The Chairman, Board of Trustees of the Nigeria Police Trust Fund, Suleiman Abba, says corruption and nepotism led to the scrapping of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).
The former Inspector-General of Police (IGP) said many of the operatives of the now-defunct squad got in because those in leadership ordered it and not necessarily because of competence.
Speaking in an interview published by Sunday Vanguard, Abba also blamed improper supervision for the monster that SARS operatives became.
“The first reason SARS is in crisis is because of nepotism. Nepotism comes in when those in leadership try to bring in their own people.
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“The second reason SARS lost it is corruption. And this is associated with the problem of leadership.
“When you don’t have direct supervision, the likelihood is that people will try as much as possible to satisfy whoever will prevent them from having 100 per cent freedom; you do whatever you like, you investigate cases the way you want, detain people for as many days as you want and perhaps cause loss of lives because nobody is supervising you properly. That is one aspect of it.
“The other aspect is when focus is completely lost simply because of the combination of corruption and lack of leadership. And this leads to so many things.
“These boys get overworked because they don’t have control. They now go out looking for cases. During our time, we didn’t send SARS on the roads.
They went out as a strike force. If it was a rescue mission, they do it and return to the office. If the mission was to arrest robbers, they do so and return to the office.”