“I’ll never join Nigerian police,” crying boy vows after watching officer oppress mum
A Nigerian boy has made up his mind about the country’s police. He’ll never join them.
To ensure he doesn’t change his mind about that, he offered a prayer to God:
“I pray to God not to allow me become a policeman or see them near me.”
The traumatised boy reached the unfortunate conclusion after watching his mother suffer at the hands of an apparently oppressive police officer who would only set his innocent “captive” free at the reception of a N50,000 bribe.
Unfortunately for police officer Tijani Adewole, the woman she apparently held captive for hours, the boy’s mother, refused handing out the huge bribe.
The mother narrated how Adewole abused her human rights in the presence of the boy who could only cry the whole time.
“I have heard Nigerian police echoed it over and over again that they’re our friends but today, I saw that Tijani Adewole (365880) of CTU Owerri Zone is not among our police friends,” Ifeoma Onwuka who works at Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Abia State wrote on Facebook after her ordeal on Sunday.
Onwuka’s reference to the police being “our friend” showed she understood there are good cops. Sadly, her young son seemed to perceive things differently after witnessing Adewole’s obviously shameful act…and who would blame the poor kid?
Her story continues:
He stopped us on our way to Enugu this morning and demanded to see our vehicle and driver’s license. On laying hold of these documents, he seized them and claimed they were fakes.
I asked him to kindly show us the original ones since I knew that I got them from the same office since ten years running now. He quickly diverted and told us that our plate number was a fake one and that he would take us to their base at Owerri to be detained for using a fake plate number. We agreed to go with him.
He quickly turned around and asked us to give the sum of N50000, to let us go.
When he saw that we were adamant and bent on not giving him a kobo, he demanded for the car key. He told us to remove all our belongings and come back on Monday to pick our vehicle.
We refused and he kept us at a spot for three hours.
Onwuka said Adewole was not even the most senior police officer at the spot. She said Adewole’s superiors told him to let them go. The police officer, according to her, refused.
What broke my heart were the tears from my son’s eyes and Tijani’s refusal to listen to our pleadings and that of his superiors. My son was greatly traumatised with all the happenings.
When God finally intervened, we were released, with no concrete explanation why we were detained for three solid hours.
With those tears in my son’s eyes he said, “Mummy I pray to God not to allow me become a policeman or see them near me.”
I pray that men like Tijani Adewole will stop bringing bad names to the police force.
Onwuka said while the episode lasted, someone took the police officer’s picture without his knowledge.
“The picture is not clear because he took it from a distance,” Onwuka said.
“We were afraid he could turn violent on us. He even searched our phones to see if we were keeping records.”
Newsroom got in touch with the police spokesperson for Imo State who dismissed Onwuka’s allegations as “Facebook nonsense.”
“My friend it’s unbelievable,” Imo State police spokesperson Enwerem Andrew told Newsroom.
He said at length:
She (Onwuka) has the right to say whatever she wants to say. Why didn’t she put the price at N1 million? If she was found to have committed an offence that would be understandable.
But for the police to stop an innocent citizen and not demand for N10 or N100 but for N50,000…my brother don’t believe it. It is an old story that cannot happen again in this Nigeria. I’m taking it with a pinch of salt.
As far as I am concerned, any police officer who commits an offence is on his (her) own. But I don’t believe this (woman’s story) and you yourself cannot believe that kind of a thing. It is not even worth investigating.
I will only investigate it if she submits a formal complaint. I don’t work on Facebook. I don’t have the mandate to investigate anything anybody posts on Facebook. Anybody can post any nonsense on Facebook. Facebook is not an authority. It is social media. If she is sure of what she is saying, let her lodge a formal complaint and we will follow it up.
The police spokesperson also said the name of Tijani Adewole “is a strange name in Imo State police command.”
