Protection from crime: what is on offer for Africans?

Protection from Crime: What is on Offer for Africans?At independence many in Africa anticipated a national state police force that would provide a universal, effective and just protection from crime and disorder, but after 40 years of independence it has become apparent that African governments are not willing or able to provide the level of service they had promised.The explanation is partly financial, but it is also true that weak states often choose to privilege "regime stability and narrow sectional interests over public safety considerations" or at times are simply guilty of "malevolent indifference" (Goldsmith, 2003: 4,7;Hills, 2000).As regards offering protection for citizens, state police are widely perceived as indifferent, inept, inefficient and corrupt (Adu-Mireku, 2002;Chukwuma, 2000;Shaw, 2002).Worse, there are many occasions when the police, pursuing their own or regime interests, commit extra-judicial killings, beat detainees, use excessive force, arbitrarily arrest and detain persons, and act in collusion with criminals (see annual reports of US Department of State, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International).Given their regime-determined agenda, it is little surprising that police who commit such abuses are rarely investigated or punished.For those living in rural areas and townships, it is not just that the state police are ineffective, predatory and potentially violent; they are absent (Pelsner et al., 2000).The Nigerian political scientist, Peter Ekeh, sums up the situation facing many in Africa today:Nigerian governments have virtually told Nigerians to fend for their own protection.My hometown of Okpara with its environs has a population that is more than 20,000 people in Delta State.It has no police station.Indeed, there is no presence of government in the daily lives of its people.That is, the Nigerian state and its governmental agencies are absent from their daily lives.Crimes will be committed in any community and are being committed in my hometown.How are they resolved?;clearly without the help of any governmental agencies (Ekeh, 2002).But policing is not just an activity of the state police.Policing, as understood in this article, is any organised activity that seeks to ensure the maintenance of communal order, security and peace through elements of prevention, deterrence, investigation of breaches, and punishment.It is in fact a mechanism of governance.As such it can be authorised and provided by non-state groups as well as the state.Some see the failure of the state police as the cause of the rapid emergence of non-state or self-policing in Africa.The rise in non-state policing, however, is not a totally new phenomenon arising from economic liberalisation and the privatisation of state functions.Years of autocratic predation that had little concern for legality or socialist leadership that sought a legal system that served the interests of the state, provoked alienation from the official law and the development of informal legal orders that by-passed and neutralised it.Going back even further, alternative security arrangements predate state (and colonial) policing and were never totally displaced by it (Waller, 1999;Turner, 1955;Killingray, 1986;Ahire, 1991).The two, of course, are not policing the same order (Buur, 2003a).The state police have always been agents of an authority that for many is following alien values concerning how crime is defined (e.g.does it include witchcraft, adultery, teenage pregnancy, disrespect to parents, unwarranted evictions) and how it is punished (e.g.does it undertake corporal punishment).Thus