hedges. A sixteen year old girl would walk the soils of Upper Iweka, Oshodi, Sabon Gida, or elsewhere after midnight without fear of molestation. Oil thieving multinationals and their Nigerian collaborators would have pity on the over 70% of us living on below US$1 a day. Non-repentant manufacturers of lethal teething powders and other infant killer drugs who cannot cope with our righteousness would vacate our space to Equatorial Guinea and their counterparts at the Bridge Head, Onitsha and Alaba markets would exile to Somalia and Bamako, where they’d be daily tormented by a million tsetse flies. Government would confiscate their lands and turn them to cocoyam farms to feed the refugees in our midst in order to sustain our no crime nature.

Now and before then, crime prevalence and growth in Nigeria is blamed on the failure of governments especially in the areas of education and jobs creation. Governments in the bid to address their failure embark on job creation policies that in most cases lack coordination and vision because they are projected to temporarily tame current matters of national interest like insecurity which generally encumber economic growth. The recruitment of more people into the military and other law enforcement agencies is an example of government’s job creation policies to bridge the unemployment gap as promised during electioneering campaigns. The establishment of LASTMA, LAWMA, KAI and their likes in Lagos by past and present administrations is another. Same job creation policies are replicated in Northern Nigeria where governments are crediting the use of uniformed individuals for several law enforcement jobs e.g. the Sha’ria police.

If societies do not experience or envisage crime, laws cannot be made. And in the crime-free Nigeria envisaged by our all-doing politician, we expect that the services of these law agents would no longer be needed by us and government would be insincere to continue to shoulder the remuneration of over 15million men and women where they are no longer needed. The hundreds of billions of naira that was their annual pay would now accrue to our national treasury and could be used for other substantial developmental projects like the replacement of the obsolete supplies at the Ajaokuta steel plant; the commencement of work on the large expanse of land acquired in Umunnato, Bende LGA, Abia State, by the Ibrahim Babangida regime for the construction of a technology village that was to house small and medium scale technologist scattered through the eastern landscape; completion of all ongoing IPP projects to lessen the cost of running small and medium scale industries; upgrading of the Lagos-Benin-Onitsha-Owerri-Aba road (Africa’s largest traffic) to standards obtainable in other climes with such carrying capacity; introduction of national educational and agricultural subsidies; provision of support loans to visionary individuals and groups, etc.

Now done and the government celebrates our crime-free-Nigeria-feat, unprecedented in earth’s history. All arms and ammunition mopped up from crime dens and those recovered from our military armouries (even in obsolesce) would be auctioned to Sudan, Congo DPR, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine and wherever they are still needed. The prisons, law courts, police and military barracks would all become national monuments. The Vatican is blue with envy at our no-sin-nature. The CNN and BBC reporters in Nigeria would flee, disappointedly, as there would come out of Nigeria, no stories of brewing political or religious upheavals, no stories of assassinations and kidnappings, no hell let loose by militants in the creeks, no hauling of furniture at each other by our lawmakers. No news, at all. Just Nigeria to ourselves, for a few months, maybe, and oops! Nigeria grows larger a double fold, and all things happen in superlative degrees - News and more news, again. Jesus refuses to return in this our time of righteousness to rapture the over 150milion of us to His father’s abode, (we’d have all merited paradise) and our patience is at its elastic limit. Our displaced 15million hitherto crime prevention and control workers march through the regions demanding that our Moses commands manna from the Aso god to sustain their days till the IBB Technology Village, Ajaokuta steel plant and other moribund and ongoing industrial projects come on alive to accommodate their means of livelihood. As they march, no police to disperse them for failing to obtain a permit to stage a demonstration. All the same, no threat to security since we’d all sworn to drop old ways. Their demand method is non-violence. Government’s magic wand could only command a crime-free Nigeria but lacks the miracle-performing-ability of ancient Moses. No manna falls from Aso Rock and the demand is intensified for alternative support to the livelihood of 15million men and women plus their dependants of nearly double their number who hitherto made up a significant number of prisoners, street urchins, armed robbers, pick pockets, prostitutes, drug peddlers, yahoo boys, campus cultists, assassins, car snatchers, etc. Stability of earth’s most righteous nation is threatened and, this time, in apocalyptic magnitude.

A year is gone and our government fails to reintegrate our men into a life of making money outside managing crime and related matters. With now nearly 45million criminals to contend with, the resultant effect is a bang, loud enough to shake the enormity of Africa to its very foundation.

Hey! It’s all a dream and our loudmouthed politician wakes from his nightmarish slumber and swears never to trumpet his ability to invent a crime-free nation. A promise to contend with the rise in crimes and intelligently steer this beleaguered marriage to a safe landing is it.

Uka Ugwa writes from Lagos, Nigeria