“I had these children in poverty. I nursed them in tattered wrappers. They wore second-hand clothes. These are children who had never had anything new. We have always lived from hand to mouth. I could not even afford to pay their school fees. That was why I told my son to go and learn shoe-making. But did they even allow him to learn anything? Have they not put him in the mortuary now?

Why won’t they let us live in peace when we are already poor?”
Grief like you can hardly put into words. The lamentations of a hurting, bereaved mother of Taye Emiola, a 16-year- old boy who was shot on Wednesday February 6 in Agege, Lagos. He died on Sunday, February 10. The sharp shooters? Policemen. Poor Taye was dressed in his poor clothes, watching one of the matches in the just-concluded African Nations Cup on a neighbour’s balcony. The hardworking cops as usual were in hot pursuit of a bus conductor who was in possession of their N20. The erring conductor had not only refused to part with the N20, he had also forced the policemen into a 100-meter potbellied cops race. And were they angry? They simply opened fire, swinging their guns like a water hose.

You would think that a man who has a wife and children would have a bit of sense. But the one they call Baba 70 from Area G Police Station in Lagos, obviously wears his brains in the soles of his boots. Soulless man killed Taye, the poor son of a poor woman who is the sole breadwinner of a family of eight. Poor Mrs Tayelolu Emiola had hopes that one day, her struggle will cease and her children will be able to stand tall in this society. Her husband has been bedridden for three years. Now her son is in the morgue.

Another victim , Taye Abass, a petty trader on Kasumu Street, Agege was also hit by stray-bullets from the guns of possessed policemen who had chased a bus conductor from the bus-stop into Kasumu street. That was at about 12.55pm on Friday February 8.

It looks like we are owing Mr Okiro and his men and it looks like we may have to continue to pay until rapture. It would obviously never matter how many times we increase their wages, they will always have us by the jugular. There is a curious pact between them and N20 such that even when a corporal or constable at the checkpoint has N20,000 in his pocket, the sight of a N20 note will still have him panting. And he’d do anything, including kill, to grab his ‘partikolas’. How many times have we mourned great Nigerians, innocent men, women ,children who were mauled down by rampaging N20-crazy cops. We pay tax from which they pay the salaries of our policemen.

It is bad enough that we do not get value for our money. We have even learnt to accept our fate in good faith. Ordinarily we would have been shocked by former I-G Sunday Ehindero’s ‘boldface’ that he had no apology for the way the Nigerian Police ran under him. As far as he was concerned, Nigeria got the police she deserved. But we are not shocked. The average Nigerian can only be shocked when good things start coming out of Louis Edet’s House. We are immune to the bad stuff. I must however admit that Ehindero does have a little point there but we will come to that shortly.
You can accuse the Nigeria Police of being all thumbs when it comes to catching murderers. You can accuse them of arriving crime scenes long after the criminals have finished sharing their loot.

You can accuse them of asking complainants to provide money for biro, notebooks or even fuel for police vehicles. But you can’t accuse them of failing to maim and kill at regular intervals children of or men who pay their salaries. If it is not a student, it is a pregnant woman. If it is not a bus conductor, it a businessman whose car trunk contains ‘crude oil’. Don’t we all remember the Apo Six? And the businessman who was cremated in his own car by cops a few years ago in, I think, Kogi State? Well, in case we are beginning to forget or doubt the prowess of our police in this department, they are refreshing our memory. They are all over the place chasing ‘suspects’ from one end of town to another.

They are ‘fighting crime’ so hard that every innocent man on the street is being herded towards untimely grave. The poor and their children like Taye Emiola must continue to die so that our policemen can continue to polish their shooting skills. Let’s just hope the policemen who unleashed terror in Agege last week won’t get just a slap on the wrist for this. Governor Fashola, please note. There just may be a grand conspiracy to do this regularly.