One question that should agitate the minds of
politico-historical researchers on Nigeria vis-a-vis our contemporary times is
why there seems to be a wide gulf between how the British system and the
Nigerian law enforcement system treats their respective crime suspects
differently.
Alternatively, an inquisitive mind will wonder why
Nigerians glamourise lynch mob attacks of petty criminals whereas in Britain
suspected criminals relish in near-celebrity attention conferred on them by the
popular media and the humane treatment atleast in the open by the law
enforcement operatives.
This line of inquiry has become necessary because Nigeria
boasts of some political nexus and interconnectedness with Great Britain given
that both nations interacted for well over a century prior to the granting of
political independence to Nigeria from Britain.
Also, the foundation for the current law enforcement
system in Nigeria was laid by the then British Colonial administrators who even
left us with the historical links with their legal system of those days of
Colonialism and indeed the Nigeria Police force owes it's evolution to the
British.
Who does not know that our earliest police operatives are
called POLICE ELIZA (or ELIZABETHAN POLICE)? They were named so because of the
name of the English Monarch Queen Elizabeth. A reading of Professor Chinua
Achebe's magnus opus (classic) 'Things fall Apart' revealed this British
historical foundation of the Nigeria Police force.
Both nations framed their criminal laws to begin with the
assumptions that crime suspects or accused persons remain innocent in the eye
of the law until otherwise proven by a competent courts of law. There are legal
jurisprudence or jurisdictions that looks at suspected criminals as guilty
until proven innocent.
Although Nigeria operates under a written constitution and
Great Britain operates on an unwritten constitution and depends on legally
decided cases as authorities and precedents but Nigeria and the British shares
almost everything in common legally even as their laws are commonly identified
as common laws.
English law from where most of our operational laws were
borrowed, is the Common law legal system which law experts say it governs
England and Wales, comprising Criminal and civil laws. English law has no
formal codification because according to scholars the essence is that it is
made by Judges sitting in courts applying statute, and legal precedents (stare
decisis) from previous cases. In Nigeria, although our laws are made by the
Legislature, Judges especially of the highest Court in the land apply the same
British style of adjudication. So, more or less, both systems have
synergized and operate in harmony atleast on paper.
Speaking about practical law enforcement in Nigeria
essentially, the legal foundation of the contemporary Nigeria Police force is
traceable to the Act that made provisions for the organization, discipline,
powers, and duties of the Police, the Special Constabulary and the Traffic
Wardens of April 1st 1948.
So why do we subject crime suspects under police
custody to odium and are tortured by the same supposed law enforcement agents
paid with tax payer's money to maintain law and order?
A good observer of the law enforcement mechanisms applied
by the law enforcement agencies in Nigeria will suffer CULTURAL SHOCK should
the person travel to Britain and have cause to visit the Police in any part of
Great Britain to notice how so humanely crime suspects are treated by the
British policing institutions.
In Nigeria a child is exposed to the cruelties meted
out by police on crime suspects as if to say that what the wordings of our
constitution said about the innocence of an accused person prior to prosecution
and eventual conviction or acquittal does not matter.
A typical Nigerian Child is groomed by the rest of the
society to believe that what a crime suspects deserve is instant mob justice of
lynching to death and not the constitutionally obligatory criminal trial in the
law courts.
In Nigeria because of the need to graphically portray
crime as evil, we no longer maintain a borderline between stigmatization of
crime but have rushed to hasty conclusion that whomsoever is suspected of
committing a crime no matter how infinitesimal or no matter whether the petty
crime is hunger- induced deserves the ultimate verdict of disgraceful and
public execution by an unruly mob.
A good example is the case of Aluu town in PortHarcourt
Rivers State whereby four innocent Students- Llyold Toku-Mike; Tekena Friday Elkanah; Ugonna Kelechi Ogbuzor; and
Chiadiaka Loroson Biringa, were gruesomely murdered by the villagers over a
mere accusations of attempted theft of laptop. These boys were lynched to death
whilst the police stood by and took no pre-emptive action to forestall the mob
attack. In Kano a lady Evangelist Mrs. Bridget Agbanime (72 years old) was
killed by Islamic fanatics who accuse her of blasphemy even whilst the Nigeria
Police operatives failed to stop this crudity.
But the media of Great Britain currently are reporting
that one of Britain’s most notorious killers, “Moors Murderer” Ian Brady, who
murdered five children with his lover and accomplice, Myra Hindley, during a
sadistic two-year reign of terror in the 1960s died on Monday.
Brady and Hindley were jailed for life in 1966 for
abducting, torturing, sexually abusing and then murdering the children before
burying their young victims on the bleak Saddleworth Moor near the northern
city of Manchester.
Brady died at Ashworth secure hospital in Liverpool, where
he has been housed since 1985 after being diagnosed with paranoid
schizophrenia, aged 79.
“We can confirm a 79-year-old patient in long-term care at
Ashworth High Secure Hospital has died after becoming physically unwell,” a
spokesman for the hospital said.
For many of his last years, Brady had been on intermittent
hunger strike and staff at Ashworth fed him via a tube through the nose on the
grounds he was insane and incapable of deciding to end his own life.
In 2013, a Mental Health Tribunal rejected his request to
return to prison, ruling it was necessary in his interests and for the safety
of others that he remains at Ashworth.
The sadistic nature of the Moors Murderers’ killings made
them among the most despised figures in Britain.
Brady was found guilty of snatching and killing
12-year-old John Kilbride, Edward Evans, 17, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, while
Hindley was convicted of murdering Downey and Evans and shielding her lover in
the third case.
In the 1980s, the couple admitted abducting and murdering
16-year-old Pauline Reade on her way to a Manchester disco in 1963 and killing
Keith Bennett, 12, in 1964.
They were finally caught when Hindley’s brother-in-law
tipped off police
During their trial the court heard tape recordings made by
the couple of their victims pleading for mercy before they were tortured and
killed.
One tape featured the voice of Downey, filled with pain
and fear, whimpering: “I want to see my mummy. Please God, help me.”
Although their crimes took place 40 years ago, the
revulsion felt by Britons and the hatred directed at them by the tabloid press
hardly diminished.
Hindley was Britain’s longest serving female prisoner when
she died in 2002 after 36 years in jail.
Successive UK governments had refused to release her
despite her claims she had reformed and was driven to commit the murders by the
psychopathic Brady. He insisted she was as much to blame.
Hindley had tried to court favour by helping police to
find the missing body of Bennett. But despite exhaustive searches, his body has
never been found.
When she was cremated, a banner which read “Burn in hell”
was left outside the building. This report by a British press shows how so
humanely the most notorious criminal was treated by the British law enforcement
system.
Mr. Khalid Masood a Moslem Convert, the lone wolf
terrorist who knifed a policeman in Westminster to death on Saturday May 13th
2017 after running over dozens of pedestrians in Central London, was attended
to humanely by medical staff after he was shot by the police just before he
gave up the ghost.
Watching the medical persons attending to this mass
murderer made me wonder what his fate would have been if he was in Nigeria.
He would have been shot severally to make sure he stands
no fighting chance of making it alive.
Also the situation of custodial maintenance of crime
suspects in Nigeria is primitive.
In Nigeria prisoners are caged in the most despicable and
decrepit contraptions called Nigerian prisons whereby they either die of
disease afflictions of bodily harm, physical and psychological torture or if
they form part of the remnants who survive these torture camps, they will
emerge back into the society looking like sickly zombies.
*Emmanuel Onwubiko is head of the Human Rights Writers
Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) and blogs @www.emmanuelonwubiko.com; www
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