The Inspector General of Police(IGP), Kayode Egbetokun, has insisted that the Tuesday, August 7 invasion of the headquarters of the Nigeria Labour Congress(NLC), in Abuja, by the police was not targeted at the leadership of the Labour Congress.
Rather, according to Egbetokun, the police were in the trail of a suspect who had been actively involved in the Sudan crisis and planning to do the same to mobilize efforts and destabilize Nigeria.
Answering journalists’ questions at the Youth Summit organised by the police in Abuja, Egbetokun, said: “My response to this will be in three parts. Number one is that, of course, our responsibility is not to protest but to manage protest. Two is that the intelligence at the disposal of the police, anyone who knows what we know about this protest, will not come out to protest.
“We had intelligence at our disposal that some agents of destabilization are ready to use the hardship protest to destabilize our country.”
He added: “I won’t be able to share the details yet because we are still on the trail of these individuals. Some of them are already out of the country, and they immediately escape.
“Some of them are even foreigners. One of them was traced to the labour house the other day, and I was just wondering why the noise about the raid on the labour house when the police raided the labour house. We raided only a shop that the individual was using as a front and we have been monitoring his activities.
“He was very active in the Sudan crisis and he’s in Nigeria mobilizing people to destabilize our country. We traced him to that shop and our detectives raided his shop. We recovered valuable documents, so there was no need for the noise about the raid of the labour house.”
The IGP, while noting that the police were against the protest because of the experiences of ENDSARS, said: “I always refer to the ENDSARS protest which turned violent. It started initially as peaceful, but any protest that is mobilized on social media has the potential to be violent because when you are mobilizing on social media, you are mobilizing the whole population, including the criminals. So the idea of the protest being hijacked, I don’t believe that a protest that is mobilized on social media is hijacked.
“Hijacked by who? By the same people that were mobilized for the protest. So our experience in the past in previous protests would not make the police want to take part in any protest that we know is going to be violent. “
On what the police were doing to protect farmers to curb food insecurity in the country, Egbetokun said the police had commenced farm patrols to give farmers confidence.
He said: “ We are doing a lot. In the Northeast, we have started farm patrol to give confidence back to farmers to return to the farm. Mr. President is very, very concerned about it, and we are doing our best.
“But let me also add that the security landscape in Nigeria is complex and diverse. Marked with a range of challenges requiring multi-dimensional responses. We have challenges in security.
“There are also economic challenges. There are political challenges. We have environmental challenges. All these challenges are interconnected. To solve these challenges we need to understand their interconnectedness. You can’t solve one challenge and leave the others.”
Responding to a question on what he is doing to flush out bad eggs in the police force, the IGP said, “You said that a lot of bad eggs are in the police. That we have bad eggs. But the bad eggs are everywhere. They are not only in the police.
“Whatever you see in the police today is a reflection of what Nigeria is. It is called the Nigeria Police Force, not the Ghana Police Force. Members of the force are Nigerians. So a society gets the kind of police it deserves. That notwithstanding, we are fishing out the bad eggs because we are responsible leaders. “
