Muhammad Auta
The Nigerian police referred to them as Special Anti-Robbery Squad. Instead of preventing armed robbery, you will find them falling over themselves in clearly civil matters, such as “two-fighting”, failure to pay one’s debt, including traffic offences. Have you been harassed by a SARS personnel and demanded for your Driver’s licence? If you have not experience that it means you have not plying our highways lately.
Nigerian police needs to overhaul that special branch because one find it difficult to distinguish between them and the Armed robbers, because they are always out of their senses due to the excessive intake of alcohol and other dangerous drugs including the famous marijuana. How do you expect these people to discharge their duties with all the decorum it deserves? They are even worse than the armed robbers.
In a sane society, this group of policemen are the hub of intelligence, where one’s movement alone can be interpreted by them and make meaning out of it. But here, only the misfits in intelligence gathering and other serious police duties are sent to that branch.
Like in Jalingo where I mostly stayed, they go on “Patrol” at 9pm and arrest whoever they come in contact with even in front of your house and tagged you as an armed robber just for you to forcefully caught between N5,000-N10,000 in the name of bail. Where you refused to part with your money, they bundled you to their detention facility and subsequently arraigned you before a magistrate on trump up charges.
The truth of the matter is that, I prefer an armed robber, robbing me than to “bail” myself from SARS.