Only God, the master creator himself, can now prevent Nigeria from becoming the greatest fictional reality of all time. There is no other way of framing our impossible factual existence except to resort to oxymoron. To be sure, Nigeria is for real. But most of the time, it feels like a great horror movie from an overweening imagination. Eerily unnerving is an understatement.
Lawrence Anini, arguably Nigeria’s most fabled and celebrated armed robber, was known to have uttered the above as the bullets came for him. Despite his evident bravery and reputation for coldblooded cruelty, Anini became a jelly when finally confronted by the inevitability of violent death at the stakes. Yet this was the same barely lettered brigand who sent the entire Nigerian military state into a major panic mode at the high noon of his brigandage.
In an infamous nocturnal encounter with one of Anini’s adjutants, a serving police commissioner had his jaw blasted by a shot gun requiring consummate surgical reconfiguration of his buccal cavity. Even the ruling military junta knew they were not dealing with an ordinary criminal. After a security briefing the military president, Ibrahim Babangida, collared the Inspector General of Police and served him a public query: “My friend, where is Anini?” Babangida rumbled.
It was Etim Inyang last query in uniform. He was ousted the same week. Almost three decades after, another Anini saga is unfolding in chillingly similar circumstances. It will be recalled that Anini and his gang did not go down alone. They took with them a prime functionary of the Nigerian state; a high-ranking police officer.
Deputy Superintendent George Iyamu hunted with the hound and ran with the hares. While ostensibly hunting down Anini and his accomplices, he was also in bed with them, leaking vital information which allowed them to stay one step ahead of the authorities. He was a sadistic executioner.T
On one particular occasion, a swashbuckling and gun-cradling George Iyamu had arrived at his favourite beer parlour in Benin with the boot of his car dripping with blood. He then accosted his fawning adulators to have their pick of the bush meat he had brought. The boot was stacked with fresh corpses.
When he was eventually outed, George Iyamu also developed cold feet at the stakes, wailing and cursing his Benin cohorts for betraying their illustrious son. Three decades after the Anini-Iyamu saga, history seems to be repeating itself but in reverse order and as a consuming tragedy. This time, it is not a provincial run of the mill police officer but the nation’s favourite cop who seems to have gone rogue.
Before his current interdiction, Abba Kyari was easily the nation’s most admired and highly decorated police officer as well as the iconic poster boy for crime busting at its most threatening and violence-suffused level. Tales of his derring-do abound as well as paeans to his outstanding personal bravery and unflappable calmness in the face of enemy fire.
In the end, character is fate. Nothing in modern history can beat that terse summation of the ancient Greeks. Your destiny is eventually determined by certain aspects of your personality. The endgame is usually the same but with differing outcome. No person can escape the retribution arising from their character flaws and peccadillos.
The Inspector General of Police is right to ask the indicted officer to step aside while the storm rages. Whichever way it pans out, there can be no way back for the fallen officer. A debauched system can only take so much without caving in. Even for the archetypal come-back kid, there is always a point of no returning.
Nevertheless, this tragedy leaves a sour taste in the mouth. Yours sincerely was one of those willing to swear by Abba Kyari’s name. For many of us, he could do no wrong. What then could have caused such a highly promising young man with a great future in front of him and a sure fire path to the top office in his profession to blow himself and his career up in this extravagant manner?
There was no basis for the plaudits in the first instance, except from deflated denizens of a sick society clutching at any straw available. There were many warning signs that ought to have alerted the wise and wary that a great personal and public tragedy was unfurling. Mr Kyari’s high profiling, his insatiable predilection for the klieg light, his arrant one-upmanship and lack of discretion in associating with people of ambiguous reputation ought to have set the alarm bells ringing.
He had no business becoming a sartorial agent of the loud and boorish social wannabes or a personal enforcer in a private dispute involving two controversial business people. He became a fanatic of the owanbe set, cavorting and gambolling where he ought not to have been seen. A section of the press and the accursed social media lapped it up and egged him on until the celebrated crime-buster was himself sensationally busted.
The end was most dramatic and unusual. The real godfathers never sleep and the alarm bells must have been ringing in the metropole while we went to sleep. Surely it is not entirely out of place for one to expect some of Abba Kyari’s superior officers and institutional minders to have reined him in or talk him out of his gun-toting bravado and vain exhibitionism. But the rot has gone so far that nobody thinks about institutional integrity anymore. Personal survival is the name of the game.
The best cops are usually those who do their work avoiding the limelight and with minimum fuss or funfair. When a superior police officer and celebrated sleuth develops an insatiable knack for self-publicity, then something has gone wrong or is about to go wrong. Yet it is not on record that any of Abba Kyari’s superior officers ticked him off or reprimanded him.
Now that it has taken a retributive and painstakingly punitive organization like the FBI to expose the institutional rot and systemic wreckage of the Nigeria Police Force, we must expect some high-pitched drama in the coming months. The FBI does not take hostages, particularly where the health of the American system is hostilely impacted. Unfortunately, Nigeria is in a very weak position to call their bluff. Not when we are dependent on American goodwill for almost everything.
While he was capering and cantering about, Abba Kyari would have been on the FBI watch list until a certain threshold was reached and a certain line was crossed. But we must know where the rains started beating us. If the truth must be told, the institutional collapse and ethical meltdown of the Nigerian Police Force did not begin yesterday. It dates far beyond Abba Kyari and George Iyamu to the immediate aftermath of the civil war.
This is where we meet Abba Kyari’s professional ancestors in all their felonious antiquity. Sometimes in 1971, Patrick Njovens, a serving superintendent of police of Camerounian extraction, was docked for aiding and abetting an armed robbery that took place in Bacita on the Ilorin-Jebba Road on April, 13th, 1971. With him in the dock was a famous politician of the First Republic, some errant police officers, prosecution witnesses voluntarily described in the judgement as “unreliable and of ignominious character” and an assortment of other post-war confederates.
The haul was nineteen thousand pounds, a very hefty sum in those days. The court heard in details how Felix Dumeh shared the loot and how Patrick Njovens broke alligator pepper and Schnapps gin among the accomplices even as he spoke pidgin English full of heavy hints and esoteric nuances.
All wars are legalised armed robberies. Although Nigeria was beginning to experience a post-civil war boom, some of the pathologies that were to dog the country in the post-bellum epoch were beginning to manifest.
Among these are growing inequality, social insecurity, proliferation of arms and the menace of demobilized soldiers and remaindered field officers who took easily to violent crimes. It was a list that boasted of the infamous Lieutenant Usman, described in the judgement as an arch-robber and the trigger-joyous Sub-lieutenant William Oyazimo.
The phenomenon of state obstruction of justice, police aiding and abetting of criminals to evade justice or render nugatory the outcome of judicial process did not start yesterday even though it can be said to have now reached an industrial level. At a point during the investigation of the Bacita robbery, a unit of CID detectives from Ilorin drew their gun on police officers at Iyaganku, Ibadan when it became obvious they were trying to prevent the arrest of a prime suspect.
This is the sordid and reprehensible culture that has led to the Abba Kyari debacle. An organization that is incapable of thorough self-interrogation is incapable of self-cleansing and internal rectification. Like every other major institution in the land, the police force has succumbed to an institutional meltdown. Without a root and branch reform, it is not going anywhere. The earlier we come to terms with this sober reality, the better for everyone.
For now whether this comprehensive revitalization can be achieved through piecemeal change or incremental reform remains to be seen. There are many out there who believe that the time for the structural re-engineering of Nigeria has come and gone. There is always a tide to all things human and non-human.
But now that he has found himself in a hole, perhaps Abba Kyari should stop digging. His attempts at self-exculpation in the social media are so self-contradictory and evidently dishonest and incompetent to the bargain that they remove the last shred of his aura and mystique as an intelligent super-cop. In the long run, the culture of impunity destroys so completely and without any immunity. Nature eventually sets the limits for a lawless society.
