A SARS officer who shouldn't be wearing the uniform

We don’t need Yomi SARS to remind us of how hard it is working or living in Nigeria.

We know that  working conditions in Nigeria isn't the best and we know the odd routines required to keep most Nigerian jobs. We don’t need Yomi SARS to remind us of how hard it is working or living in Nigeria.

Nigeria is not a haven and We, Nigerians, have grown to become aware of the kind of society it is.

The society stench.

At least we know that APC and PDP are made from the same stock.

We know that corruption rules the day and that you have to pay the police to be their friend.

The country is full of filth really.

play Filty streets of Lagos
(Onyinbos Online)

We smell the stench everyday and the mess is littered everywhere across the different sectors of the Nigerian society.

It is hard for anyone not to notice the ills around, even a kid now knows that it isn't pieces of paper that taxi drivers need to pass police check points.

We know that the working condition in Nigeria isn't the best. We don’t need Yomi SARS to remind us of how hard it is working in Nigeria and even worse, we should not let him justify the illicit acts of SARS officers by saying “SARS job na hustle. There is no guarantee. If you #ENDSARS now, who go carry the gun?.”

Such statement is a product of a wild mentality and it is the reason an average SARS officer believes he is a not-to-be-questioned hero for wearing the uniform, causing him to point a gun at anyone who resists unlawful search or to frame up an innocent person for refusing to pay bribe.

To an average SARS officer his salary is meagre and with a gun in his hand, he would aggressively hunt for new ways to make more money even if it means oppressing and brutalising innocent citizens.

These innocent citizens who are often SARS victims are not treated any less by the harsh condition of the nation. Some of them are among the millions of youths without jobs or among the horde of civil servants whose salaries are held back or even pensioners who are enduring a taunting process to receive their entitlement. So there is no justification for SARS excesses.

If the narratives about SARS brutality and oppression were only few, one could have written them off as a case of an officer having a bad day but tens of thousands of Nigerians shared their experiences in the hands of SARS officers on social media alone.

I bet there are even more that didn't make it to the Internet. This shows that it is not a slip but a culture of SARS officers. A culture which must be stopped, perhaps not by scrapping the SARS unit but by reforming the unit, especially through instilling uprightness in the officers by enforcing strict disciplinary measures against the erring ones.

If I were a SARS officer and a colleague of mine goes down for oppressing an innocent lady and another colleague of mine is punished for brutalising an innocent person, I would clean up my act and change my approach towards my job for good.

Written by Ogbeni Lagbaja.

Ogbeni Lagbaja is a character created by a man who used to be an atheist; a man who was once in love, a man who once doubted himself. He can be reached via writelagbaja@gmail.com