Hello, everyone.
I welcome you to my blog. Welcome to Nigeria, where the uniform makes many military personnel feel like they are God over you, and once you see them, you should fall on your face at their feet and worship them, as failure to do so might result in harm or even violence. Lately, police brutality and military men's ill treatment towards civilians have become the order of the day; every day it is one police brutality story or the other, and if it is not police brutality, then it is the army, navy, or air force treating the people wrongly.
Sometimes it's sad to see how the people who are supposed to protect us are actually the ones causing us pain and harming us both emotionally and physically. With every given opportunity, the same people who are supposed to protect us want to harm us; they want to harass us and remind us how big and mighty the uniform makes them feel and how we who are not in uniform are not on the same level with them. With every given opportunity, they want to extort from you as a citizen, especially in cases where you are a young boy. They always look for a way to make sure you fall into their trap just so they can extort from you. As a young boy, it is very difficult to escape; no matter how hard you try, they will always find a way to extort from you.
I have heard many terrible stories about encounters with military men/uniformed men in this country both online and offline. Sometimes these uniformed men do things, and you are left wondering what actually differentiates them from actual criminals. How will a policeman point a gun at you and ask you to make a transfer to a point of sale (POS) terminal so they will give him cash, and he does that knowing that he cannot be tracked or traced since all he got was cash and there is no way to track or trace him? Is that not robbery? And in most cases, they actually shoot if you fail to do as they say or try to run away if you encounter them.
Many people's encounters with our policemen and military are really not nice and not a memory they like to remember. Welcome to Nigeria, where you see policemen on the road and then your heart sinks, not because you have anything that will incriminate you or are involved in any criminal activities, but because they will do anything to incriminate you just so they can comfortably extort you, and in large amounts. If there is nothing incriminating, then the amount they will extort from you is small, and they don't want that. Extorting the masses they are supposed to protect is now more like a hustle for them.
Just last week I traveled to Owerri, and I had my fair share with the Nigerian police on the road. I forgot my laptop receipt at home, and they claimed it was stolen. How can a laptop that has my picture as wallpaper be a stolen laptop? How can a laptop that I know the password to be a stolen laptop? I called a friend that has a key to my room and asked him to take a picture of my laptop receipt in my file and send it to me, which he did, but they still insisted I pay 20,000 naira ($12.58) before they let me go, saying that if I had not shown them a soft copy of my receipt, I would have paid 50,000 naira ($31.56). I pleaded and pleaded, but they stood their ground, and I had to pay since I needed to get to where I was going early. It is very hard to have a nice experience with our uniformed men in this country.