DEATH was the farthest thing on the mind of Kazeem Tiamiyu as he cruised his car along the Sagamu Inter-city loop last week. At twenty six, he had not done badly for himself as Assistant Captain, attacking defender and star midfielder of the Remo Stars based in Sagamu. He might not yet be a household name across the nation. But he was definitely on to something. And he was good looking and quite prepossessing.

His nickname of Kaka reminds one of the impressive Brazilian midfield maestro. At the summit of his game, the Brazilian soccer prodigy sent commentators and crowds alike swooning with wild pleasures with his dribbling waltzes through defence which often culminated in crackling shots that reverberated through the field and environs like cannon balls.

If he could do half of the things the Brazilian genius did with the ball, Kazeem would have surmised, his day and time might yet come on the national and international stage. With the monetary rewards that come from talents and hard work, he should be able to rescue his family, particularly his doting and beloved mother, from the clutches of endemic poverty to middle class reckoning and respectability, just like many of his illustrious predecessors.

Many names, local and international, would have sprung to his mind, from the favelas of Brazil, the slums of Buenos Aires, the garrets of London to the fetid ghettoes of Lagos. These were the avatars whose footsteps he was determined to follow. Thanks to the brave new world, poor boys from the slums of poor nations can steamroll their way into international reckoning with the combination of talent and tremendous luck acting as talisman.

The local superstar has arrived at the global supermall. As if to confirm the sure fire potency of this formula, Anthony Joshua, a boxing hero from the same vicinity, had been accorded the kind of tumultuous welcome reserved for true global celebrities when he came visiting that same week. The world belong to the brave and daring.

By evening time, all that remained of that dream was the crumpled and crushed body of the footballer as it lay in a local mortuary. Instead of being borne along towards the western world on the great wings of the bird of progress and prosperity, it was the satanic Nigerian hen that sucks its best eggs that struck instead. Kazeem was limp and cold. He was dead.

Rather than joining the great train to wealth and fame, Kazeem had become part of the grim statistics of state-ordained murder. The Nigerian Police Force has struck again. It had added Kazeem to its rich haul of local scalps. A few days earlier, two local traders had been felled in a Lagos suburb while the police claimed to be on the trail of some absconding criminals.

The irony is bold and unappetizing. The culprit on both occasions was not the regular police but the elite squad known as the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Kazeem had joined the likes of Dele Udoh, the younger brother of Finidi George and countless other Nigerians who have fallen victims to the brutality and murderous incompetence of the Nigerian Police Force.

The evidence is clear and uncontroverted. Kazeem had been apprehended while driving by a unit of SARS on the suspicion of belonging to the group of internet fraudsters known as Yahoo Boys. He was being taken to the SARS office in Abeokuta when he was suddenly pushed out of the car only to be crushed by an oncoming vehicle.

The police authorities had claimed that Tiamiyu jumped out of the vehicle to evade arrest only to meet a gruesome fate in the hands of a hit and run driver. But this piece of fiction has been roundly rebuffed by Sanni Abubakar, his friend and team-mate, who insisted that both of them were arrested while driving and were being taken to Abeokuta when the officers suddenly stopped on the Sagamu-Abeokuta highway only to push the ill-fated footballer out of the car.

As news filtered out on the death of the star footballer and the squalid circumstances, a rash of protests broke out in the normally placid environs from people who thought they have had enough of the menace of the police. Police responded firing live bullets into the crowd resulting in the death of a protester. Meanwhile, it was reported that the car of the slain footballer had been burglarized in the police station where it was taken.

This is as desperate and unprofessional as it can get. Now to the best of our knowledge, going after Yahoo boys and other internet fraudsters is not in the remit of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. As the name implies, the squad is there to prevent or foil physical robbery and other misdemeanours occasioning violence.

The officers involved were clearly on illegal and unauthorized duty. Even after the late footballer tendered evidence to show that he was a footballer, his abductors insisted on arresting him. It is clear that they had the other duty in mind. That duty could only be criminal extortion and state abduction.

The officers involved must be part of a syndicate; a criminal network of extortion and blackmail which has nothing to do with crime prevention. It has been alleged that going after so called Yahoo Boys is where the big bucks lie. Some of those unlucky and unfortunate to be apprehended are often frogmarched to ATM machines where they were forced to part with all their holdings. Even where genuine criminals are apprehended, they are immediately unleashed on the society to continue with their “good” work.

It is with a solemn voice of affronted patriotism that we must make the following declaration. What is staring us in the face is the complete criminalization of the Nigerian police as an ancillary of the comprehensive criminalization of the Nigerian post-colonial state. We have been warning about this possibility in the past three and a half decades. Now, the chickens seem to have come home to roost.

It is said that no straightforward furniture can ever be procured from crooked timber. Those who turned the Nigerian post-colonial society into the living hell it has become must bear heavy responsibility for this untoward development. No amount of hypocritical cant and mushy preachments from tattered bully pulpits will simply wash.

The problem is that as a result of the dysfunctional society we have produced and the inevitably dysfunctional recruitment process, too many sociopaths and psychopaths have been insinuated into the police force and not a few of them have risen to positions of authority and influence. They are now expected to police and guard us from social malfeasance.

It will not happen. They will look down on us with the cynical glow of premeditated malice and outrage. This is the moment that has stolen upon us. Something will definitely have to give before we come back to our senses. A rotten orange fruit does not fall very far from its parent tree.

We cannot isolate the police force from the general malaise that has overtaken the entire society. As it has been famously noted, a man can make for himself a throne of bayonets, but whether he will be able to sit on it is another matter entirely.

Every institution is affected and afflicted. Go to the banks and see the level of thievery and criminal knavery that go on on a daily basis in the name of banking. Everybody is in the business to get rich quick. The ordinary bankers know the antecedents of their employers.

It is futile and counterproductive preaching to them. Everything, including the hallowed places of worship, is infected. Let their spiritual paterfamiliases continue to entertain themselves with their pious inanities. When the hallowed masks of mass deception fall off in the dead of the night, there is nowhere to hide.

The situation is as close to revolutionary anarchy as we can ever have. The problem now is whether we can have the strength, energy and unification of purpose to crawl out of the heaving debris to commence the genuine rebuilding of this traumatized society or whether we will allow the house to fall on us leaving the dead to bury the dead.

What remains to be said is the growing concern among many pan-Nigerian patriots and nationalists whether Nigeria’s endemic crisis of nationhood can still be resolved under a one-nation rubric of stifling and strangulating unitarism or whether the unwieldy contraption will have to be prised apart in order to liberate the fertile imagination and creative energies of the indigenous people.

With the Boko Haram regaining strength and vitality as a result of international conspiracy against the nation and the collapse of the Maghreb buffer zone, and with many local separatist groups in fierce ascendancy, the odds for a peaceful resolution are lengthening by the day. In the climate of the pervasive failure of human agency, there are three non-human agencies that may eventually put us out of our misery. We name them in no particular order and with no particular joy.

The creeping global climatological disorder may yet engender a world-historical apocalypse which could make us vulnerable to the fate of the dinosaurs. On the other hand, the onrushing demographic nightmare and the growing aridization of the north may eventuate in an asymmetrical war of all against all which will make Boko Haram look like a child’s play. But then that is if the Chinese Yellow Peril doesn’t get there first.

Those who have had their dreams shattered and their live destroyed like Kazeem Tiamiyu may actually be the lucky ones. There may be a worse fate in store. Here is wishing a talented footballer who never made it to the world stage sweet repose.

By Tatalo Alamu