1st September, 2014
Kazeem Ugbodaga
A lawyer with the Lagos State Ministry of Justice, Mr. Muheeb Abdul-Fatai, has explained why he wrote a book about the Nigeria Police and the criminal justice system.
Abdul Fatai made this disclosure at the launching of the book titled: The Police in Criminal Justice Administration in Nigeria, held at the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management House, Alausa, Lagos, Southwest Nigeria.
“My choice of writing on the topic of the book that has just been presented today is not unconnected with my experience as a public defender. For the few years I worked in the Office of the Public Defender, which spanned about six years, I saw a whole lot of horrendous attitudes in our criminal justice sector on the part of most men of the Nigeria Police, most of which I have dealt with in the book.
“So, it has always been my feelings that some of these horrendous attitudes of some members of the police are dissected in a lucid, reformative and useful manner, even though I was not contemplating writing a book on them at that time,” he said.
Delivering the keynote address at the occasion, former Commissioner for the Environment, Dr. Muiz Banire, said while the necessity of having a police force could not be over-emphasised, the confidence of an average Nigerian in the force might require some examination as the institution was not immune to certain ills facing the society. “The complaints of corruption, inefficiency and decay daily stare us in the face while the failure of the system to effectively kit an average police officer and guarantee his welfare cannot be downplayed,” he said.
According to him, “the dilapidation in capacity of officers and governmental insincerity have both combined to question the relevance of the police in society. Has the police force outlived its relevance that in many cases of civil disturbance we flippantly deploy the soldiers?”
Banire argued that the horrible in all was the confinement of police officers to the police stations, as the most civil of all actions was now being assigned to soldiers and men of the Civil Defence Corps.
“Rather than allowing the police to conduct monitoring of elections as purely civil activities, we have brought the military in and we have gotten the horrors most compounded. The Nigerian system has not been fair to the police and we have all manners of uniformed men taking over what should be the traditional role of the police in criminal justice administration.”