The most fervent wish of many occupiers of political positions is to acquire the capacity to have uniformed servants of the State at their beck and call, as watchdogs, or better still, as attack dogs. Nothing pleases a Nigerian politician – and increasingly other people of importance – better than to have a battery of police personnel, tagging behind or beside him, to protect him from the other members of the society, especially from enemies, whom he might have garnered through several dubious acts of commission or omission. The number of men and women in uniform, who tag along an individual is now becoming a barometer for measuring the level of importance of such an individual.

The inability of most state governors to pocket the police commands in their states or to have their rank and file at their beck and call, in the true guise of their appellation as ‘chief security officers’, has resulted in the keen clamour for the state police, across the country. The way it is now, as has been amply dramatised by the situation in Rivers State, is definitely going to further raise the decibel of this agitation, even though most Nigerians as well as the amenders of the Constitution seem not to have found favour with the clamour for state police forces.

However, there are many people, who believe that hankering after the protection by uniformed men and women is often a clear announcement that you have something that you have done that has kept you in the constant fear of your kind. Otherwise, how would such leaders like Mr. Peter Obi of Anambra State always feel free and safe to mingle with all manners of people – on the street, in the church, at gatherings, at airports or motor-parks – with the minimum accompaniment of a battery of security details? He had once said if he had his way, which security agencies have refused to allow him, he would never want any policeman around him. His reason is that Nigeria had not yet got to – and might never get – to a stage where the people, who had freely elected you as their leader would turn around to harm you, if you were doing what they elected you to do. In other words, he was saying that wrongdoing often haunted and giave birth to the feeling of insecurity.

Yet the Nigerian State has always found it absolutely necessary to provide police – and even other military – security around people that occupy executive and other crucial political offices, which is the way it should be, even though there are those who feel that there are too many of our policemen deployed to individuals that too few of them are left to police the ordinary Nigerian and his property.

Significantly, while most of these political bosses have often bought their way into the hearts of these uniformed men around them with their huge security votes, and have often in that process, compelled them to carry out all their wishes, even illegal ones, there have been among police those with the minds of their own, great commitment to their oaths of office and are sticklers for their professional code of conduct. In other words, not every police officer, would in disregard of his or her professional code, indulge in the type of shameful act that the world watched Governor Amaechi’s ADC re-enact ‘live’ in Port Harcourt last week.

And there is no doubt, that in their attempt to serve the State rather than their bosses, many police officers often come into conflict with their political bosses, who instantly deploy the massive organs of information available to them, to advertise the otherwise professional police officers as villains. It is in this light that the constant face-off between the commissioners of police in some states and governors should be seen and interpreted, which is not to say that some political bosses have always cried wolf. In the ongoing case of Rivers State, the fact that the commissioner of police was publicly trading words on television and in the newspapers with the governor looked untidy and leaves much to the desired. There are, however, those who have also argued that being human, the officer might have been provoked to the limit of his endurance and into losing his professional guard and composure and into vituperating like a politician.

It would be important to observe that the unfading wish of some state governors to put the heads of the police commands in their states into their pockets would progressively remain unsuccessful because, increasingly the Nigeria Police Force is being peopled with officers with good education as well high intellectual and administrative capacities  and who tend to see what they consider as undue interference and overt dictation from governors as irritating and go out to resist them, in accordance to the dictates of their conscience and professional codes of conduct. This is in tandem with the greater respectability which the current administration in the Force is bringing to its rank and file with its insistence on greater discipline and professionalism.

The police bosses in the states are said to be often miffed that some governors and other political leaders would expect them to become embroiled in the several political crises that are brewed in their states and in the process diminish their capacity to police the entire state as they should do. Many people in the Police suspect that the current face-off between Governor Rotimi Amaechi and the Commissioner of Police, Mr. Mbu Joseph Mbu of Rivers State, might be a result of the firm refusal of the police boss to be used to settle political scores or to carry the dirty cans left behind by political gladiators in the state. There is a generalized impression in the Police that the service record of Mr. Mbu J. Mbu would never pass him off as a bad officer, morally or professionally, the altercations in Port Harcourt, hardly withstanding.

Mr. Mbu is being pained as a cheap villain being used by the opponents of Governor Amaechi in the charged political battles against him. Everywhere in Nigeria now, Mr. Mbu is on the lips of people who have been massively influenced against him as a villain and an unprofessional policeman who has been suborned by some inclement quarters to do Governor Amaechi and his supporters in. In that process, powerful quarters like the House of Representatives have openly passed a resolution, calling for his removal, even as the Senate, in their characteristic show of greater maturity called for a restraint in the crucifixion of a man who might after all, be a scapegoat or a mere victim of circumstances. The way it is now, not even the members of our vibrant media seem interested in listening to Mbu’s side of the story.

It might interest the world to know that the bad image of Compol Mbu’s standing being currently created in the mind of the general public is not shared among his colleagues and his bosses in the Police. Rather than write him off as unprofessional and incompetent, my investigations have it that Joseph Mbu is being regarded as one of the finest officers in the Force by the way he is said to have acquitted, carried himself and performed his functions since his enlistment in the Force in 1984. It would be no hyperbole to state that the Police High Command currently regards the Rivers State Police Commissioner as one of its finest officers. And this view is said to be shared outside the Force and even in the least expected of quarters – from highly placed politicians and the colleagues of the Rivers State elected legislators who dub Mbu as a villain.

Before assuming as the boss of the Rivers Police command in February this year, Mbu was the police boss in Oyo State since August 2012, where he reportedly left commendable footprints in different aspects of policing, especially in crime fighting, such that it was impossible for all and sundry not to have noticed. I was physically present at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua centre early this year, when IGP Abubakar was launching the Police Code of Conduct for the Police, when Senator Abiola Ajimobi, the governor of Oyo State was there in person to publicly hail Mbu. At the live-televised event the Oyo governor, unprompted, had declared that Mr. Mbu Joseph Mbu was one of the finest police officers he had seen in his life! That was the first time most Nigerians were hearing of him.

Two months later and after his transfer to Rivers State, the clerk of the Oyo State Legislature, on the instruction of the speaker, reportedly sent a letter to the Inspector General of Police, noting, “…The good work done by the former Commissioner of Police (CP) Mbu Joseph Mbu, posted to Oyo State in fighting and deterring crime, hereby ensuring safety of lives and property within the short period he held sway in the Police Command in Oyo State”.

The March 19th, 2013 letter signed by Barrister P.I. Bankole further requested the IGP to release Mbu to attend a special sitting that the Oyo State House of Assembly was planning to host on his behalf, “…in acknowledgement of his good works…” Of course the IGP proudly obliged and CP Mbu was hosted with copious encomiums at Ibadan.

Before then, Mbu’s qualities had been identified by his former bosses in the Force, resulting in the fact that he was said to have been regarded as an interventionist officer who was reportedly posted to spots and locations where remedial and prompt action was required. The result is that in his 29 years in the Force, he is said to have had more postings than almost every other officer and has served in every zone of the country in different capacities. In 2008, when the Police Education Corps was rocked by seemingly intractable crises, he was reportedly promoted and redeployed from Anambra State where he was serving as the Assistant Commissioner of Police in charge of Administration to head the troubled corps. He did not only straighten things out there, but was said to have further brought about remarkable changes which included the establishment of more police secondary schools. In his usual creative character, he reportedly negotiated with the “Books for Africa” project through which he travelled to Atlanta Georgia (USA) and ferried-in more than N300 million worth of free books which were distributed to Police schools.

Soon after, when the current reform-minded IGP MD Abubakar assumed office and noticed that the image and operational methods of the Police Mobile Force were begging for a cleansing, it was on Joseph Mbu that he reportedly beckoned to do the needful, which he was said to have again accomplished without a blemish. It was from there, in August 2012, that he was posted to Oyo State as the Commissioner.  Reportedly, one of his earliest duties was to refurbish and literally rebuild ten abandoned Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs) which were said to have been abandoned for over five years in addition to refurbishing other 18 unserviceable vehicles and putting them back to work. His crime fighting record there, as in other places, has been adjudged to be almost unequalled.

Having held almost all aspects of police duties, coupled with his second upper degree qualification in political science from one of the nations’ premier universities, it would be impossible to fault his understanding of Nigeria’s political terrain as well as the activities and behavioural patterns of Nigeria’s political actors. Hailing from the nearby Cross River State, Mbu could not have been a stranger to the politics of Rivers State and that must have informed the neutral posture which he adopted and which he is currently being blamed for a party to the quarrels in the state.

Squabbles and misunderstanding are regular and inalienable components of democratic politics and are not absent even in the climes whose systems have matured more than ours. The sour aspect of our own system, however, is that political practitioners have refused to find ways of striking a balance and making a distinction between the ephemeral and shifting interests of politicians and the governments they control from the permanent interests of the State, its agencies and apparatuses, to which the Police and other security agencies belong. Governments come and go, and are formed and dissolved but the State and its agencies, like the Police will remain, growing from strength to strength, if nurtured, to cater to the interests of all, to both the political and apolitical.

It is, therefore, to the interest of all Nigerians that no political interest is allowed to rubbish the legacies of the agencies of the State but to rather support their growth and maturity. That is why every Nigerian should see it as a patriotic duty to support the ongoing reforms in the Police Force and ensure that those who are found to be the products and proof that the reforms are working should be made stronger, not weakened. The society should not allow the likes of Compol Mbu Joseph Mbu who are generally seen as models in the Police Force to become the scapegoats or victims of fleeting political interests.

In the same way, the likes of Mbu should examine their conscience and ensure that they do not, in the advice of a Nigerian proverb, start learning how to be left-handed in adulthood. If Mbu departs from the path of rectitude for which the Force and his colleagues know him, it would be unfortunate and become akin to having started off like a rocket, only to fall like a feather.

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Posted in Nigerian Newspapers. A DisNaija.Com network.

Source: The Sun Newspaper

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