Mediating an Intra-Elite Struggle for Power and Privilege in Nigeria: The Police and the Oyo State Political Crisis, 2005–2007
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1350/ijps.2010.12.4.192 |
| Author | Abimbola O. Adesoji,Emmanuel O. Rotimi |
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Mediating an intra-elite struggle for power
and privilege in Nigeria: the police and the
Oyo State political crisis, 2005–2007
Emmanuel O. Rotimi‡and Abimbola O. Adesoji†
‡Department of History, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Tel: +234
8037200231; email: erotimi@oauife.edu.ng and kemirotimi2001@yahoo.com
†(Corresponding author) Department of History, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife,
Nigeria. Tel: +234 8033779798; email: aadesoji@oauife.edu.ng and aadesoji2@yahoo.com
Submitted 7 January 2010; revision submitted 23 February 2010; accepted
26 April 2010
Keywords: Nigeria, police, politics, elite, partisanship, godfather,
mediation, election, hooliganism
Emmanuel O. Rotimi,
PhD is a senior lecturer in
the Department of History, Obafemi Awolowo
University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He is the author of
‘The Police in a Federal State: The Nigeria
Experience’ (2001). His recently published works
(co-authored) include ‘Nigeria and Its Anti-
Corruption War: The Cases of Dariye and
Alamieyeseigha’ (2008) and ‘Jaja and Nana in the
Niger Delta Region of Nigeria; Proto-Nationalists
or Emergent Capitalists?’ (2008).
Abimbola O. Adesoji,
PhD is a lecturer in the
Department of History, Obafemi Awolowo Uni-
versity, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. His recently published
works include ‘Progressive Unions and the Com-
petition for Community Development in Nigeria:
A Study of Ifon, Ilobu and Erin Progressive Uni-
ons, 1940–1970’ (2008) and ‘Indigeneship and
Citizenship in Nigeria: Myth and Reality’ (2009)
(co-authored). He is currently Georg Forster
Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Alexander
Humboldt Foundation at the Institut für Histor-
ische Ethnologie, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt,
Germany.
A
BSTRACT
It is not new that politics in Nigeria since the
attainment of political independence, and even in
the period before, has been a zero-sum game. It is
also a fact that politicians and political office
holders engage in intense struggles to sustain
themselves in power and to liquidate the opposi-
tion by all means possible, fair or foul. Similarly,
the emergence of political godfathers with tre-
mendous clout has remained an essential feature
of politics in Nigeria, the same way that the
police have remained a pawn on the chessboard
of the political class in Nigeria. The emergence of
‘godfathers’ and the brazen ways in which they
justify their existence may be the most defining
feature of Nigeria's democracy since 2003. The
crisis between Rashidi Ladoja, the governor of
Oyo State from 2003 to 2007, and Chief
Lamidi Adedibu was only one of many such
cases. Yet it typifies Nigeria's politics by the
manner of police involvement. This paper situates
the role of the police in a historical context of their
being an instrument of power since colonial rule.
It explores how the new manifestation of this
character in the Ladoja–Adedibu crisis under-
scores the contemporary form of Nigeria's
politics.
INTRODUCTION
Since the era of active decolonisation in
1951, politicians and political office holders
International Journal of Police Science & Management Volume 12 Number 4
International Journal of Police
Science and Management,
Vol. 12 No. 4, 2010, pp. 487–502.
DOI: 10.1350/ijps.2010.12.4.192
Page 487
have found in the police a necessary and
useful tool and accomplice in their pursuit
of, and sustenance in power. Structured in
this way by colonial rule, Nigeria's political
class has retained the police as an instru-
ment of power and control. Rotimi (2001,
p. 129) lists the significant roles of the
Nigerian police to include: being the
authoritarian instr ument of an authoritarian
State; protecting the ethnic power bases of
the ruling elite; and more importantly (for
our purpose), showing off power in a bid to
limit challenge from the political opposi-
tion. Thus throughout Nigeria's history, the
police have been identified with the ruling
party and the politically dominant region.
This has often reduced opposition parties
and contending regions, which are some-
times coterminous with the major ethnic
groups, and individuals in the ruling party
who challenge the status quo, to victims of
the police. Underlying the do-or-die con-
test for power in which the police have
proved useful was mad ambition, sheer
greed and other selfish individual and class
interests which usually cut across ethnic or
regional divides. Tools often employed in
such contests in addition to the police
included wealth, hooliganism and oratorical
power.
This political role of the police not only
ensures unconstitutional security of tenure
and successes in elections for the ruling
party, it also destabilises the opposition in
many ways. The most significant way is that
it produces a number of actors as political
kingpins who are able to access the instru-
mentality of the police to dominate politics
at more local levels. Usually allied with the
ruling party and concomitantly the federal
government, these local elites get away with
criminal and political crimes, and maintain
militias of thugs, the activities of which
the police often appear incapable or unwill-
ing to control or challenge. While this has
been a regular feature of Nigeria's politics
since Independence, it assumed a more dis-
concerting dimension in Oyo and Anambra
States where, between 2003 and 2007, the
police brazenly acted in support of political
godfathers against the democratically
elected political office holders. This political
misuse of the police appears the more com-
plicated because, in these cases, it occurred
within the ruling party.
The particular case of Oyo State raises
fundamental questions which underscore
the ideological shifts in Nigeria's Fourth
Republic in nuanced departures from the
previous eras. Why should the Chief
Security Officer of a State be hounded by
the same police force that should have pro-
vided security for him? Why should it be
difficult for the governor to guarantee the
security of lives and property in a place
where he was the chief executive/chief
security officer, whereas the same police
force was at the beck and call of a potentate
who did not hold any political office? Why
did the police act in the way they did,
supporting or withdrawing support for the
parties to the crisis depending on situation
and circumstance? Why did some police
officers show greater loyalty to politicians
than to the force or its leadership? Why did
the police vacillate in taking decisions even
when it was obvious that certain laws had
been breached? What are the implications of
‘godfatherism’ on the structure and per-
formance of the police? These and other
pertinent questions engage the attention of
this paper.
POLITICS IN OYO STATE UP TO 2003
Oyo State was created in 1976 by the
military government of General Olusegun
Obasanjo, following the splitting of the old
Western Region into three States, namely
Ogun, Ondo and Oyo (Federal Republic of
Nigeria, 1976; Adejuyigbe 1979, 1989;
Mediating an intra-elite struggle for power and privilege in Nigeria
Page 488
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