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Botswana leads African pack as report confirms poor policing trends in the continent
By John Eche
Reinforcing the outcome of recent polls on the most corrupt institutions in the country as well as the event of ongoing Senate investigation of allegations made against its boss, a global survey has revealed that the Nigeria Police is in a bad shape and needs all the help it can get.
Specifically, the ranking places the Nigeria Police Force at the bottom of the ladder of assessed police forces with the force in Botswana emerging as Africa’s best and the 47th most impressive force in the whole world.
Like Nigeria, several other African countries did perform very poorly on the Index, as Africa’s most populous nation was followed in the laggards corner by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya and Uganda.
The outcome of the survey, which forms the basis for the World Internal Security and Police Index (WISPI), was released to the media by two bodies, the International Police Science Association (IPSA) and the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP).
The index equally ranked the Rwandan police as Africa’s second best (with global position of 50th) followed by Algeria (58th), Senegal (68th) and Tunisia (72nd) in that order. Completing the top 10 for Africa were, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Ghana, South Africa and Mali respectively.
“WISPI measures the ability of the police and other security providers to address internal security issues in 127 countries, across four domains, using sixteen indicators,” an accompanying briefing note to editors outlines, reporting that the four such domains are capacity, process, legitimacy and outcomes.
Underscoring the fact of the failure of Africa to make any mark in the top forty was a second point: the continent was very prominent in the lower rankings. Six African countries were in the bottom 10. Cameroon and Mozambique in the 120th and 122nd spots.
Still on the laggard African police formations, Uganda, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Nigeria made it an African quartet at the bottom, as they filled the 124th to 127 slots in that order.
Conversely, at the top of the global rankings, it was a massive European sweep for about all of of the top ten positions. The only ‘outsiders’ here were first place Singapore and sixth placed Australia, even as Finland, Denmark, Austria and Germany took up the 2nd to 5th positions and Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, the 7th – 10th positions.
The aim of the WISPI is to, firstly, measure security provider performance across the four domains of internal security: capacity, process, legitimacy and outcomes; and secondly, to see how these domains relate to each other; and finally to track trends in these domains over time, and to inform the work of security providing agencies, researchers, and practitioners in the field of peace and conflict studies, criminology, and police studies.
Nigeria Police IG, Ibrahim Kpotum Idris
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