AS an undergraduate at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akoka, Yaba, I had a friend who was very funny. He was gifted in twisting words to suit a particular purpose. He is in the United States now and we still get in touch regularly.He would look for an adjective beginning with the same letter with someone's name to describe you and he would do it effortlessly.He would always say: bad Benjamin, garrulous Gab, ridiculous Rico, terrible Tony, muddy Mukaila, etc.During one of our lectures ' Comparative Analysis - he told our lecturer that there was no difference between Oregon in the United States (U.S.) and Oregun in Ikeja, Lagos but that Whites value life while Blacks waste life.We all laughed but since I started going to the West years ago, anytime I travelled and I returned to the country, I always wonder why we Blacks have decided to perpetually continue to make life unbearable for fellow human beings due to the total disregard for the sanctity of life. The aura of sanctity for everything that is good, valuable and precious is lacking in this part of the world.It is not as if Nigeria is the only country where crime abounds. Far from it. According to my UNILAG friend, as it is in Oregon, so, it is in Oregun. Crimes are also being committed in the U.S. and other Western countries just like it is in Nigeria.Accidents happen in other climes and there are also mad men who can go haywire any second but the only difference between those climes and here is that there is a system in place which is effective with enough capacity to deal with any situation.At least, the world watched when Dominique Strauss-Khan was arrested in New York over a crime in which a suspect would be given a chieftaincy title in Nigeria.Strauss-Khan was one of the most powerful people in the world. As the boss of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he was feared by many countries because he decided their fate. But, because a maid shouted rape, two policemen just got him arrested and handcuffed him without recourse to the Governor of New York State or even the police boss.It is like two policemen from Amukoko Police Station walking up to any of our billionaires to get him arrested because somebody shouted rape. How will that happen in Nigeria' I was in the U.S. last month and as usual, stories of man's inhumanity to man abounded throughout my state in God's Own Country but there was no incident that the instrument of state did not rise up to immediately.On Saturday, September 17, a lady, Cindy Nguyen, was kidnapped by a parolee and killed in a garage in a residential area of San Jose. Nobody reported the matter to the police before they swung into action immediately. Paul Ray Castillo, who had earlier shot another man at a gas station, was immediately named as the suspect and he was declared wanted. Castillo was arrested hours later.On Sunday September 18, Jeremiah Fogle, 57, fatally shot his wife at their Florida home and then burst through the front door of a nearby Greater Faith Christian Centre Church in Lakeland, shooting and wounding a pastor and associate pastor before parishioners tackled him. Policemen arrived minutes later to arrest him. A day before, Trell Thomas, on his 26th birthday, waited on the street for the No. 71 bus to take him home at Mount Vernon Square in Northwest, by the famous Carnegie Library and the Convention Centre when about 10 youths surrounded him and started beating him, apparently with the intention to snatch the leather suitcase he was carrying. He told the Washington Post: 'At least, six were hitting me. Every time I got away from one fist, there was another one. I said, 'Please, please stop.' I was almost choking on blood.'Thomas was eventually rescued by a transit police officer at the Mount Vernon Square Metro Station and hours later, the boys were arrested.On September 18, a lone accident involving a middle-aged man happened in Baltimore, Maryland. He died in the accident and policemen got to the spot in minutes, with a back-up by men of the Maryland Fire Service. The scene was shown live on local television stations and the corpse was taken to the mortuary immediately. The policemen were also shown going to the man's house to inform his family members. My wife was impressed with the efficiency and respect for life shown by the officers within minutes of the accident.To show that crime does not pay, on September 16, a Washington D.C. Superior Court Judge, William M. Jackson, went beyond sentencing guidelines and ordered a Hyattsville resident, Raylen D. Wilkerson, to serve 21 years in prison in the planned robbery of an alleged drug dealer in Southeast Washington.What angered Jackson was that Wilkerson was on probation at the time of the shooting for dealing in cocaine and that he had a previous gun-possession conviction.Jackson also did not spare a police officer, Reginald Jones, Arvel Crawford, Jarvis Clark and Roshun M. Parker who were part of the planned robbery. The same day, Justice Gerald Fisher of a D.C. Superior Court ordered that Larry Seay, a police officer who had earlier been dismissed for sexual assault, be placed on electronic monitoring until his next hearing. Seay was accused of assaulting three women while on duty as a 3rd Police District patrol officer and one of the women was arrested for sexual solicitation.Seay's lawyer, Stephen Cooper of the District's Public Defender Service, argued that his client had been suspended from the force and was about to be terminated after 18 years. He asked Fisher to release Seay from electronic monitoring but the judge refused.Also on September 16, President Barack Obama demonstrated the reason Americans are ever ready to die for their country when he personally decorated Marine Sergeant Dakota Meyer who defied the orders of his superiors while on duty in a remote province in eastern Afghanistan, raced into a killing zone and rescued trapped 36 U.S. and Afghan troops.Obama awarded him the Medal of Honour, the military's highest honour, at the White House.From the real-life stories narrated above, it is obvious that the American system is not ready, at any point in time, to condone any breakdown of law and order from any quarter or individual, no matter how highly placed. At least, the Strauss-Khan incident proved this.But, what do we have here'I am sure millions of Nigerians would have been embarrassed (not shocked since it is no longer news to them) with Tuesday's revelation from the Chairman of the Police Service Commission (PSC), DIG Parry Osayande (rtd) that 100,000 Nigerian policemen carry handbags for wives of some moneybags.He said regrettably, only 230,000 were left to police 150 million Nigerians.Osayande attributed failure to plan and lack of vision as some of the problems confronting the force, insisting that corruption had assumed a great dimension and seemed to have been institutionalised, as some officers and men who engaged in the practice had been found to collude with and, sometimes, shield criminals, rather than prevent crimes. Some policemen, according to him, had been found to facilitate the escape of criminals from lawful custody, obtain money from suspects for closure of case files or to derail the cause of justice, escort contraband, steal from suspects and accident victims and supply police weapons and uniforms to criminals. Osayande is not far from the truth on the decay in the system if a report from a national newspaper is anything to go by.Sergeant Mathew Julius or Inspector S. Edo (real name Timothy Adigun) was dismissed from the Nigeria Police Force in 1991 for performing illegal duties but for 20 years, he was still operating with his uniform and extorting money from Nigerians until he was arrested two months ago in Ibadan.In addition to extortion, the Ogbomoso-born Adigun reportedly formed a three-man gang with two others, Tunji and Jimoh, and were robbing people of their motorcycles, while pretending to have arrested them. Also, Adigun made sure that he promoted himself anytime he heard that his course mates in the police force had been promoted, hence his rank as an Inspector, although he was dismissed as a Constable.What type of a system would have allowed this impunity to happen' Nothing can be more shocking than the report published by the Nigerian Compass on October 5 about the Chief Security Officer (CSO) to Governor Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara State, Ibrahim Bamuche, a Superintendent of Police, missing.The Police Commissioner, Tambari Muhammed, said detectives located Bamuche's car burnt at a spot in Jos, Plateau State but could not find the body.He then said something shocking: Three corpses were found at a grave very close to where his car was burnt. Who are the three persons whose bodies were exhumed' This has shown the type of insecurity in the country. I remember an incident more than 10 years ago when the torso of a boy was discovered in London. Scotland Yard detectives came to Nigeria because of this just to unravel the mystery behind the killing. They even named the unknown victim Boy Adam.Last week, one Ezekiel Ayah was killed in cold blood by some hoodlums in Dopemu, Lagos. Despite the fact that these hoodlums had been reported to the police many times by elders in the area because of their violent ways, nothing has been done.The total disregard for human comfort and life is also responsible for the current debate on the planned removal of fuel subsidy. The government has accused almost everybody but itself of being a member of the cabal stealing billions of naira monthly all in the name of fuel subsidy but to name those benefitting from this scheme has become a problem.Are we going to continue to run this country this way'In the midst of this confusion, a former member of the House of Representatives, Patrick Obahiagbon, told Nigerians to take their destinies in their hands by resisting the attempt to remove the subsidy.In his own characteristic way of speaking, he said: 'I have read with acatalectic disgust, governments asinine and puerile ratiocinations attempting to justiceate the proposed removal of subsidies from petroleum products. It has asseverated that it's intentions is guided by the need to checkmate the odoriferous excesses of a machiavellian and mephistophelean cabal and I have said to myself, what a shame' What a self-indicting admittal of the failure of governance' What an hocus-pocus' What an anathematous disdain for it's citizenry' Must the people now bear the brunt for governments ineptitude, inefficiency and pusillanimity in squaring up with these economic philistines and fat cows' I feel even more nauseated and vexed that the Governors Forum has posthaste conferred an apocalyptic imprimatur on this genie. Let's not forget that majority of these same governors had earlier called for this state of affairs as a condition sine qua non for paying the minimum wage. What an opprobrium'What a deprecable descent from the sublime to the ridiculous' It's up to us all to put this presidential and gubernatorial genie back into the bottle but are we prepared
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