By DESMOND UTOMWEN
Q: Could you recount your experience with the Police and how you got brutalised?
A: On Friday, 11 December 2009 at about 11a.m, I stumbled on a peaceful protest around the premises of the Area III, Garki branch of GTBank, in Abuja. As a journalist, it was natural that I stopped to find out what was amiss. On getting there, I realised that the people were protesting some fraudulent withdrawal from the account of one of the customers of the bank, amounting to about N490,000. Curiously, the fraudulent withdrawal was done in one night with an ATM card, which is in contradiction of the N100,000 daily withdrawal limit of the bank. The protesters believed there must have been insider collusion for such colossal withdrawal to be made in one night. As required of a journalist, I was taking some photographs. I made effort to balance the report by attempting to speak with the branch manager or whoever was competent enough to speak on the issue, but I was denied access to the bank. At this point, I decided to leave for my office. I was on my way back to my car when some of the bank officials and policemen on patrol came after me. They asked me to stop and I did. The bank official who got to me first requested that I give them my camera. Of course I refused. I told them that I did not know them and it was not proper for me to give them my camera, as it is my working tool. They attempted to forcefully take it and I resisted. It was at this point the police swooped on me and started roughhandling me, targeting my face. They seriously assaulted me and inflicted bodily injuries on me until I fell down unconscious. They later bundled me into their van and took me to their station in Garki village. While the beating was going on, they held a gun against me and threatened to shoot to kill me if I uttered any word. They warned me that nobody would do anything about my death if it happened. At that point they confiscated my phones and denied me the opportunity to make or receive calls from my bosses, colleagues and relatives. It was at the station that they returned the phones to me.
Q: When they came for you, did you resist arrest or act rudely to provoke their anger?
A: No. One, they did not invite me to go with them to the station let alone refusing them. They didn’t even ask me who I was or what I was doing at the scene. The only question I got from them was: ‘where is the camera, who did you give the camera to?’ They came with the wrong assumption planted inside of them by the GTBank officials that I may have given my camera to somebody else, whereas the camera was with me at that time. And before I could say a word, they started punching me as if I was wrongly matched in a boxing bout against the Klitschko Brothers. They took my digital recording device and I could not find my official working ID Card and some of the money I had in my pockets before the beating. As a matter of fact I had no reason to resist arrest. Apart from the feeling of innocence, I am also an accredited Police and Crime correspondent, with Police accreditation tag issued from the Force Headquarters on me. If they had asked for my identity, I would have given them.
Q: With your experience, what is your perception of the Nigerian police?
A: While one may not want to dispute the fact that there are still some refined gentleman officers at the top hierarchy of the force, the experience, without mincing words, calls to mind the widely held opinion that the Police Force is infested with a bunch of callous, inhuman personnel with murderous instinct among the rank and file and the earlier the government took steps to show these bad eggs the door, the better. How do you explain a situation whereby the police are called to the scene of disturbance and without asking questions and properly identifying offenders, they just descend on innocent and defenceless citizens. They descended on innocent journalists who were only doing their job and rightly or wrongly, they did not even do anything about the protesters themselves just because the GTBank officials asked them to come after us.
Q: But why would the bank officials ask the police to come after you and not the protesters?
A: As I said earlier, they were after my camera and to them, my crime was that I took photographs of the demonstration. I think they were not comfortable with the inscriptions on the placards the protesters were carrying and felt that publishing them would affect their image negatively. So, their major aim was to confiscate the camera and ensure the photographs taken never got published.
The Police claimed you had no right to take photographs of the bank premises. What is your take?
I don’t know where they got that notion from. I don’t know if it is a written or unwritten law. Their reason, as I was made to understand, is that such protest could provide a cover for hoodlums to carry out some nefarious activities. I didn’t just go taking photographs of the bank premises. I took pictures of the protesters. So my focus was not on the bank.
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