NIGERIAN RAPPER M.I ABAGA URGED NIGERIANS TO GET THEIR PVC FOR 2023 ELECTIONS AFTER HE SPENT TWO HOURS IN POLICE STATION OVER NOTHING

"We have work to do as a country" Rapper MI, subtly reminds Nigerians to get their PVCs and exercise their voting right as he shares his experience at a police station where he spent 2hours.

POLICE BRUTALITY

The Nigerian Police Force grew out of this acrimonious context, in which violence, suppression, duplicity and impunity merged in the bid to maintain colonial power. It was never a force created to protect locals and foster harmonious community relations. Instead, it had been formed as an occupation force for a narrow and specific reason: to maintain the power of the state even if the state is illegitimate.

Unfortunately, this operational outlook has hardly changed and certainly did not at the dawn of independence. So rather than viewing citizens as deserving of protection, the Nigeria Police Force views them primarily as adversaries, as established in the mandates of the colonial state. This lack of almost extraordinary in its grotesqueness.

And it became an outlook the infamous SARS took to an even more brutal level. Young men merely walking on the streets were stopped, frisked and dispossessed of their phones to view the contents. SARS operatives invariably demanded bribes and those who failed to comply were beaten and humiliated in public. Women, even the elderly among them, were not exempt from the terror of Police brutality in the form of beatings and torture.

"What the young people were asking for was essentially citizenship, their rights to be respected and what the Nigerian state has done is not unlike what it has always done when confronted with the demand for citizenship by any part of the citizenry."