Signal of ‘fire on the mountain’ came early to Senator Ahmed Abdulhamid Mallamadori on Tuesday morning (May 21st, 2024). A National Assembly top shot was the caller. He was alerting the Senator representing Jigawa Northeast that retired police pensioners from all over the country had massed up at a gate of the National Assembly. Even if the caller didn’t say so, the Senator knew he had a thick bushfire to quench. Newspaper headlines the following day presenting the image of angry ex-police operatives at the gate of lawmakers won’t be good for him as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Police Affairs nor for the Police establishment itself and certainly not for the NASS or even for the party in power.
The first line of approach was the repositioning of Senator Yunus Akintunde, the Deputy Chairman of the Senate Committee on Police Affairs. He enacted the first layer of the conversation with the angry but non-violent protesters. That certainly reduced the frustration of the protesters. At the least, an insider was at hand to talk to them, acknowledge their presence and give an insight into the subject of the protestation.
The next line was a deeper conversation. That had to take place in Ambassador Mallamadori’s office within the National Assembly. But, in order not to create panic in the National Assembly with all the protesters pouring into the premises, only ten selected protesters went for this level of the conversation.
Committee Chairman Mallamadori stepped in to add to the dialogue that had already taken place at the gate. Within the context of democracy, your protest is very much welcome, Mallamdori told his guests. It is your right to make your feelings and position well known to the authorities. You are not doing anything wrong by organising yourselves to present your case, he went on, adding “However, nobody here has forgotten your case. The process is very much alive. Even today, a meeting between the appropriate agencies is taking place on your case”.
Senate President, Godswill Akpabio
The 10th Senate, he added, had taken up the issue from where the 9th Senate left off and, in the shortest possible time, the Act will be out, ready for the President to do his own part.
“That is the state of affairs and it is important to assure that this is the correct position. Ignore any other information and please, exercise further patience so that this thing is properly laid to rest”, Mr. Committee Chairman concluded, according to a one-page statement on the conversation.
What Intervention came to understand is that the whole problem is a procedural problem. The 9th Senate had truly concluded the legislation on the pensioners’ case but the House of Representatives did not conclude its side before the session peaked. What that means is that the process has to start all over.
Somehow, the pensioners had the impression that either nobody was concerned about the case or they were being taken for a ride. This came out clearly in the statements by two or three of them who spoke in the Committee Chairman’s office. They have an idea of who they think is in support of their cause and who is not and all that. Intervention is informed that the depth of their anger even up to the Chairman’s office was thick enough to be cut with a razor. One of them reported said what has happened to them is not what has happened to ex-cops in the country where Nigeria borrowed the pension model in question from.
Which way in policing Nigeria?
More assurances followed from Senator Akintunde. It had to be suggested that, for them to be convinced they are not being taken for a ride, they could nominate two of their leaders to liaise with the legislators on the unfolding of the process. That way, no tale bearers will be able to circulate any falsehood anymore.
If only the pensioners knew that Godswill Akpabio, the Senate President, was at the conversation. Senator Akpabio was not in the room but Intervention was reliably informed he kept up with the Committee Chairman as long as the protest lasted. He was actually the early morning caller to Senator Mallamadori on the issue and relaxed only when told that there had been a productive conversation.
But there was still the diplomatic touch. Intervention was not told how Senator Mallamadori discovered that one of the protesters turned 78 on the day of the protest. It was learnt that identifying him and making his birthday part of the conversation changed the atmosphere in the room. For the first time in the conversation, the language of thankfulness or appreciation was heard. The old man was simply happy with the reckoning of his birthday. Even though he expressed sadness to be on the barricade on his 78th birthday, he seemed to find Mallamadori a great guy. Just as misrecognition can provoke war, so also can recognition bring enduring peace. If ever evidence of this was needed, the conversation between the Committee and the protesters provides it.
It must have been the Jigawa Senator’s baptism of fire. Although not new to protests and protesters, Mallamadori has become the diplomat’s diplomat over the years and more attuned to tact in problem solving rather than rofo-rofo fights. On May 21st, 2024, he had to come to terms with the rofo-rofo feature in Nigeria’s body politics.
With the country lost in a contested conversation on State Police, Senator Mallamadori might not have seen anything yet and today’s baptism of fire may just be instructive. As Committee Chairman, he is not expected to be a hardliner but an umpire. Whether a NEPU-PRP legislator will sit there and allow anything like the Native Authority Police (yesterday’s equivalent of State Police in the old Northern Nigeria) without a fight remains to be seen. He must have his own ideas about State Police, coming from his own long experience as an ambassador in an EU country (Turkey) for eight years as well as many years of practical involvement with Nigerian politics at the grassroots. The point is how he brings the diversity of his backgrounds to steer the politics of policing contemporary Nigeria within the politics of the NASS as Chairman of the Committee on the Police.
The assumption is that protagonists and antagonists of State Police and all other substantive issues about policing Nigeria now bear in mind what the late super cop, Gambo Jimeta once predicted. In an October 16th, 2010 interview with Weekly Trust, the former IGP said “The kind of neglect and irresponsibility shown by previous governments then, I am afraid there might be no police force in the country in 50 years. If appropriate steps are taken and police is given a rebirth, in the next 50 years, we would be among the best in the world”.
It is an interview worth reading intertextually through the above link. It is because, as Professor Booth, one of the leading scholars of emancipation tells us, every engagement with the word security must start with the very idea that “every security agenda should be interrogated to discover the interest and assumption that shaped it”. What are the interests and assumptions shaping the idea of State Police right now in Nigeria? Security is never just about the police, military, secret service and para-military instruments. It is about power. It is about who is defining security.
