By Lucky Okoedion
The failure of the Nigerian Police Force’s SARS project is a textbook example of what a flawed corporate governance structure and culture can cause to an institution, and by extension, a state or nation. Particularly when we mirror and project the lessons unto a broader context.
We learn that a government unknowingly derails nation building and escalates secessionist agitations when it makes peaceful protests which are a form of citizen participation in a democracy impossible by unleashing the “dogs” of the state upon the citizens who the soldiers and police ought to defend even when they are protesting against the government.
We see parallels between the absence of government at the grassroots that made it easy for Northern Nigerian youths to be recruited into bandit groups and Boko Haram, and the faulty federal structure that bred the problems that led to the #EndSars protests. And in both scenarios, the question is the same:
We ask, how many Northern Nigerian youths would have to be killed in order to end banditry and Boko Haram, given that the more you kill, the more the numbers that are purportedly being recruited by the bandits and terrorists to replenish their fold? And, how many Southern Nigerian youth protesters would have to be brutalized, arrested and massacred in order to avoid another #EndSars protests, given that the suppressed protesters simply gravitate into something worse – the secessionist movements?
We wonder, why don’t we solve the long list of the root cause of the problem instead? Of which the fact is that those #Endsars protests in which I was a key participant, before it metamorphosed into a means of expressing divers forms of frustration by mostly southern Nigerian youths and before it was allegedly hijacked by state and federal government sponsored hoodlums, infiltrated by other politicians and foreign forces, it was originally purely about the corruption and abuse of power, human right violations, robbery and extra judicial killings perpetuated by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad(SARS) unit of the Nigerian police force, mostly in states in Southern Nigeria. And as such, it was an open condemnation of the rot that had become of a very sensitive institution – the Nigerian Police Force – whose situation is a perfect example of what has become of the whole of Nigeria as a nation.
We observe that the same problems – institutional corruption flowing from top to bottom such that there were allegations of top police officers at the federal level getting kickbacks from funds stolen by SARS from their victims, a laid back system of police service with no measurable key performance indicators, no quality assurance and performance targets, no culture of continuous innovation to constantly adapt to new and global best practices, heavy reliance on allocation of resources, intelligence and vision from a federal command in Abuja before subunits can evolve and adapt to local challenges, laws filled with lacunas, a 1999 constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria that seems divorced from current realities and is almost impossible to amend due to ridiculous clauses like having the 36 states houses of Assembly voting to approve some changes that the National Assembly ought to be able to amend alone, and the resultant counterproductive bureaucratic bottlenecks – which led to the failures of that SARS unit of the Nigerian Police Force, and by extension the failure of the force itself are the same problems facing the nation as a whole.
We saw that while the #Endsars hashtag trended, other hashtags like #EndNigeria soon followed because before you spend a few minutes brainstorming on how to solve the SARS problem, you soon realize that it is a much bigger “Nigeria problem”.
And now we fear that the problems listed above that led to poor corporate governance within the Nigerian Police Force which in turn caused so much failure within that institution that Nigerian youths had to rise up to demand the end of SARS, are the same problems that could lead to the same Nigerian youths and elders rising up some day to demand the end of Nigeria as a nation, if care is not taken.
We know that the world operates on a principle of cause and effect. You cannot plant social injustice and bad governance and expect to reap a united and prosperous nation.
So, I recommend that all state governments, the federal Government and other custodians of the Nigerian project will only be able to steer this nation out of the current and unprecedented existential threats facing it by adopting a thought model that sees the Nigerian nation as the SARS unit of the Nigerian police force but one that is at few months prior to the #endsars protests. Then we quickly answer the question of “What could we have done proactively to remedy the above listed corporate governance flaws that led to the failure of the SARS unit of the Nigerian police force, so that we can quickly apply same to the nation to avoid the impending #EndNigeria uprising?”
Take note that the question I recommend is NOT “How could we have averted the #EndSars protest?”. I didn’t feature the protests in the question because the protest is not the problem, rather, the above listed corporate governance flaws that led to the failure of SARS is the problem. This paradigm shift is crucial. And it is saddening to see key government players more concerned about how to avert the next protest instead of focusing on how to avert the next systemic failure that leads to the protests.
Hence, reasoning with the thought model that draws an intersection between Effective Governance, Active Citizen Participation and Nation-Building in the light of the #EndSars protests shows that asking the right questions and appropriating the lessons from the #Endsars protests in Nigeria as a whole are the key to solving so many of our current problems as a nation because the problems all have our ineffective governance structure and governance culture as their catalysts at least, or as their root cause at most.
Lucky Okoedion is a believer of a New Nigeria where true democracy is practiced. He is on Twitter and Instagram as @luckyokoedion
