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In 2020, at the height of the #EndSARS protest, one of our core demands was an improvement in police salary and welfare. We demanded that police officers be paid a reasonable wage, housed in habitable barracks, and retired with reasonable pensions. I remember creating those graphics, watching them go viral on Twitter (now X). And we got bullets and teargas in return.
It is not often that you find someone publicly defending the welfare of his persecutors. But in staging a protest demanding improved welfare for Nigerian police officers, Omoyele Sowore may have demonstrated one of the highest form of civil maturity. The same police that has hunted him from his university days through his adult activism, arrested him, brutalized him in many occasions. Yet, he took to the streets today, to remind the government that even its most errant arm deserves better. It takes uncommon courage and clarity of principle to do so. I commend him for that.
In 2020, at the height of the #EndSARS protest, one of our core demands was an improvement in police salary and welfare. We demanded that police officers be paid a reasonable wage, housed in habitable barracks, and retired with reasonable pensions. I remember creating those graphics, watching them go viral on Twitter (now X). And we got bullets and teargas in return.
The Nigerian police is a broken institution partly because of the rot that defines its internal conditions. Their barracks are, in many places, unfit for human habitation. They are cesspools, filthy, leaking, and dehumanizing. No rational government should expect decency from people subjected to such institutional squalor. Their salaries are a national insult; barely enough to sustain a family, let alone match the demands of a job that carries the weight of life and death decisions. With irregular payments, lack of insurance, no psychological support, and humiliating retirement benefits.
There is a psychology to violence. When you hand an underpaid, undertrained, and underappreciated man a loaded weapon and tell him to protect the public, what you are creating is a slow-burning crisis wrapped in uniform. The poverty within the system clings to their uniforms, reflects in their appearance, and vibrates in their interactions with the public. It is why roadblocks became extortion points. It is why police stations have become bribe collection centers. When there is no proper welfare, the rifle becomes a tool for robbery instead of protecting lives and properties. And no one is safe in that kind of system. Not the ordinary citizen like me.
It is precisely because of this smelly structure that many police officers prefer VIP attachments to real police work. Being a messenger boy for politicians, celebrities or anyone who can afford their service. After all, opening car doors and holding briefcases are more lucrative than policing the public. It provides tips, soft cash, sometimes even long-term settlement. What this means is that the Nigerian police force has, unofficially, created a parallel system where policing becomes transactional. You are not paid to serve and protect. You are expected to hustle. A friend of mine once had a case and went to the nearest police station. He was told there were no officers available because they had all gone on ‘official assignments.’
The rot continues into retirement. After 35 years of service, police officers are rewarded with pensions that can barely sustain six months of food with their families. Compare that to the politicians they protect, many of whom steal billions and retire with all the benefits available. The senior police officers live in outrageous luxury while junior officers scrape by on salaries that cannot even pay school fees.
Sowore’s protest brings this issue back into national consciousness. There is something fundamentally broken in a system that trains people to carry guns, entrusts them with the power of life and death without taking care of them properly.
As a Nigerian who has been a victim of police extortion and brutality, it is very difficult to support such noble protest for their welfare. But the police is in dire need of a complete overhaul, not just about their welfare. The entire systems needs a reform.
So yes, it is emotionally jarring to defend the welfare of a force that is complicit in public crime. But as a nation, we must learn to do the most impossible things. And demanding humane conditions for even those who have failed us like the Nigerian police is one of them.
Sowore deserves commendation for this inconvenient courage. Let us hope the federal government does more than just press release.
SAHARA REPORTERS
