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| Mohammed D. Abubakar |
Credit: Associated Press
Nigeria’s president has selected a new officer to lead the nation’s police
force as a radical Islamist sect increasingly targets the force, but that man
already has a past tarnished by allegations he allowed religious and ethnic
violence that killed 1,000 people to spiral out of control.
Mohammed D. Abubakar served as police commissioner in Plateau state in 2001,
leading up to rioting that saw Muslim and Christian groups armed with machetes
and firearms attack each other in the restive central Nigerian city of Jos. And
while some victims burned to the death in the street, civil society groups said
Abubakar refused to send officers into the street to stop the violence.
“The police commissioner kept saying everything was under control while the
whole town was on fire,” one local human rights activist told Human Rights
Watch after the rioting.
Abubakar took over Thursday as inspector general of the Nigeria Police
Force, an agency still roughly organized and as maligned as it was when the British
colonial government created it in 1861. Today, more than a fourth of its
officers serve as personal attendants and drivers to the oil-rich nation’s
elite, while others extort bribes from motorists at checkpoints.
Abubakar, who previously served as police commissioner in Lagos, found
himself appointed to the position after President Goodluck Jonathan forced
Inspector Gen. Hafiz Ringim to retire several months early Wednesday. Criticism
had grown over Ringim’s management after a series of attacks by the sect known
as Boko Haram, including one that saw the force’s headquarters bombed in June.
The final straw appeared to be the sect’s coordinated assault last week in the
northern city of Kano that saw at least 185 people killed.
Yet in 2001, Abubakar served as the top police official for Jos as the city
edged closer to violence. Civil rights activists accused the commissioner of
ignoring warning signs and their messages asking him to mediate the growing
turmoil. On Sept. 7, 2001, the city erupted in violence, pitting Christians
against Muslims in violence that has repeated itself in years since.
The attacks killed about 1,000 people, Human Rights Watch said, violence
that went unnoticed on the world stage as the Sept. 11 terror attack happened
soon after. Some of the violence could have been averted by the police —
including one instance where officers turned away a Muslim man trying to find
protection for a Christian later killed, Human Rights Watch said. Officers also
did not deploy to stop attacks at the city’s university.
Abubakar was transferred to Abia state in November 2001.
In a statement Wednesday announcing Ringim’s ouster, the presidency
described Abubakar’s appointment “as a first step towards the comprehensive
reorganization and repositioning of the Nigeria Police Force to make it more
effective and capable of meeting emerging internal security challenges.”
Presidential spokesman Reuben Abati did not respond to a request for comment,
nor did a federal police spokesman.
It remains unclear what effect Abubakar’s leadership will have on police,
though he has been lauded for his anti-robbery campaigns in the time since the
2001 Jos violence. Nigeria’s police force remains under-equipped and unable to
investigate major terror attacks like those carried out by Boko Haram.
Boko Haram wants to implement strict Shariah law and avenge the deaths of
Muslims in communal violence across Nigeria, a multiethnic nation of more than
160 million people split largely into a Christian south and Muslim north. The
group, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the Hausa language
of Nigeria’s north, has now killed at least 262 people in 2012, more than half
of the at least 510 people the sect killed in all of 2011, according to an
Associated Press count.
