Nigeria’s uncompromising brand of zero-tolerance policing, dubbed ”Operation Fire for Fire”, came under attack after two innocent students were shot dead.
The pair were killed on Monday after failing to stop at a checkpoint in central Lagos, barely one week after the slaying of a 15-year-old girl sparked a row over the police’s hardline tactics.
The police officers involved in both incidents have been arrested and charged with murder, officials said, but campaigners warn that more incidents are likely unless discipline improves.
”Operation Fire for Fire has not been effectively supervised,” Innocent Chukwuma, director of the Nigerian non-governmental group the Centre for Law Enforcement Education (Cleen), said.
Nigeria’s Inspector General Tafa Balogun introduced Fire for Fire to combat gangs of armed robbers who were operating with impunity and had killed several police officers.
Accurate national figures are almost impossible to come by in Nigeria, but Cleen estimates that police kill up to 1 000 people a year, Chukwuma said.
Some of the killings may have been justified, but with no independent means of monitoring the police, accidental deaths, abuses of power and impromptu executions are inevitable, he argues.
Fire for Fire, which is both an order for police to return fire whenever they are fired upon and an operation putting heavily armed officers on the street, has made things worse, he said.
”Any ad hoc mechanism to check robbers that leads to more contact with the public will lead to an abuse of power if there is no effective supervision,” he said.
Public sympathy has lain mainly with the police in their battle, Chukwuma accepts, but the recent killings have shocked a public that has grown used to street violence and state brutality.
On Saturday night a car carrying four students across a bridge linking Lagos’ exclusive Victoria Island residential and business area to upmarket Ikoyi Island failed to stop at a checkpoint.
At least one policeman opened fire on the car, Lagos police representative Victor Chilaka said, and two of the students, Morakinyo Akerele and Nnambi Ekwuyasi, were killed.
”All the policemen involved have been arrested and detained for the offence of murder,” he said.
One week earlier, 17-year-old Oluwatosin Adelugba was shot dead by a police sergeant who fired on a bus in the north of the city.
Nigerian press reports said that the bus driver had refused to pay a bribe to pass the checkpoint, but national police representative, Haz Iwendi, said that he he had simply failed to stop.
There is no suggestion in either case that any of the young victims had committed an offence or were a danger to the officers.
Politicians have also expressed anger at the deaths and sympathy for the victims’ families.
Lagos governor, Bola Tinubu, opened a computer centre at Adelugba’s school in her memory.
Balogun has also expressed his regret, and his representative vowed that police found to have endangered the public will be punished.
”Anybody who misuses his firearm will not only be disciplined but will also be prosecuted … if it results in murder,” Iwendi said.
”While you cannot rule out human behaviour, it is not force policy (to fire on cars passing checkpoints) and that is why we clamp down heavily on it,” he said.
It was not true, Iwendi said, that incidents had become more common since Balogun announced Fire for Fire.
”The IG has been in office for just over 100 days and there have been two incidents,” he said. Sapa-AFP