PERSPECTIVES OF NIGERIAN POLICE AND TORTURE

Under the Lens of an Investigative Reporter

JULIANA EBERE FRANCIS

PERSPECTIVES OF NIGERIAN POLICE AND TORTURE

Under the Lens of an Investigative Reporter

JULIANA EBERE FRANCIS

The Cover Illustration and Design by Victor Asowata

© Copyright, Juliana Francis

Tel: 08023684524

Email: ebere20@gmail.com

Published January, 2025

The Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 asserts Juliana Francis’s right to be identified as this work’s author. All Rights Reserved. Written permission is required for any reproduction, copying, or transmission of this publication. The publisher requires written permission for reproduction, copying, or transmission of any paragraph in this publication, except as permitted by the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorized act about this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

ISBN: 9783689839413

Verlag GD Publishing Ltd. & Co KG, Berlin

E-Book Distribution: XinXii

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE The Face and Effect of Torture

CHAPTER TWO Extrajudicial Killings: Story of SARS and Robbery Suspects (1)

CHAPTER THREE Police: Making up charges to fleece innocent Nigerians

CHAPTER FOUR Deploying Torture as Investigative Tool

CHAPTER FIVE Despite Public Outcry, SARS Still Above the Law (I)

CHAPTER SIX A Police Officer’s Perspective on Torture, Investigation in Nigeria

CHAPTER SEVEN The Nigerian Security Beat: Journeying Through Valley of Death

CHAPTER EIGHT Days of Hell, Torture in Police Cells

CHAPTER NINE Flawed Criminal Justice System Despite ACJA

CHAPTER TEN Waited For Death in the Hangman’s Noose (1)

CHAPTER ELEVEN Challenges of Nigeria Police Force and Its Personnel

CHAPTER TWELVE Police Brutality: I Was Bundled Into A Car Boot, Asked to Pay N1m or Face A Robbery Charge -Victim

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Meeting International Standard of Policing, Deploying Forensic Investigations

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Checking Extra-Judicial Killings, Torture, Obtaining Confession Under Duress

CHAPTER FIFTEEN PWDs Interactions with the Criminal Justice System

CHAPTER SIXTEEN ‘Welcome To Hell Fire’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Nigerian Correctional Service and Human Rights Violations

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN Criminal Justice System in the Context of Policing

CHAPTER TWENTY Elimination of Torture Through Emplacement of Scientific Policing

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Torture And Adherence to The Universal Protocol On Investigative Techniques

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE BOOK

Notes

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks go to one of my mentors, (I have many mentors) a lawyer, Mr Gbemiga Ogunleye, who through several windows of opportunities provided by the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) for training journalists, repeatedly pushed me to write a book reflecting the security beat, which I had covered for years. This is just one of such books. Others are coming soonest.

I also want to appreciate the eggheads that contributed to making this book a reality. They are people I respect in the Civil Society Organisation network, and they are passionate about human rights and reforms in the criminal justice system.

They are: The founder of Human Rights Observatory, Mr Damian Ugwu, former President of the Crime Reporters Association of Nigeria (CRAN), Mr Christopher Oji, a legal practitioner and a human rights advocate working on Access To Justice, Women’s Rights Programmes and Justice Reforms, Ms Pamela Okoroigwe, the Executive Director of the Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre (RULAAC), Mr Okechukwu Nwanguma, United Kingdom Officer and citizen, currently a lecturer at The Institute Of Policing Studies, the University Of West London, Mr Andy Desmond,  a Chevening Scholar, Journalist, Communication, Advocacy, and Campaign Specialist, Mr Gbenga Ogundare, and the Founder of Prisoners’ Rehabilitation And Welfare Action (PRAWA)Dr Uju Agomoh.

Others are; the Executive Director of Elixir Trust Foundation, Mr Emmanuel Ikuke, the former Inspector-General of Police (IGP)/Former Chairman of Police Service Commission (PSC), Dr Solomon Arase and John Doe(s) Policemen of the Nigeria Police Force.

Furthermore, I want to thank my siblings, who have constantly remained my bulwark, pushing me to reinvent and discover a better version of myself. They always urge me to do all possible to make myself happy and to push all other disturbances off my mind. And yes, writing makes me happy. I love you guys: Patience Ndidiamaka Francis, Glory Anurika Francis, Ifeoma Esther Francis, Chukwuemeka Francis, Michael Boluwatife Oloyede and George Anointed Oloyede.

CHAPTER ONE The Face and Effect of Torture

Juliana Francis

Silent Tears of a Tortured Female Suspect

I never got to interview her, but I suffered secondary trauma after seeing her haunted look and dishevelled appearance, and later hearing about her ordeal.

I was a rookie reporter on the security beat back then. I wish I had the experience and knowledge I have today. If I did, I would have done something – anything –rather than that feeling of helplessness and despair: it was anger without venting.

How do you even ask such a person for an interview? I doubt she would have been able to speak. The trauma! But one cannot even ask for an interview because the lady would be surrounded by her torturers, who would not want her to reveal her nightmare. To add, most women who suffer gender-based violence do not find it easy to speak of their ordeal because of shame and stigma.

I had entered the Lagos State Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Department (SCIID), Panti, Yaba, that fateful day, frantically hunting for a scoop.

It was one of those roomy offices, with chairs, desks, and filing cabinets strung haphazardly, symbolising the madness of the system and conditions of the officers working there.

I noticed her immediately because she seemed totally out of place. Many Police personnel using that office are mostly men, and most suspects there are usually male.

The Unit, known back then as RAIDER (SARS), is usually saddled with the toughest job of chasing armed robbers and bringing such cases to closure no matter what it takes.

The woman – my interest – was as still as a statue and kept her face downward. Till I left, she never once raised her head. But a closer look revealed her tears dropping. Naturally, I asked questions about her, and a Police friend told me that she was arrested on proxy.

The Raider officers were hunting for her lover, who is a suspected armed robber, but the suspect got wind of the manhunt and appeared to have disappeared into thin air. In Raider/SARS Units, the personnel, especially bosses, do not believe in excuses, but in results. So, determined to get the fleeing suspect and close the case, the Police team arrested the lady on proxy and embarked on torturing her, asking for the whereabouts of her lover.

It was one of the cruellest forms of torture as a beer bottle was inserted into her genitalia until she bled. I cannot even begin to imagine her suffering and mental health state.

My Police friend told me that her scream was particularly mentally disturbing to him. He was not against torturing a suspect to get information, but he was disturbed by the manner of her torture. He could not air his view openly because it was not his team. There are different RAIDER Teams, and each did whatever it deemed fit to get results or crack cases.

I do not know what the lady later confessed to, but I can bet that she must have confessed to a crime she did not commit, or passed on false information, just so the torture could stop.

In 2013, the Police in Lagos State arrested 24-year-old Onyeka Patrick for kidnapping and strangling a seven-year-old boy, identified as Ayuba, who happened to be his neighbour. He left a ransom note and would later join Ayuba’s distraught family to look for Ayuba and his ‘supposed kidnappers.’

Patrick was a budding footballer, and Ayuba loved playing with him. Eventually, Patrick strangled the child, put his body in a sack, and dumped him into a septic tank.

He told journalists that he had to kill the child, who loved and hero-worshipped him: I had to kill the boy because he knew me and if I had let him go, he would have told everyone in the neighbourhood that I was the person who kidnapped him.

Before Patrick was found out, he would tell the Police that a ‘native doctor’ kidnapped the child and had been calling him (Patrick) for ransom, knowing how close he was with the child. He had everyone on a string and all danced as he pulled. He was the puppet master. The star of the moment, the supposed hero in the community.

He gave the Police his hairstylist’s phone number as the prospective native doctor/kidnapper.

The hairstylist was arrested, and his statement that he was not even in town when the child went missing fell on deaf ears. He was tortured until one of his legs became useless: broken and damaged beyond fixing.

The hairstylist would never be able to use his leg again. To save himself from pain, he admitted that he kidnapped Ayuba. He promised to take the Policemen to where he kept Ayuba, he took them to the Egbeda area of Lagos State and kept taking them from one place to another, on a wild goose chase, until it dawned on the Police team that the hairstylist confessed to lies to stop the pain being inflicted on him.

Tortured suspects make confessions to save their lives, and these confessions, most times, are packets of lies.

The Nigerian Security Sector and Torture

We are in a society where the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) and law enforcement agencies are grappling with many shortcomings. It is shocking to state that in this 21st century, the NPF has not yet embraced forensic investigation, and members of the NPF and indeed other law enforcement agencies are still deploying torture as a means of investigation.

The lack of scientific policing is the reason Nigeria has several cases of unresolved murders, with many now cold cases.

Scientific policing often provides answers to puzzles at crime scenes. It is also a great help in reducing cases of unresolved crimes. The absolute beauty of scientific policing is the creation of opportunities for cold cases to be reopened, especially when new evidence is found or discovered.

It is quite amazing that men of the NPF, especially the senior cadres who used to frequent the Police Chiefs’ annual meetings in the Netherlands, are yet to bring innovations from these meetings. Interestingly, most of the countries at these meetings are from countries that have advanced in scientific policing and are still breaking new ground in solving crimes.

Forensic or scientific investigation deploys science to solve a crime¹, overriding the use of torture. When Police officers get to crime scenes, they are expected to collect material at the scene like blood, body fluid, hair fibres, fingerprints, footprints, footwear and tyre track evidence, soil, vegetation, glass fragments, hard drives, computers, among others for analysis, with the hope of getting results that help them narrow down to particular suspects and make arrests. This method of Police work embraces forensic analysis of evidence gathered, DNA, polygraph, fingerprints, data analysis, and profiling of suspects, among others.

This means a Police investigator would have to use any of the above-mentioned means to nail a suspect before arresting him/her. But because the NPF has yet to embrace forensic investigation, no thanks to Nigerian lawmakers and the indifference of different administrations in Nigeria, the Police continue to make do with what it has at its disposal.

Therefore, overworked Policemen continue to be ordered by their superiors sitting in air-conditioned offices to make arrests and solve crimes, without considering that the Force lacks the proper apparatus to carry out thorough and total investigations. 

To solve crime, Policemen in Nigeria continue to carry out investigations upside-down. They make arrests before getting evidence, rather than let the evidence be the reason for an arrest. Worse still is that they continue to force confessions.

Everyone wants results, but nobody cares how these Policemen achieve these results. They continue to arrest suspects over real or imagined crimes and then torture the ‘suspects’ to elicit confession and close cases.

Torture is not child’s play, and it is not funny. It is not a game, and it is life-threatening.

Torture can make a suspect confess to a crime he/she did not commit or know anything about. I have seen victims of torture and interviewed some: their stories are chilling and traumatising, even for the journalists.

It is a two-edged sword, affecting both the sufferer and the listener.

Some years ago, I interviewed a 19-year-old boy. He was returning from a night party when he ran into a pack of the now outlawed Oodua Peoples’ Congress (OPC) members. They suspected he was an armed robber, but he repeatedly denied the allegation. His denial fell on deaf ears as they decided to make him confess to being a robber. They reasoned that it was only a criminal that would be out at such an ungodly hour.

He told me that as they tortured him, they kept screaming at him from different directions to mention the names of his partners in crime. He was a child from a broken home and took to working as a bus conductor to survive. He had worked with several bus drivers. He did not have a home and slept at the home of any of the drivers he worked with; sometimes, he would sleep in the park.

When he feared that the OPC men would torture him to death, he mentioned the names of all the drivers he had worked with as armed robbers, claiming that they had all gone on operations with him. He then took the OPC men to the houses of the said bus drivers.

The men were beaten black and blue before being handed over to the Raider Team at the State Criminal Intelligence and Investigations Department (SCIID), Panti, Lagos. The Raider Team, still working on his confession, went to arrest more commercial bus drivers. It was a circus and there were about seven to nine bus drivers. The bus drivers were then tortured until they admitted to being armed robbers.

Back in those days, I was a young reporter and spent most of my days frequenting different Police stations in Lagos State. The Late Adekunle Ojo was then the Officer in Charge (OC) of the Raider Teams Unit, otherwise known as Section D9.

I was opportune to speak with the bus drivers and the 19-year-old bus conductor. The idea of the interview was to find out what pushed them into armed robbery, their lives as robbers, and how they were eventually busted.

After interviewing them for hours and asking a string of questions, their stories stubbornly refused to fall into place. They all admitted to being armed robbers, but nothing else agreed. The so-called robbery operations they admitted to did not have similar patterns among them. The timing of the operations, days, locations and sharing formula of the loots did not add up.

I interviewed them separately; but usually, narrations of gangs of armed robbers are the same, especially concerning operations and sharing formulas.

Journalism is not magic or rocket science. It is about listening and putting down what you hear in a balanced and creative format. It is about information and cohesion. It is about gut feeling, instinct, and assemblage of facts/information gathered. It is about scattered information fashioned into a complete whole that makes sense to readers.

The suspects’ stories refused to make sense as things refused to fall into place, and facts were left dangling in the wind. I could not complete my jigsaw. Too many loopholes. A good reporter must be able to notice holes in stories and fill them by asking the right questions. The suspects’ stories kept changing until I became frustrated. Something was off, so I decided to go back to the source of the arrest and story.

So, I went back to the teenage suspect bus conductor, to interview him again.  

On the day of the second interview, he was clutching a Bible and wearing a white rosary. He had, like most victims of police torture, found a desire to be closer to God, becoming quite religious and spiritual. He looked pale and frail, like someone who life had dealt a jaw-shattering blow.

When we sat down, I subjected him to an intense interrogation, pointing out the holes in the story. He caved in and told me that he lied against all the men. He confessed that he lied because of the torture. The torture had been too much for him, he said, crying. Nobody can withstand torture.

Leaving him, I returned to the other suspects and started my interview afresh, using allegations and confrontation techniques, which usually work when it involves multiple suspects.

I found out that all the mentioned men were bus drivers. What they had in common was the teenage conductor and their kind hearts. Also, they all plied Oshodi-Mile2-Iyano-Oba routes. These drivers had initially denied being armed robbers to the Raider Team but confessed to being robbers when the torture became unbearable.

I went to Mr. Ojo to tell him my findings and opinion. I told him the men were innocent. I told him what the teenager told me, information he did not give to the Police, including his parents’ broken marriage and how he was abandoned to fend for himself.

Ojo was usually a temperamental officer, but that day, he paid attention. He listened. I urged him to personally interview the suspects, beginning with the teenage boy.

The drivers and the boy were later allowed to go, but I can tell you for free that they would be having nightmares for days.

Torture is a traumatising experience for anyone. It can also cause mental health disorders for victims.

In some climes, the way adult suspects are treated is different from the way teenagers are treated. In other climes, young folks are provided with lawyers when they are arrested, in Nigeria, they are taken into the torture chamber.  

Nobody bows to the Administration of the Criminal Justice Law (ACJL) in Nigeria, leaving the justice system in a ridiculous mess. In Nigeria, torture knows no age, only class. It is rare to find the child or children of rich folks being tortured.

I have seen a grown-up man crying and trembling as he narrated how he was tortured. He was stripped and suspended on a rope while a broomstick was inserted into his penis.

In Anambra State, two undergraduates were arrested while returning to their lodge. They did not commit any crime. They were at the wrong place at the wrong time.Their legs and hands were tied behind them, while the Police repeatedly ‘flogged’ them with machetes until they confessed to being cult members.

An estate agent, arrested by Operatives of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), was subjected to torture until he became mentally unbalanced. When the officers realised he had gone stark raving mad, with his conversation no longer coherent, they called his family to come and take him home. He died in a hospital.

There are so many cases to make references to, but this article is not about cataloguing tragedies.

The truth is this; as long as our government is not ready to overhaul the Police, equipping it with the right and necessary tools, including introducing forensic investigation, our Policemen will keep resorting to torture to solve crimes and elicit confessions.  

Over the years, security experts, civil society organisations, and security stakeholders have argued that the NPF is a microcosm of Nigerian society. A society rooted in corruption, perpetrated, and photosynthesised by its leaders.

Indeed, Nigerian society has become known and synonymous with having a double standard for the rich and poor in the Criminal Justice System. This is partly the reason a politician or an influential Nigerian, who has emptied the state’s coffers via embezzlement, is allowed plea bargaining or allowed to pay a paltry fine from the money he or she looted while in office, while the hungry man who steals foodstuff is sentenced to prison.

Naturally, plea bargaining is allowed; it is so stated in Nigerian laws. But again, many Nigerians have debated, argued, and maintained that these laws have become archaic and should be jettisoned for one that reflects and is in tandem with current problems, challenges, and the reality of Nigerian society. The Nigerian Criminal Justice System now criminalises poverty. The Nigerian laws need to be overhauled.

This is the system most Police personnel were recruited into. A system where most of them must buy their uniforms, boots, stationery, bullets, etc. A system where they must use their money to maintain patrol vans, fuel said vans, and ensure sanitation of the Police station/formation.

Most of them practically run their Police stations and formations with money from their accounts. Many Police personnel have complained of their salaries not being able to take them home, so if they continually plunge their hands into these same meagre salaries to run their stations, they would seek means to augment their spending. Nigerians who go to the Police seeking redress or justice end up being the hapless pawns used to settle the game of this spending.

The Police have come to realise and relish the power of the uniform and their rifles. So, armed with this knowledge and coupled with greed, have continuously extorted civilians, causing many to dread and resist going to the Police to lodge complaints or seek redress.

The truth over the years has not and cannot change. What is this truth?

The truth is that Police investigations cost money, especially if the investigator must travel from one state to another to make an arrest or go after a fleeing suspect.

When Policemen go for an outside state investigation, they go as a team. They must pay for the flight or their chosen means of transportation. They must feed and stay in a hotel, and the Police's top hierarchy does not provide money for these itineraries and investigations, leaving the investigators to raise money on their own. As a result, the personnel’s imagination runs wild, with torture, threats, harassment, intimidation, and fear thrown into the mix to ensure the complainants and suspects play ball.

Men and women of the Force working in the Gender Units: a unit which is the most sensitive because it has to do with Sex And Gender Based Violence (SGVB) have often complained that no money was given to them for investigation, for movement to crime scenes, to hospitals for medical examination, or to even move suspects and complainants who are often survivors of GBV to the courts.

This lack makes many officers resort to shocking practices, which witness the perpetrators of sex crimes going scot-free, while the survivors become traumatised after being denied justice.

Most times, the perpetrators have money to play with, while the survivors are mostly poor. In the Nigerian Criminal Justice System, money is a powerful tool and crucial to attaining justice.

It has not ever been an easy feat for gender-based violence survivors to give their trust and speak up. But those who eventually do are often denied justice because of a flawed justice system, which refuses to take a holistic look at issues before creating units. Unfortunately, our government’s response to issues is often via knee jerk reactions, rather than a lasting solution.

The cost of governance in Nigeria is shocking, and if it is looked into and slashed, then more money