HE said to me that for him and a whole lot of successful private sector professionals, partisan politics and indeed politics generally had never been their thing. However, in recent time, he had begun to question such indifference and whether they still have any right to complain when things go so terribly wrong.

I chuckled to myself as I reflected on what he was saying and the immortal words of Socrates in the Republic came rushing to me that: “Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself”.

The spate of kidnapping for ransom had finally brought home the point that it is defective thinking to leave politics to those whose perception of security, for instance, is merely in the number of gun-toting mobile policemen at their beck and call when they are in office. The learned Senior Advocate of Nigeria proceeded to give me a rather hilarious but graphic illustration of the classic security conundrum that our public officers have created. He said that he had seen this so many times and no one seemed to have learnt any lesson from the experience of the previous officers.

He said that a common trait among public officers has been that as soon as one got elected or appointed to public office, the officer is assigned a number of mobile policemen. The typical public officer drives to the airport with two mobile policemen in his car and four in the hilux escort car on his way from his state to Abuja. One of the policemen, of course, has to fly with him. The policeman dutifully surrenders his rifle to the cabin crew as required by aviation regulation to be collected at disembarkation. In Abuja, he reckons that he needs only one policeman to play guard even when he settles into a five-star hotel.

The life of the public officer is now too important to be toyed with that the full complement of half a dozen policemen must protect him at all times within the state.  All too suddenly, the Senior Advocate continued, the tenure comes to an end, but there is still a hangover. The detachment of policemen reduces to two, which the officer has to pay for from his pockets. The former public officer sustains this for the first three months before reality kicks in as monthly income has ceased to flow in. In fact, for the three months since the end of tenure in office, there had been no income. The officer had simply been drawing down on reserve and the rate of depletion is alarming. It is time to begin adjusting to reality. The former officer drops one policeman and still manages to fly with one to Abuja. By the sixth month, even the lone policeman is finally dropped as the former officer is having difficulty paying air fare for himself alone. The former officer is finally, once again Citizen John, a regular Joe, without frills or thrills.

While the officer held swayin public office and appropriated several policemen to himself, the ordinary citizens, the tax payers, were left at the mercy of armed robbers and kidnappers. The end of his tenure also marks the ascendancy of some‘new Sheriffs’ on the block whose lives are now more precious, so the former public officer has to face the insecurity that ordinary citizens have come to accept as their lot. He ended by asking wistfully: “Does Citizen John have a right to complain about insecurity in the State after his tenure?”

Amazingly, this encounter with the Senior Advocate was shortly after a conversation I had with a former colleague in government. We were riding in my car on our way to a funeral of our deceased colleague and invariably, our discussion drifted to the spate of kidnappings and general insecurity and he said to me: “My brother, let me tell you, recently, I challenged the Commissioner of Police over their failings when my in-law was kidnapped and what he said to me was instructive.” According to my former colleague, the Commissioner of Police provided him with the rough statistics of police deployment in the state.  He said that out of a complement of about 10,000 officers, investigators and rank and file policemen deployed to the State with a population of 3.3 million people, more than 2,000 of the crack men of the force, about 20 percent of the total are on guard duty protecting less than one percent of the population consisting of public officers in the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, including top bureaucrats. Other wealthy citizens are catered for with some having upto 10 per persons, depending on their financial disposition. In this category are, of course, 419 kingpins who also need to be protected by the police. He said the Commissioner then turned to him and asked: “How many policemen are left to protect the remaining 99 percent of citizens and carry out other policing activities such as crime investigations?”

As the Senior Advocate rounded off, I told him that perhaps my visit could mark the beginning of the process of change because it is evident something proactive has to be done as we cannot continue like this. The security and welfare of the citizen is the main reason for the institution of government. Security of the citizen cannot be misconstrued to be the protection of one percent of the population. We agreed that we are too smart to continue with this order and we left on a note of renewed determination that we can collectively make a change.

r. CLEMENT OFUANI, a political analyst, wrote from Asaba, Delta State.