Police as ‘tax’ masters on our roads!
There’s a particular kind of police behaviour that cracks indulgees up any time they gather for their weekly meetings. And if you think you are going to start hearing about this behaviour right away by behaving jumpily, then you must be new to this gathering. Go ask your neighbours next door, they would know a thing or two about how we do our thing here!
By the way, one indulgee actually rushed into this week’s meeting, for instance, laughing to tears for what many thought was “no just cause”. Yes, for no reason at all! You know how they say these things, for no just cause! I bet you just remembered something now and a little smile betrayed you. It’s the way the mind works – in a not-too-mysterious way, you might want to say. But what is a just cause, anyway? Is it the one that you say is, or the one that I say is; or the one that a group of people – NGOs, a National Conference, a National Assembly, or the military – say is? See, it is good to subject things to some kind of debate so that you use the opportunity to debrief people of their different biases? Now, I can see you are beginning to tell yourself that you were wrong all the while for thinking this chief indulgee is on his own (bet you must have screened OYO at some point during your adventure or misadventure into this informal meeting of ours – where you meet me and I don’t meet you; you don’t meet me and I meet you, all at the same time)! Or so you thought.
“Oh, you mean Phillip? I know him, of course! We meet every Sunday, nowadays. It used to be every Friday and then throughout the weekend, when he wouldn’t just go away until I am ready to return to the hustle and bustle of my working life.” “Awwwww, that’s really sweet. I mean this much to you? Thank you.” That’s me pretending that I heard you and then, going further to try and provide you with a response, as if this meeting is, indeed, holding, face to face, somewhere physical! But it’s in our mind, innit? One thing I know is that a cause is a cause, and it is just by interpretation, according to who is justifying it. And as we gradually make effort to get these distractions out of the way, it might be wise to return to the indulgee who chose to saunter into this meeting cracking up her ribs, with or without a cause – it’s her ribs to crack up, not so?
“Why are you cracking up, even before the meeting has started?” Someone asked. The man couldn’t stop. But, he did manage, teary-eyes, induced by volumes of laughing gas that he consumed somewhere else, to murmur something that sounded like, “It’s the chief! It’s the chief!” What has the chief done this time? It’s the way with indulgees. They like to take the shine off me sometimes. Most of the time, I fight my way back to stamp my authourity as the chief indulgee at the square table! At the odd few times, when I let them have their way, it’s when I remember the word ‘democracy’ and all the Fashola Take-Aways associated with it. Yes, Fashola likes take-away a lot. I am still trying to find out which particular take-away places are his favourites – Mr Bigs? KFC? Sweet Sensation? Tantalizers? TFC? Or is it some Point-and-Kill joint somewhere around Alausa? When the man leaves office, I won’t be surprised if someone starts calling him ‘The Take-Away Governor’. You know Nigerians, don’t you? Good belle or bad belle, as they sometimes are, they like to rub something in for the fun of it. But do not say you heard, sorry read it, here first! If you do that, you are on your own. The man is my friend-oo and I don’t know book-oo!
What the chief indulgee did that has made this indulgee to crack up, it turned out, was a recall from the past. I had tabled before the gathering sometime ago, that Nigerian police men and women are perpetually in a comedy mode, especially when they are posted to stationary checkpoints (as in the past, before checkpoints were outlawed) or nowadays, what I call checkpoints-on-the-move (make that mobile, because you can be driving by and find policemen on patrol quickly assemble in an area to do spot-and-check on vehicles, and if you returned there in five, ten, twenty minutes later, they would have disappeared). The comedy image is that sometimes, you can find them be so tenacious in shouting: “Park! Park! Park!” to just about everybody they think they can get something from. By the way, the barking of “Park, Park, Park” gets more severe if you appear to look poor and have no way in hell of fighting back (either by way of saying, “Do you know who I am?” or by actually calling someone whom you know or someone who knows someone, and who can send certain police personnel, with such effrontery as to want to ‘park you’, to the orderly room). I had said after weeks and even months of observation, I had seen that there was a tendency for the rank and file police personnel to be very aggressive about this activity. And this aggressive behaviour comes alive when they are pursuing ordinary Nigerians, who are going about trying to eke out a living doing little business.
If you are an inner city observer, whether in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Onitsha, Abeokuta, Kano, Abuja or Kaduna, you will find this sort of behaviour meted out to small business owners like tipper drivers who are just moving a tipper of sand from suppliers to buyers’ building site for a fee; truck pushers who are trying to deliver goods from one point to another for traders. Our policemen and women on these now occasional mobile checkpoints, have continued to perfect the art of using this opportunity to become ‘tax’ masters!
Our laughing indulgee apparently decided, during the past week, to put my own observation to the test. He had just come out of his bank and was observing things around him, when he saw an aggressively charged traffic police woman (Eunice) barking out the “park, park, park” order. She was aided by all the body movements she could muster, just to reinforce the point to an oncoming truck driver that they were at work. Her colleagues, all male police personnel, were there to support her. Everything is taken measure for measure. They measure if there’s a ‘kill’ as any truck that appears to be transporting anything approaches. It would seem to me that there’s a mindset that says, “we must benefit from this your business!” Meanwhile, the man is just a truck driver. He has only been hired to transport the items and has charged for his service. I hear that because of the behaviour of the police that they encounter enroute, they tend to build police cost into their charges! See how the cost of business becomes unnecessarily high here?
In this particular case, this was a truck driver transporting planks used on a building site! In order words, you could see that the planks were used. They were now woods that would probably be used as fuel for another small trader frying and selling akara balls! The woman shouted “park, park, park’ continuously, apparently to intimidate, because as soon as one of her colleagues climbed and took a seat in the vehicle (ostensibly to establish the value of the planks), she stopped! It’s a ‘tax’ master’s affair!
PHILLIP ISAKPA