The first thing a first time visitor to the Southern part of Nigeria will notice, besides the ubiquitous bad roads, is that there are security checks at almost every other kilometre of the road.
The road blocks are mostly manned by squads of police officers and a mix of police and military officers. The checkpoints also vary from point to point. Police officers in the South East use unsophisticated barriers like tree branches, logs and old tyres and tar barrels to barricade the road at such close intervals that they turn the road into a snaky, single lane.
Face value
At such checkpoints, the officers on duty first mentally size up the passengers. “If you look innocent, you are left to go. But if they don’t like your face, they will ask you to come down and ask you questions like ‘where are you coming from or where are you going to?’ and then demand for your license and registration documents,” Emeka Ngwu, a taxi driver in Enugu, said.
“Sometimes they ask every passenger to step down and they go in to search the vehicle. Some other times, they ask the driver and passengers to spread their arms apart while they search their body too.” Mr. Ngwu added.
The checks are ostensibly to fish out suspected criminals, especially kidnappers, so the efforts to secure the region. Yet, despite the heavy presence of security officers on all the main roads in the area, the south-east still remains, according to the police, the most insecure place to live in Nigeria.
“Those are the areas where we have the highest incidence of kidnapping right now,” Emmanuel Ojukwu, the national public relations officer of the Nigeria Police Force, said an interview with NEXT. “Now, we have isolated cases of kidnapping in some part of this country. But we have a preponderance in the South (East): Anambra, Imo, Abia (and) Edo state.”
Extortion or Security?
Drivers and other road users on these routes however said the officers that man these checkpoints do more than security checks. They say the officers are more inclined to intimidate, harass and extort money from them.
Linus Obum, who has been a commercial bus driver in Aba, a commercial city in Abia State, for more than 10 years, said it has almost become part of his daily routine to always put money aside for police officers at checkpoints.
“I drive Aba to PH (Port Harcourt) and sometimes to Owerri and I share at least N1000 to police officers at checkpoints on each trip,” he said. “If you no give them, they go waste our time sotee (till) your passengers go drop enter another bus.”
Mr. Obum claimed his dilemma is shared by every other bus or taxi driver in the region. At such checkpoints, the commercial drivers stop for either the bus conductor or the driver to run to a nearby patrol van with money in his hands and pay an officer sitting in the van, a ransom that allows them to progress to the next checkpoint where the ritual is repeated.
Are they effective?
Figures of security breaches across the nation question the efficacy of these checkpoints security-wise. Hillary Ugwuanyi, 42, a resident of Enugu, said the police pose more threat to the residents than even the criminals they claim to guard against.
“They can open fire on a civilian for just N20 at a checkpoint but disappear at the slightest appearance of criminals,” he said. “Most times, I wonder if they are paid to protect us or intimidate and extort us civilians.” Mr. Ojukwu, the police spokesman, however said the officers were doing their job well, especially in combating kidnappers. He also said the police have other crime combating strategies beyond road blocks.
“We have a number of cases whereby where we notice the demeanour on somebody, we subject the person to search and we have been able to rescue some victims, even along the roads,” he said.
“When they pick somebody (the kidnappers), they may not necessarily pass the main road. They can use foot paths or some routes which police are not manning. But that notwithstanding, we have rescued so many victims and we have arrested so many kidnappers and we shall keep arresting then.”
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