Egbetokun withdraw police from VIPs
Egbetokun withdraw police from VIPs
FOR decades, the Nigeria Police Force has brazenly prioritised the protection of Very Important Personalities at the expense of its primary mandate to protect the general populace. In the face of escalating insecurity nationwide, the Inspector-General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, must be resolute in reversing this obtuse practice.
A new report by the European Union Agency for Asylum highlights the issue. The agency estimated thousands of officers are deployed to protect VIPs, including politicians and fraudsters.
Both recent sources and sources dating back as far as 2007 claimed that the NPF had an estimated strength of 371,800, serving a total population estimated in 2024 at 236,747,130,” the agency said. “… The resulting shortage in police personnel was compounded by the fact that more than 100,000 police officers were assigned to the protection of politicians and VIPs, rather than to tasks serving the general population.”
These statistics are grim. While the UN unofficially recommends one police officer to 450 people, Nigeria’s police extant staff strength of 371,800 serving 237 million gives a ratio of one officer to 637 Nigerians.
Most rural communities are without police presence. For Nigeria to meet the UN recommendation, it will require 523,105 police officers in all, with none among them deployed to guard VIPs.
Former President Muhammadu Buhari had directed that police personnel attached to unauthorised persons and VIPs be withdrawn and deployed for core security duties in 2015. The presidential order was met with haphazard compliance.
“We could not sustain the enforcement of the order on the withdrawal of policemen attached to unqualified persons in the country because of lack of funds,” the Chairman of the Police Service Commission, Mike Okiro, said in 2018. This is an untenable excuse.
In 2018, the then IG, Ibrahim Idris, ordered the withdrawal of police officers attached to VIPs countrywide. However, the officers found themselves back with the VIPs shortly after.
In 2020, the Katsina Governor, Aminu Masari, lamented that 30 police officers were providing security for 100 villages “with only 10 guns” in the state.
While Egbetokun focuses on the safety of VIPs, Nigerians suffer at the hands of criminals – serial victims of kidnapping, robberies, banditry and murder.
The Missing Persons Platform Nigeria recorded in 2024 that over 50 per cent of missing persons in Africa are from Nigeria.
The latest report by the International Committee of the Red Cross says more than 23,659 Nigerians are still missing, leaving 13,595 families in deep pain.
Despite Nigeria’s poor security profile, successive governments and police leaderships have been incapable or unwilling to enforce the withdrawal of officers assigned to the VIPs.
It is disturbing that, rather than creatively seeking strategies to secure the people, the police would unashamedly assign about one-third of their officers to duties outside their core mandate.
The special protection unit and others have been reportedly monetised with officers serving as guards and escorts to politicians, businesspersons, celebrities and even persons of shady character who can afford to pay for their services.
Shockingly, the Force appears to have ceded its traditional duty of providing internal security against insurgents to the military.
Tellingly, Okiro condemned a situation where police officers are still attached to persons who held political offices more than a decade after leaving office. This is preposterous.
This also portrays the police as a Force only loyal to the government and not the people. Privileged Nigerians should employ private bodyguards. This brazen hijack of state security resources must end. Special licences can be issued to verified private security outfits to allow their operatives to carry arms for VIP protection.
Therefore, Egbetokun must give the teeth to his 2023 and 2025 orders for the withdrawal of police officers assigned to VIPs. He must complement this with the re-training of the redeployed officers and the entire workforce.
The country is embroiled in unabated kidnapping and killings that have caused President Donald Trump to name it “a Country of Particular Concern”. Withdrawing officers from VIPs to provide security for the people should be one of the critical ways to snap out of its inglorious labelling and global attention.
It is obvious from the multiple challenges besetting the police that instituting a reform of the Force and a review of the Police Act are the only way out.
The police chief should break away from the past and police the people, and not a privileged few.
