Watching the ongoing street demonstrations in Hong Kong brings a lot of issues to mind. Hong Kong is fighting for its soul, literally. The battle is not to determine whether China gets Hong Kong. Hong Kong belongs to China. Whether China “takes” Hong Kong now or several years down the line, as envisaged by the “one nation, two systems” accord signed with the erstwhile colonial authority Britain, China already has Hong Kong, and it does not matter who likes it or not.
The Hong Kong protests are a negotiation. The people – especially the young, who have grown up with ‘Western’ freedoms in one of the most technologically advanced places in the world, do not want to contemplate the possibility that they could get sucked into the mainstream culture of their fellow nationals on the Chinese mainland, where the internet is routinely censored, and where clear limits are imposed on the freedoms they have grown up taking for granted in Hong Kong.
They were particularly alarmed by a piece of legislation that was put forward by the Chinese-backed local government, which would have made it possible for people who committed offences in Hong Kong to be extradited to the Chinese mainland for trial.
The focus of this conversation is not the politics of Hong Kong but the street demonstrations that have been going on for several weeks there, and how the Police of Hong Kong are dealing with the disruptions to public law and order. It is also a conversation about how the police is primed to define and carry out its duties in a modern society.
The young people of Hong Kong, who are throwing missiles and Molotov cocktails at policemen in the narrow streets of Kowloon, are normally very respectful of police in their society. Being a policeman is a respectable occupation.
By contrast, police and policing in Nigeria suffer from widespread distrust and negative perception from the public they serve.
It is necessary to ask – are there any lessons to be learnt from Hong Kong?
Hong Kong – a tiny island territory with a population of 7,555,000 people – has a Police Force just under 37,000 staff, out of whom 32,000 are active duty officers. In Nigeria the comparative figures are 371,800 police staff, but with a very large fraction not available for routine police duties because they are serving effectively as bodyguards to public officials and private sector “VIPs”.
The drama of civil disturbance on the streets of Hong Kong, which even for a time brought one of the busiest airports in the world to a grinding stop, has been a gripping spectacle for media watchers all over the world. It has been remarkable not just for the tenacity of the protesters but also by the patience, professionalism and forbearance of the police ranged against them.
The police, despite their vast armamentarium, have limited themselves to using non-lethal tactics and equipment to contain protesters who, in some cases resorted to violence, breaking shop windows, and ransacking offices. Molotov cocktails, sticks and stones have been thrown into the ranks of the policemen and women sheltering behind plastic shields. The police have responded with baton charges and the occasional burst of teargas.
Many arrests have been made. A few policemen and protesters have sustained injuries, but no life has been lost directly due to the clashes, though there have been five suicides related to the issue of the protests. Recently, there was the first report of a gun being fired by a policeman when he was chased down an alley by stick-wielding protesters and felt his life threatened.
It is interesting to think what would have happened if those massive, vociferous protests had taken place on the streets of Lagos or Abuja, and it had fallen to the Nigeria Police to be the ones to deal with them.
Watching Hong Kong police in action would bring to the minds of those old enough to remember an earlier, gentler incarnation of the Nigerian Police. Long ago, there were “anti-riot” Policemen in Nigeria. They wore – wait for it, khaki shirts and shorts, and carried shields and batons as the tools of their trade. They were deployed to contain worker’s strikes, students’ protests and other incidents of public disorder.
In the eyes of the public then, there was a calibration and proportionality in police response to situations, and recognition that the life of the Nigerian was precious. Lethal force was only to be undertaken with the authorisation of superiors, after gentler means of crowd control had failed.
Over the course of decades of military rule, and probably as a result of the general coarsening of the sensibilities of Nigerian society as a whole, lethal force has become the front-line response in any public disorder. A generation of Nigerians has grown up never having seen their policemen carrying shields and gently trying to pacify a protesting mob. Everybody in uniform, it seems, is licenced to kill.
No citizen has died – yet, six weeks on, in Hong Kong.
If Nigeria had been Hong Kong, and a mob hand invaded the airport and rampaged through shops and offices, heads would have rolled and blood would have flown, assuredly.
Policing is a tough, sometime thankless career everywhere. In Hong Kong, the salary of the policeman is substantially higher than the median income in the private sector. The policeman is respected in society. In Nigeria, the pay is still poor, despite the latest efforts of government. But more worryingly, the motivating ingredients of self-respect and social esteem are all too often missing.
In that space, the automatic response to provocation in an already demoralised ‘law officer’ with a gun in place of a shield and baton is apt to be lethal. There is little respect for life.
It is not where the Nigeria Police started from. It certainly does not represent the direction it should be happily heading to.
FEMI OLUGBILE
