A security risk management and intelligence specialist and Managing Director, Beacon Consulting Limited, Kabir Adamu, has said that if the Nigerian Police were to conduct a test on its officers and men, 50 percent of them may be discovered to be under the influence of drugs.
Adamu stated this in an interview with The Punch, while reviewing the security situation in the country and proffering his own solutions.
Picture caption: Security expert, Adamu
According to him, “The Police have recruited several persons that I will say are not ideal for any police arrangement; I can almost with all confidence say if today a drug test is done on the police, probably a significant percentage of between 30 and 50 may be found to be under the influence of one drug or the other, and that’s not what you want.
“So, in terms of professionalism, a lot needs to be done. It is a Catch-22 situation; because they have been trained in weapon handling and so, you don’t want to let go of people who have weapon handling training.
“There needs to be rehabilitation; find out why they are addicted, rehabilitate them and those that will be 100 per cent rehabilitated, reabsorb them. Those that cannot be rehabilitated, you need to get something more effective for them to do”, he added.
The security expert further advised that “something akin to dialysis needs to be done in the Police in order to weed out this group of unideal persons in the police system. I don’t know how true it is that societal rejects and deviants are finding themselves in the Police; that means the background check process is zero.
“They need to do a bit more in terms of background checks to ensure that anyone being recruited into the police has a good moral standing. That means going forward, starting from recruitment to deployment needs to be changed.
“The entire Police structure needs to be revised so that we can have a more functional and professional Police than we currently have”, he stated.
