Abba Kyari: Nigerians Can’t Be Fooled All The Time!

Although Nigerians have long developed a thick skin to the shenanigans of public officers, unfolding sordid affairs around the disgraced police officer, DCP Abba Kyari, have taken absurdities to a new level. Not even the civilized world expected such monumental corruption in the conduct of security matters. This criminality in the nation’s law enforcement makes a child’s play of the scandalous reinstatement of pension funds thief, Abdulrasheed Maina. Just when Nigerians thought they have seen it all, they never suspected that a supposed super cop was a super crook neck-deep in the trafficking of hard drugs and well versed in its dealership.

On Monday, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) disclosed that its operatives caught Kyari, a deputy commissioner of police, red-handed in a sting operation while aiding and abetting drug trafficking. He was said to have attempted bribing the drug law enforcers, tampering with exhibits, and facilitating collusion with drug traffickers. Appointed head of Inspector General of Police, IGP Intelligence Response Team (IRT), Kyari portrayed himself as effective in bursting kidnap and other sundry crime cases. He went a great deal in using social media to publicize his many crime-combating heroics.

Prior to his promotion to DCP in 2018, Kyari headed the now-disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) for five years at the Lagos Police Command. To his credit, he led the team of SARS operatives that ended the 14-year reign of a notorious South-west robbery gang known as Godogodo in 2013. His other notable feats include the March 2017 arrest of Henry Chibueze (Vampire)-led kidnapping gang in the Southeast and Rivers State. He also led the IRT to arrest Chukwudi Onuamadike, the notorious billionaire kidnap suspect popularly called Evans, in 2017; and Taraba’s wanted kidnap kingpin, Hamisu Wadume. These brought him laurels even from the Wife of the President. in 2018, Kyari got a handshake from Aisha Buhari who handed him a gilded plaque with the inscription: “in appreciation and recognition of his gallantry and diligent role in curbing crime in Nigeria”.

While Kyari recorded these notable successes in keeping Nigerians and their belongings safe, there were loud complaints about his excesses, including conversion of exhibits and large-scale human rights abuses. There was the allegation by a Lagos-based businessman, Afeez Mojeed, that Kyari and his men extorted over N41 million from him. In a petition filed on October 22, 2020, through his counsel, Salawu Akingbolu & Co, and addressed to the judicial panel of inquiry and restitution for victims of SARS-related abuses in Lagos, Kyari and his officers were accused of forcefully taking about 32 items from Mojeed’s house during a raid in 2014. In 2019, a federal government agency, the National Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International accused Kyari and his IRT of illegal expropriation of proceeds of crime to the tune of hundreds of millions of Naira.

The allegations were casually dismissed by the police. If only the police authorities had not swept these allegations under the carpet, the man would not have grown to become the sort of monster he was before hubris exposed him. Kyari was apparently in the good graces of the police hierarchy and political establishment. It was this connection that made him so invincible that he was almost getting away with a slap on the wrist in the report by the Force Headquarters panel which investigated him after the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) claimed that Kyari was recruited and paid by an internet fraudster, Ramon Abass, popularly known as Hushpuppi, to deal with an opponent.

Nigeria must be the only country where an officer of the law indicted by the FBI for dealing with an internet fraudster is only punished with a mere demotion in rank. This explains why despite the suspension slammed on him last August by the Police Service Commission which ordered further investigations into his relationship with Hushpuppi, Kyari continued operating as a police officer until January 2022 with “boys” in the Force who he can still mobilize for illegal operations. Naija News cannot agree more with rights lawyer, Femi Falana SAN, who rightly said, “That a serving police officer who is suspended, would also (be able to) mobilise police personnel to go and perpetrate drug trafficking shows that the system has collapsed.”

For this so-called ‘super cop’ and an accomplished officer to have walked into such an elementary entrapment shows what avarice can do to a limelight-loving social media buff of an officer who revelled in the paean before his demystification. NDLEA spokesman, Femi Babafemi, who presented video evidence that appeared to show Kyari making illegal deals with an NDLEA agent and handing over $61,400 as a bribe to pervert justice, said, “With the intelligence at our disposal, the agency believes strongly that DCP Kyari is a member of a drug cartel that operates the Brazil-Ethiopia-Nigeria illicit drug pipeline…”

This same Kyari had been indicted by a US court in the $1.1 million scam perpetrated by Abbas and ordered his arrest, based on which the US as of July 2021 requested Kyari’s extradition to face trial. The revelation that Kyari was still cutting deals as a police officer – drug deals for the matter – despite being on suspension speaks to the decadence in Nigeria’s security and law enforcement institutions. No thanks to the soft-landing glaringly being given to Kyari, Nigerians perceived the disgraced officer’s arrest by the NDLEA as an official conspiracy to shield him from being extradited to the US.

It has now become clearer that the way the issue was being handled is in keeping with security apparatchik’s penchant to cover up the rot in the system. If not so, why would IGP Usman Baba have no qualm with the suspended Kyari attending his son’s wedding! According to Reno Omokri, “As at January 30, when DCP Abba Kyari attended IGP Alkali Baba’s sons wedding, Kyari was already a known criminal. Consorting with known criminals is already a breach of the IGP’s oath of service. If Buhari knows his own job, IGP Baba should not have a job by now!”

Following their investigations, the NDLEA penultimate Wednesday turned in their preliminary findings on Kyari and his squad asking the Police authorities to hand them over for prosecution. When this did not happen, the agency’s leadership held a meeting with the inspector-general of Police, Usman Baba, who promised to hand him over. This was not to be three days later, forcing the drug law enforcement agency to go public on Monday. When the Police hierarchy eventually turned Kyari and his collaborators in, they sought to extract a pound of flesh by claiming that the NDLEA must go after its own rogue officers with the same zeal it had chased the police outlaws.

This crying shame exposes Nigerian law enforcement agents as so compromised that they have become mercenaries for hire. It, therefore, highlights the need for a comprehensive purge of the system. President Muhammadu Buhari owes this to Nigerians as an anti-graft champion. While Naija News is mindful that Kyari is innocent until found guilty by a competent court of law, the point must be made that no serious country condones corrupt law enforcement officers. China, for one, wastes no time in executing them. In May 2021, a corrupt officer of the United Kingdom’s Scotland Yard, Kashif Mahmood, was jailed eight years for involvement with a drugs gang from whom he also stole £850,000. A South Texas, US, police officer, Hector Beltran, was in February 2020, sentenced to 10 years in jail for drug trafficking.

The punishment of errant law enforcement officers in Nigeria comes highly recommended to instil discipline and serve as deterrence. Given that Kyari was at various times publicly celebrated as a model to his police peers having received accolades from the House of Representatives among others, his punishment for the despicable infractions should be such that will deter his colleagues from roguery. Naija News leaves Kyari and the forces trying to shield him with the eternal words of Abraham Lincoln, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time”.