Former Vice President Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has exposed the critical shortage of police personnel in Nigeria, revealing that his local government area in Adamawa State operates with fewer than 15 police officers.
The former PDP presidential candidate made the revelation during a media coverage by Symfoni TV from 2:39, highlighting the massive disparity between Nigeria’s population and its police force. “Today, we have 340,000 policemen in a population of 240 million. Tell me, how can they police you effectively? In my local government in Adamawa state, we don’t have more than 15 policemen. And most local governments are like that,” Atiku stated.
The former vice president used Egypt as a benchmark to illustrate Nigeria’s inadequate policing capacity. “Egypt, with almost 100 million population, has 1 million police personnel. How can we have peace? These are some of the challenges that we have to face squarely,” he said.
Drawing from his experience in government, Atiku detailed how he addressed similar policing challenges during his tenure as Vice President under President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration. He recalled bringing a United Nations report about Nigeria’s policing deficit to President Obasanjo’s attention and proposing concrete solutions. “I read in a United Nations report that Nigeria was terribly underpoliced. I went to him (President Obasanjo), I said, ‘Mr. President, I read a United Nations report, and Nigeria is terribly underpoliced.’ He said, ‘What do we do?’ I said, ‘Well, we have many police colleges that have been closed across the states. We should open them and hire as many policemen as possible.’ And we did that,” Atiku recounted.
The former vice president also described how the administration streamlined police equipment procurement by bypassing traditional contracting procedures. “And then it came to the issue of procurement of the equipment for the police, from arms and ammunitions, and so on and so forth. I said, ‘Mr. President, let’s call the police. Let them tell us where they procure these items and from which countries.’ And the police gave us the countries,” he explained.
Atiku detailed the innovative approach they adopted to expedite equipment delivery. “I said, ‘Let’s call the ambassadors of those countries and deal directly with them. Let them produce the equipment we need within a record time, which they did.’ We didn’t go through the contract system because the contract procedure was cumbersome. This was how we dealt with it,” he stated.
