Nigeria grossly under policed, says PCRC chair

The Police Community Relations Committee (PCRC) says Nigeria “is grossly under-policed”.

The Chairman of PCRC in Ogun State, Architect Samson Popoola, said this at PCRC state headquarters, Abeokuta, while receiving members of the Security and Safety Media Monitoring Group.

Popoola said with less than 500,000 police personnel, Nigeria won’t meet up with the police officer-population ratio of one to 400, even if Nigeria recruits 50,000 police personnel annually.

He expressed concern over insecurity in Nigeria, describing it as “precarious.”

Popoola said “The state of security is a very precarious one and that is why it is necessary for every right thinking citizen to start looking at solutions to the problems that we seem to have.

“Now we have these problems on our hands and of course when we look at the numerical strength of our police, you will find out that we are grossly under policed.

“Even if we are recruiting 50,000 police personnel every year, we cannot still meet up with the requirements of the UN standard of policing which is one to 400, how are we going to make that, when we have about 220million people living in the country.

“As of today the numerical strength of our police is less than 500,000. Out of this 500,000, about 50 percent of them are the people that are actually doing the police work that affects the generality of the people.

“We have top-heavy, we the IGPs, DIGs, ACs, people that will tell you that with their ranks, they cannot go to the streets again and do the normal policing work. So, we are left with that very little number and among all these ones, we have others that are professionals who are doctors, lawyers, engineers, tailors, secretaries and drivers among others and by the time you remove all these from the numerical strength, then what are we left with that are going to actually do policing?”

Popoola said the PCRC has been synergising with the police ” in the area of intelligence gathering, assisting them with information and some logistics where we are able to in infrastructure and generally making life better for them.”

Popoola, who is also the Secretary of PCRC Electoral Committee ahead of next month’s election, expressed the body towards peaceful transition.

He said the leadership of PCRC had built on consensus and zoning arrangements to foster continuous unity of the PCRC.

Popoola also denied alleged imposition or encouragement of mediocrity in the leadership of PCRC.

“I’m the secretary of the electoral committee and we have rolled out the guidelines for people to contest the election, but prior to that, we believe that sometimes you need to build consensus because there is no point going into an election with a divided house and then coming out of it even worse than you went in and so, the elders within the PCRC thought it wise that in order to maintain balance, we agreed that all the positions hitherto in the north should be transferred to tie south and then those in the south should be transferred to the north. That means positions like the national chairman, assistant national secretary will come to the south while the legal adviser, welfare and others will go to the north.

“The positions have been zoned to the various geopolitical zones and everybody agreed to the arrangement.

“But we never went out of the constitution to say that anyone can’t contest, this is just an agreement, so anyone interested is still at liberty to contest because it is their constitutional right.”

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