By Rotimi FASAN
So the Federal Government has placed orders for the purchase of about 100 units of Peugeot cars for the use of the Police in combating kidnapping across the country?

To say poor logistics is one of the worst challenges of the Police is to state the obvious. Police personnel go about their duty in battered vehicles, ugly, slow-moving monsters that belong in the scrap yard. Even then, police officers on official duty are expected to fuel these vehicles from their own purse, giving them the excuse they need to continue to extort the people.

Where this is not possible they commandeer private, commercial vehicles in a manner that makes them no better than common robbers on the highway.

When they go around in these vehicles in their tattered uniforms or equally dirty civilian clothing, they inspire fear rather than confidence as they look more or less like armed robbers, the sort that go round impersonating security people. Which all goes to show that the Police can do with all the support they can get to revamp logistics in the Force.

The Police have no business pretending their snail-speed vehicles can match the fast cars kidnappers and armed robbers go around in. Yet one must still say that the purchase of so many vehicles does not equate effective crime fighting. If anything, it follows our usual fire-fighting approach to major issues of social dislocation.

Just because kidnapping has once more become front page news following the abduction of four journalists and the intervention of the President, the Inspector General and other prominent Nigerians, the authorities have suddenly seen the need to equip the Police with more vehicles to fight kidnappers.

This is a reactive approach that would take us nowhere. What would the Federal Government next do should criminals change tack and turn to other forms of crime? Rush in this same ad-hoc manner to provide the Police with what they would need to fight that particular type of crime? Today it is kidnapping; yesterday it was armed robbery. Tomorrow it would be something else.

The emphasis criminals place on the different types of crimes we are beset with keeps changing but crime remains. One day it is armed robbery, but the next it is kidnapping or rape. And the Police rush in, headlong, in reaction to the latest wave of crime only for the criminals to turn in a different direction. Wherever they turn, the Police is left trailing them, reacting to every one of their moves rather than pre-empting those moves and taking necessary steps to combat them.

Just as the Police are equipping themselves to fight kidnapping which is fast spreading across the country, especially in the East, armed robbery, particularly bank robbery is the kind of crime that is presently causing much anxiety in the West.

For the past many weeks, many towns in the Yoruba West have been subjected to the ministration of armed robbers who put the people through the mental torture of being given advanced warnings by the criminals who proceed to make good their threats. Only a couple of weeks back, armed robbers went on a killing spree in Akure, making nonsense of whatever security arrangements had been put in place by the Ondo State Police Command as they robbed several banks within shouting distance of one another in the State capital.

It was a day authority or governance was ceded to armed robbers: the Governor, Olusegun Mimiko, was out of town; and so was the State Commissioner of Police, while the special crime-fighting outfit in the State was away in Ore. It all seemed so convenient to explain such egregious lapse in security to the absence of principal state officials.

Other major towns in Ondo State have not been spared either. Banks in Ondo town were under lock and key for several days in a row in the recent past. They were only beginning to open as late as last week. Where they opened, they did not attend to customers.

Tell me the usefulness of banks that won’t or can’t attend to their customers? How about Owo and Ikare, both in Ondo State? They, as were other towns in the State, have had their dose of terror attacks. Ekiti State has its own tales of terror to recount.

In neighbouring Osun State, the story is not different. Just this past Thursday, the university town of Ikire, some 15 minutes from Ibadan, was thrown into confusion when news spread that armed robbers had taken over an area where banks are located. This came days after a major road accident claimed some 40 lives in Asejire, another town within a shouting distance of Ikire.

Prior to this, banks in the town had for several days closed shop after, it was said, they got notice of usually unsolicited visit from armed robbers. The psychological aggravation of such notice, to say nothing of its financial implication to business, is best imagined. Nobody could be sure exactly when the visit would be or the likely consequence. And there was no confirmation that the robbery actually took place on this day of confusion in Ikire. Ibadan itself has not been immune from the periodic closure of shop by banks in response to robbery attacks.

What is worrisome here is the confidence with which these robbers operate with little or no challenge despite their having given notice days before they attacked. Of course, such scare tactics are meant to underline the inadequacy of the Police to provide any meaningful challenge. But the Police can’t do it alone. It is time private businesses made private security arrangements of their own.

Yes, the Police in Ikire we heard rose to the occasion, taking positions around the town for a possible showdown with the robbers. But we cannot continue like this. Which is why the authorities must realise that what the Police needs is total transformation from an organisation presently surviving on handouts and ad-hoc measures to a well-equipped, trained and disciplined body that can meet twenty-first century challenges. Anything else, including the purchase of a hundred vehicles to combat crime, is ad-hoc and can only go as far.