| Lagos armed robbery and matters arising KAYODE KETEFE On Sunday, September 9, 2012, the city of Lagos came under siege as daredevil armed robbers invaded it from all directions. The gun-toting men of the underworld carried out dastardly robbery operations in many parts of the city including Ijesha area of Osodi Apapa Expressway, Adekunle in Yaba, Pen Cinema in Agege, Gbagada, Anthony, Maryland, Ojodu Berger, and Falolu/Aguda in Surulere. Whether it is the same group of gangsters or several pockets of loosely associated mega formation of marauders that perpetrated the heinous crime, nobody could say till now. Nine persons including two policemen were killed while at least ten other persons sustained varying degrees of injuries. When certain things happened – something queer and odd, questions are abound to be asked. Looking at this tragedy in wholesome perspectives, the cogent question is whether or not we have security forces that can respond to any emergency. The magnitude of the robbery operations in broad daylight, covering many high density areas, the sheer gut and rapacity of these criminals, the utter success of the operations which saw the robbers carting away millions, (especially the money stolen from bureau de change operators) the one-sided casualty rate, and the supine, ineffective responses of the policemen, all pointed to one unsavourry conclusion - we are yet to have a collective security system in which we can entrust the safety of our lives and properties. If suicide terrorists have proven uncontrollable to our forces, certainly, one, ordinarily, would not expect that common robbers should also prove superior simply because they are wielding AK-47. Lagos is the economic nerve centre of Nigeria and it conduces to good reason that a considerable amount of security resources would be deployed in the city both in terms of human and hardware. So it is very baffling that the multiple open street robberies would be taking place for several hours in the city without the security agents being able to crush them. According to reports, the rampaging robbers won on all fronts of the war, killing and maiming innocent Nigerians and making cannon fodder of some security personnel themselves in few places they were offered feeble challenges. It is simply unfathomable that armed robbers would have a field day for several hours in a metropolis like Lagos that is not only the headquarters of Zone 2 command, but also boasts of many police formations in form of area commands under the state command regime. This is not to talk of ubiquitous heavy artillery like Armoured Personnel Carriers (APC) strategically placed all over the city. Within the Agege, Oshodi, Ikeja axis, there are no less than three Armoured Personnel Carriers. Now with the improved communication system in form of Global System of Mobile communication through which the people could reach out via the widely publicised "police hotlines" and the putatively enhanced internal communication system within the security forces itself, should these marauders have been successful in their operations in broad daylight? What if robbers had operated during the night? We are already used to stories of robbers laying siege to a whole area and operating throughout the night for four or five hours with no police intervention throughout! ; we have heard stories of robbers starting their rapacity from the beginning of one street to the end and them resume the raid on the next street and then the next, with virtually no check on their rambunctious, terrifying expedition. Is this tragedy an exhibition of the now too-familiar police inefficiency or a combination of unspeakable incompetence with the fifth columnist phenomenon within the police hierarchy? Are these robbers some subterranean spirits who issued from the bosom of the earth, carried out their nefarious activities, and retired into some recesses underground or are they human beings in material forms like you and me who planned, strategised, executed the raid and then escaped materially? These are some questions the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Mr. Abubakar Umar Manko, should answer. Perhaps he himself should ask his subordinates the same questions. The IGP, Mohammed Abuabakar, himself was so shocked by the incident that he issued a peremptory order to both the Lagos State Police Command and Zone 2 command which has its headquarters in Lagos, to "wake up from their slumber" "You have mobility, you have support, you have allowance from the state government; you must not allow people of Lagos to be terrorised by robbers. It can never be accepted anymore." Abubakar fumed. By the way, this writer has often witnessed policemen huddled together at the check points on a spot while carrying out stop and check operations and thereby offering themselves easy targets for gun-toting armed robbers to execute a clean wipe out through a lavish spree of bullets. The reason for this counter-intuitive practice is that they are distrustful of one another and would want to witness "live" the collection of bribes from the motorists in order not to be short-changed by their greedy colleagues! The recent incident is yet another sad reminder that we are yet to solve even the basic problem of the most primitive socio-political formation, viz, security. We don't have an efficient, effective and functional policing system and the high time we accepted this humbling fact and started planning how to put in place a police force worthy of its name, the better for us.
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