Buhari, Call Off Customs’ Siege On Igbo Traders, By Okey Ndibe

…it is time they stopped this practice of unleashing ravenous agents to prey on innocent Nigerians. And with the impression gaining ground that these agencies have launched a vicious assault on the enterprising spirit of the South-East, it is time the government rethought its strategy—or risk an unpredictable, possibly explosive, response.

A few days ago, a friend sent me a video of a choir made up of members of Nigeria’s security agencies singing “Feliz Navidad,” a popular Christmas song. The rendition was entirely inspiring, a thrilling combination of rousing singing, dancing and festive atmosphere. I was moved by the sheer cheeriness of the service singers, infected by their sunniness of spirit. The high professional quality of the performers was complemented by the outstanding videography.

In between the Christmas lyrics, members of Nigeria’s respective service arms took turns pitching messages. A female officer informed us that the police were our friends, that its officers serve and protect with integrity, and that they make Nigeria secure. Another officer, also female, touted the Nigerian Prisons Service as reformers, keeping society crime-free. A member of the Civil Defense Corps spoke about defending the defenseless.

It was, quite simply, a soaring performance, a tour de force, indeed the best rendition of “Feliz Navidad” I have ever seen or heard—and I have listened to quite a few. I couldn’t help replaying the video several times. Each time, I found myself riveted, beguiled, awe-struck, a dupe for the wholly upbeat service messages organically interjected into one of Christmas’s most captivating anthems.

Again and again, I surrendered myself to be transported by the winsome performance. Yet, I emerged from each session with an afterglow of sadness, brought rudely down to earth by the shattering awareness that there was little concordance between the reality of life in Nigeria and the mesmerising vista projected by the video. The video vended a beatific vision to me; yet I knew that the reality of life in Nigeria was, for the most part and for the majority of Nigerians, awful if not hellish. The video was selling me a dummy, attempting to mask the sordidness of everyday life in my country, its enchanting performance no more than an effort to narcotise its audience, to rig reality.

That dominant sense of a discrepancy between performance and reality was reinforced for me in two recent conversations. In one, a writer friend who is an academic in Canada recounted his near-brush with death. Some assailants had cornered this guy and shot him on the leg. Terribly wounded, bleeding, he had limped away from his car to seek help. In some ways, his nightmare worsened once he found the police.

First, the police had no ambulance to drive him to a hospital. They brought him back to his car, which the armed gangsters had abandoned because it was demobilised, and got him to reactivate it. Then, instead of rushing him to the hospital, they took him to their station because Nigeria has this weird practice that hospitals should not treat anybody with a gunshot wound in the absence of a police report. Meanwhile, as the police busied themselves with observing the bizarre bureaucratic protocols of generating a report, the bleeding victim slipped in and out of consciousness, gripped by a sense of his imminent death.

No, he didn’t die in the end, in part because one of the police officers finally recognised him as a senior editor at a major newspaper. Once his quasi-privileged status was established, he was able to muster just enough strength to convince the officers—against what they said was policy—to take him to a private hospital where a relative of his was a medical chief. The drive there was harrowing, marked by a traffic gridlock that slowed the car, leaving the hapless editor bleeding profusely, racked by hideous pain.

The other conversation, with a friend who recently traveled by road from Lagos to Awka, the capital of Anambra State, concerned a broader problem. He spoke about the many checkpoints mounted by the police, customs and other security agencies. He described the trip as an excruciating experience. Each checkpoint taxed travelers’ nerves. The service officers harangued, harassed and cajoled travelers to “drop something,” Nigerian slang for offering a bribe.

He shared the impression that Nigerian customs and police seemed to target businessmen and women from the country’s South-East. This friend, who travels by road to different parts of Nigeria, felt there was an unwholesome intent behind the incessant checkpoints. He described them as part of a vast extortion scheme authorised by the Nigerian state, a veritable siege on (especially) Igbo-owned businesses.

That sentiment has increasing currency. A headline in the December 14, 2016 edition of the Punch newspaper told the story: “Customs, police extorting us – South East traders”. According to the paper, “The South-East Zone of the Amalgamated Market Traders Association has raised the alarm over the worsening cases of extortion by security officials on highways in the country.” The association’s president, Okwudili Ezenwankwo, “accused men of the Nigeria Customs Service and the police of barricading highways to extort motorists and traders.” The paper quoted him as stating that “the presence of customs men and police officers mounting road blocks to extort motorists and traders had made a mess of the anti-corruption campaign of the Federal Government.”

Mr. Ezenwankwo “wondered why containers, belonging to traders, should be stopped and searched at various points from Lagos and to the South-East by customs men and the police after such containers had been cleared at the ports,” and demanded that the Federal Government move the officers in order to end their extortionist game. He argued, “It is only in Nigeria you see customs men on the roads. If they have anything to do with searching our goods, it should be at the ports or borders.”

The trader made a pertinent point: that President Muhammadu Buhari’s so-called anti-corruption campaign “would only have meaning when the government addressed low-level corruption by security officials.” He added: “Forcing hard working Nigerians to part with their hard-earned money every day by policemen, customs men and other security agents should not be happening in the current dispensation.”

It should not happen in this or any dispensation, period.

Another businessman, Chuma Eruchalu, echoed the growing dismay. “Even when you buy goods in the open market across the country, (customs and police officers) still extort money by seizing some of the vehicles in the hope that you settle them. You find (the) police doing the jobs of customs and asking you to provide customs documents used for clearing goods.”

The Nigerian economy is in a shambles, and many small business owners are buffeted by hard times. An administration that means well ought to take every measure to reduce, if not remove, impediments to the flowering of businesses. Instead, under President Buhari’s watch, police and customs fan the roads to importune traders and business owners who are doing their best to keep themselves and dependents afloat.

With the exception of the most privileged among us, Nigerians frequently experience their country as an affliction, a pestilence and a pain in the place where pain hurts most. How I wish that the image created in the rendition of “Feliz Navidad” corresponded with the reality. This is far from being the case. In many cases, the police, soldiers, customs and other security agents view themselves as armed intimidators of the populace they are supposed to defend and protect.

A little sense of history should instruct the president and those who head the various security agencies that it is time they stopped this practice of unleashing ravenous agents to prey on innocent Nigerians. And with the impression gaining ground that these agencies have launched a vicious assault on the enterprising spirit of the South-East, it is time the government rethought its strategy—or risk an unpredictable, possibly explosive, response.

Please follow me on twitter @okeyndibe

Alpha

Would’ve been a good writeup if not sectional. The very wicked custom checkpoints permeate all of southern Nigeria -(I haven’t travel North for a while), therefore affecting all travellers, east, west and south south. I had a heated argument with those at Sapele, who claimed to be checking force “importer rice” at the Abraka junction!!!
It will not be a surprise for anybody who witnessed the absurdities of Buhari’s rule in the 80s
Obiayo

I almost didn’t want to go beyond the first paragraph because Okey thinks that the rendition of the ‘Feliz Navidad’ by Nigeria’s security agencies was awesome. I watched that video and it was symptomatic of the very problems that bedevil the various security outfits, and except, Okey didn’t watch the same video I watched, he got it all wrong on that one. That being said, Okey is Okey, a great writer and one whose articles I love to read. He may not have the ears for good music, or eyes to tell what a great musical performance is like, but, he’s still a great writer and in this article, as almost always, he’s on point. Security agents mostly exist to serve themselves in this country. That mantra, ‘to serve and protect ‘ they usually mouth could as well have been, ‘to serve and protect our interests always’.
- marc umeh
  
  I watched the same video with my wife . We taught it was awesome !!!
  Go figure .
  - Obiayo
    
    Then, we ain’t talking about the same video. That pretty much sums it up.
Remi

There appear to be some “circular reasoning” going
on here. The only proof offered by Professor Ndibe to justify his claim is the
evidence of those who allege that they are being discriminated against. Given
the tendency of our Igbo compatriots to allege discrimination each time the
implementation of any policy does not favour them, even when such policy also apply
to persons of every other ethnic group, Professor Ndibe should do more than offer,
as proof, only the claims of those making the allegation. For example, has Professor Ndibe seen, or
heard of, any government policy that lends credence to his claim?

I find it quite difficult to
believe that a government will send out it’s security agencies to mount
roadblocks for the purposes of specifically extorting money from citizens, of an
ethnic nationality. This is not to say that security agencies do not engage in
collecting bribes at roadblocks, however ,
it should be pointed out that those engaged in such acts are simply criminals
and rogue security agents, who are acting for
their own selfish interest. Having said that, it should be noted that, like
other rational human beings, criminals tend to ply their trade where it will be
most profitable and the current “security” situation in the south east, make
that place particularly conducive for the rogue elements in our security
agencies. Hence, when rogue security
officers set up extortionist
roadblocks on certain routes, more than they allegedly do on others, it is probably
due to the richer pickings on such routes and not because they are targeting
Igbos. That Igbos are most affected, in this case, is only coincidental and /
or circumstantial, and not necessarily intended. For example, the recent act of
economic illiteracy which informed the clamp down on foreign exchange operators
affected northerners most, not because it was targeted at them as a regional
block, but because they just happen to
be the largest operators in that line of
business. At the height of the Boko Haram insurgency, when the north east was
suffused with security men, we also heard of similar complaints from the
inhabitants of that region. If Professor
Ndibe speaks with private commercial transport operators in Lagos, he will hear
of similar allegations as that of his Igbo compatriots. Then, does that imply
that Yoruba businessmen are being targeted?Finally on this point, I will advise Professor Ndibe to search out, on the Sahara reporters website, for an article titled “ino go better for customs” by Abiodun Ladepo.

The tragic reality is that,
regardless of who we are, the corrupt Nigerian system will affect us somewhat, somehow
and somewhere.
UK BOY

If you had a seaport in Onitsha, or a functioning seaport as you have in apapa in onne or portharcourt, these customs gang will realise that having cleared yourself from the seaport, and that since you’re in your homeland (and not someone else’s place) that there is only so much that they can do to affect your business. No stranger will come to your land and dictate/or exploit the owners of that land. This is failure of my fellow igbo politicians and power brokers in there geo-political and geo-economic calculations in this country called nigeria (and which by the way is collection of ethnic nationalities- And my position is not reflective of secession or anything to do with the biafra cause, i am pro-nigeria with a caveat for regional self actualisation and true federalism in all its facets, which includes fiscal federalism). In the government of Goodluck jonathan, instead of chasing after all those contracts and all other individual gains aspirations, they should have chased after the Ndigbo group aspirations, things like independent power projects, PPP road projects/contracts, a functional international airport that handles both passenger and cargo goods-such as we have in enugu, a functional seaport in onitsha and onne, 2nd niger bridge, and clamour to have all foreign consular offices in enugu or asaba etc, these things would have made the igbos self reliant and less exposed to these kinds of exploitation, they would have created an incentive for a lot of igbos to start looking towards moving back to the south east, and having less conflict with the yorubas or any other tribe, because we could have started looking inwardly to developing and transacting business from our own homebase with everyother ethnic group and even farther afield than nigeria.
cheers

Buhari, Call Off Customs’ Siege On Igbo Traders, By Okey Ndibe

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