Report: Police tracker was used to monitor politicians’ enemies, mistresses — instead of kidnappers

A retired senior police officer says a real-time tracking platform, once instrumental in helping to solve criminal cases by the Intelligence Response Team (IRT), was misused by politicians.

According to Vanguard, the unnamed former officer said the tracking system, meant to combat kidnapping, ended up being used to monitor “enemies and mistresses” of politicians.

In 2015, Solomon Arase, the then-inspector general of police (IGP), launched intelligence-led policing and inaugurated a tracking platform to enable real-time monitoring of kidnappers’ movements.

The system led to several successful operations, including the arrest of five kidnappers involved in the September 2015 abduction of Olu Falae, a former secretary to the government of the federation (SGF).

However, according to the senior police officer quoted by Vanguard, successive IGPs did not maintain and modernise the tracking system.

“The priority of successive IGPs was quite different. Solomon Arase set up the platform when he was the IGP. It was a technical platform to track calls,” he said.

“It was mounted in the IGP’s office then and only one officer, who is now an AIG, had access to the technical platform.

“The Intelligence Response Team, IRT was supposed to be the operational wing that would work with the technical platform. When the technical team got information, it would pass it to IRT to go to the location and make an arrest. Drones and vehicles were bought for the operation.

“But successive IGPs who were analogues didn’t know what to do. They merged the technical platform and IRT. Instead of the platform being used for crime prevention, it became political.

“People in the national assembly and villa got hold of the platform and used it to track their enemies and mistresses.

“For such a platform, you don’t give both the technical and the operational units to just one person who would be compromised by politicians.

“That was the beginning of the collapse of the platform. It requires someone with power and intelligence; someone of a strategic level who is keen on that line.

“This platform was supposed to be renewed and hooked up with the service provider. But that was never the priority of successive IGPs.

“They had money to pay for the accumulated subscription but they refused to pay. When you leave such a system for more than one year, it requires recalibration. This technology keeps evolving.

“You can’t say something you set up today will be used the same way for 10 years without being upgraded. Before long, the system broke down, and the functionality of the police tracking equipment began to diminish and subsequently went comatose.

“The tracker, particularly, became non-functional due to non-subscription as well as failure to engage the relevant company to carry out required system upgrades.”

The police officer added that the company responsible for maintaining and upgrading the tracking platform withdrew its services after the police failed to pay subscription fees “for about three years”.