Sowore: Police no longer perform their duties — all they do is protect VIPs

Omoyele Sowore, presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC), has accused the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) of failing to perform its duties amid the rising insecurity in the country.

Sowore spoke in an interview with Africa Independent Television (AIT), which will be aired on Thursday night.

The presidential candidate accused police officers of serving as security attachés to prominent personalities at social events, instead of engaging in their responsibility of maintaining law and order.

“In this country today, the Nigeria police are no longer doing police work, the army is the one doing police work. What the police are doing is [to] accompany people to parties, and accompany VIPs. They are just doing VIP protection,” he said.

Speaking further, Sowore said some houses being protected by police officers in the federal capital territory (FCT) are empty.

“We have 350,000 policemen. Every house you go to in the Asokoro area has six policemen in front of them doing nothing — just protecting VIPs. Some of the houses that have policemen in front of them, they don’t have people even occupying the houses because they have reduced the police to nothing,” he added.

“Our security agencies are managed, with due respect, by incompetent people and leaders. They are not appointed on merit. They are appointed based on ethnicity, nepotism and religiosity.”

Sowore also bemoaned the decline of public education in the country, noting that the situation contributed to the prevalent insecurity.

“Before we started this pro-democracy struggle, there was a N120 million loan that the World Bank gave to Nigeria to develop universities. Did you know what the authorities at the University of Lagos did? They were building fences around the hostels,” he said.

“They were not building libraries because they were more interested in those things that enable them to squander the money. Now you have private universities everywhere, you abandoned the public universities.

“The children that we did not allow to go to school between the year 1999 and 2022 are probably part of the bandits that are closing down private universities now because very soon all the universities may have to close down whether it is private or public.

“Any opportunity you lose to give children the opportunity to learn, you have also destroyed the future of your own country.”