Police To Investigate Viral Video Showing ‘Officer’ Railing At Authorities

The Yobe State Police Command said it would investigate a viral video which showed an officer who claimed to be attached to the command, railing at the authorities for allegedly failing to prioritize the safety and welfare of police officers.

The video, which surfaced on the internet on Tuesday, captured a police sergeant lamenting alleged inhumane treatment being meted out on officers in Yobe State.

The Yobe command’s spokesperson, Dungus Abdulkarim, however told THE WHISTLER that the police were yet to identify the officer.

In a one-minute and 18 seconds video, the officer disclosed that there had been “no feeding, no allowance, no nothing,” since December 2020 when he was deployed to the state.

He alleged that four of his colleagues were killed in a recent attack. “They killed my colleagues; they killed four,” he said, calling on Nigerians for help.

“Because of the N63,000 I am collecting in Nigeria Police as a sergeant, I am dying in Yobe. Nigeria look into our problem; We are dying [with] no helper. What are we serving this country for? Nothing. Hungry Service Men. God is there,” he added.

But reacting, Abdulkarim told our correspondent in a phone conversation that the video had come to the notice of the command and efforts were ongoing to identify the said officer.

He, however, was of the opinion that the police force has procedures through which officers were supposed to lay their complaints and as such, the means adopted by the yet-to-be-identified officer was unprofessional.

“That is why the command is trying to find out, is he a police officer or somebody else,” he said, adding that, “I don’t know why this person went on [to call out the force]. We do not know up till now whether he is a policeman or not, but the command has taken cognizance of that and we are trying to do our best to see who really that person is, and if he has that issue, there are means of putting them forward and not to go on air like that,” he added.

Abdulkarim admitted that although there were challenges when operatives are deployed to various parts of the country especially when it concerns allowances, it has to go through the right means.

Meanwhile, a senior police officer who did not want his name mentioned told THE WHISTLER on Tuesday that there are spelt out internal mechanisms to handle this type of problem and as such the officer had done the wrong way and may be playing to the gallery.

Speaking also to this website, the Police Service Commission spokesperson, Ikechukwu Ani, said: “The Police must be doing something about that specially to determine if the step he took to complain about problems they are facing in Yobe is true”.