SARS: The Beginning From The End

By Chukwuma Uche

I saw some people yesterday grinning from ear to ear as though the scourge that pins them down is lifted by the puzzle offered to them by the IGP. I will say to them that “THE IDES OF MARCH IS COME BUT NOT GONE”.

I did not see the end of the activities of the bad eggs in SARS who made otherwise a beautiful police unit very notorious. What I saw was a very bad wine that was transferred to a new bottle. You ended the name SARS while happily retaining all the actors and features that made it a nightmare. What a caricature.

When you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer. When you make a wrong demand, you get a wrong response. The response we got yesterday was a wrong one though many of us are yet to see it.
We have gone this self-defeating route many times in the past and the devastating effects are still living with us today. Our current president is a perfect example. My people refused to learn. All the funny characters who defied every warning in 2013-2014 while shouting “anything but GEJ(Goodluck Ebere Jonathan)” were the same people who championed the ENDSARS call. With every hindsight to history, I am of the opinion that the swiftness with which the government answered this call in affirmative appeals for caution. Our government is not distinguished in standing with any cause beneficial to the people.

We missed it once again. We missed the opportunity of reforming both the police force itself and the police unit they called SARS.

With the obvious exponential increase in violent crime in our society every day, it behoves every logical imagination that we have very quickly forgotten the condition that introduced SARS in the first place despite its glaring excesses. Statistics have shown that despite the presence of SARS, criminals – armed robbers, assassins, kidnappers, scammers, and rapists have killed hundred times more innocent people in a year than SARS had killed since the beginning of its operation.

Now that it seems everyone is in a heated competition to join the flourishing reigning criminal syndicates in Our country, I am genuinely worried about what our society will be without a unit as rugged as SARS. I still maintain that we have shot ourselves on the leg once again because we failed to look deeply before we leaped. We have happily answered the call of the propagandists whose interest is to stir public opinion away from the real issues so as to score selfish political point. A reformed SARS that weeds off the bad elements and hold them responsible for all the atrocities they committed against the law abiding citizens would have been better than opening all our doors willingly to criminals. Now, the floodgates are open to all fear stricken potential criminals initially on check by SARS doggedness to happily join the crime competition currently going on in our society.

Again, since the desolation of SARS is with immediate effect, do we worry about the implications of thousands of dangerous criminals that will be released into the society from their holding facilities around the country?To me, as it stands now, the criminals have won.

So, we only have to wait a little before celebrating our pyrrhic victory.