‘I doesn’t’: The disturbing backstory to that policeman’s viral video

There is very little, if any, doubt that the Nigerian policeman is a tragi-comic figure in popular imagination. He is half enforcer, half hostage. He is the chap at the checkpoint with a rifle slung across his chest and despair embossed on his soul. He is underpaid, overworked, frequently brutal, occasionally heroic and, very often, mentally splintered. Every now and then, the mask slips, as it spectacularly did in that viral video of ASP Newton Isiokpehi, who threatened to shoot anybody audacious enough to film him while on duty.

In other countries, a policeman threatening to shoot civilians for recording him would immediately trigger parliamentary inquiries. Here, we turned the video into a carnival of memes, gags and vicious ridicule. The man became an overnight sensation not because he sounded homicidal, but because he sounded grammatical in the same way Nyesom Wike sounds orchestral. “I doesn’t,” he said repeatedly while threatening citizens with death.

We laughed. I plead guilty to laughing. In this country, humour is less entertainment than a survival mechanism. If we ever eschewed levity or stopped joking about horrifying things, three quarters of the population would require immediate sedation. But beneath the atrocious, almost X-rated English, and the theatrical aggression sat something genuinely unsettling. It is a psychologically smitherened man carrying an assault rifle. That is the truly terrifying part.

The officer did not merely threaten violence, but also narrated, in disturbingly graphic terms, the violence he himself had endured during roughly 30 years in the force. He spoke of bullets ripping through flesh and other injuries that have not just left scars, but may have permanently re-arranged the architecture of his mind. He sounded like his nervous system had become one long emergency siren. He seemed a man so marinated in violence that violence had become the only language his body is still able to speak.

The distressing bit here is that this is no aberration within the Nigerian Police Force. It is practically an occupational hazard. Nigeria asks policemen to operate under conditions that would test the sanity of a medieval gladiator. They patrol highways where robbers routinely outgun them. They confront kidnappers and other homicidal loons armed with military-grade weapons while carrying rifles old enough to have been used by troops under Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle. Many live in barracks that are worse-looking than housing blocks in Gaza after Israeli artillery fire. Their salaries are insulting, their welfare a national embarrassment and their exposure to anything resembling emotional regulation or mental health support appears approximately non-existent.

Somehow, we act astonished when some of them begin behaving like their internal circuitry has melted. Before the career activists begin breathing heavily into tote bags, I wish to state that none of this excuses police brutality. A policeman threatening to shoot citizens for filming him is issuing a fascistic threat and deserves disciplinary action. In a democracy, policemen are not vampires who dissolve when exposed to cameras. Citizens absolutely have the right to document officers in public spaces, especially in a country where uniforms have too often concealed extortionists, torture maestros and trigger-happy lunatics. In Nigeria, phone cameras are not merely useful, but civic survival tools.

The most drawable inference from that video is that Isiokpehi sounded mentally unwell. Why would he not? Nigeria treats the mental health of policemen with approximately the same seriousness it treats education, health or urban planning. Officers witness shootings, mutilated corpses, kidnappings, mob violence and death with numbing regularity. Many have themselves been shot at, with some carrying bullets inside their bodies. Still, there exists almost no institutional mechanism for psychological decompression.

There is no mandatory counselling, trauma recovery system or meaningful psychiatric evaluation. Nothing. Just a rifle, a chaotic street corner and vague instructions not to die. Nigeria has essentially created an industrial system for manufacturing traumatised armed men and then stationed them at checkpoints and other duty posts. In countries with functioning policing systems, officers exposed to repeated violence are often subjected to mandatory psychological assessments before returning to duty. Trauma counselling is routine because their governments understand something glaringly obvious, even to people who think astrology is science. A traumatised man with a firearm and unchecked authority may not be the ideal guardian of public order.

Nigeria, meanwhile, behaves as though trauma evaporates in sunlight. The mental health support many policemen receive is self-administered in the form of sachet liquor, Indian hemp and assorted psychotropic substances as well sexual pleasure provided by resident prostitutes. As such, the wounds fester and curdle. They fester into domestic violence and extortion conducted with the bitterness of men who feel abandoned by the state. They also fester into random explosions of rage at checkpoints because emotional regulation evaporated five nervous breakdowns ago. They fester further into trigger-happy paranoia, as policemen begin seeing every civilian holding a smartphone as though he were an armed insurgent. I suspect that some of them probably no longer know the difference.

But it has to be acknowledged that our society itself has cultivated a deeply unhealthy relationship with policing. We simultaneously fear, mock, pity and despise policemen. They are ridiculed as poorly educated, corrupt and crude, often with excellent reason. Still, we expect them to absorb terrifying risks on behalf of society and confront criminals armed like the Taliban. We sneer at their intellectual deficiencies while ignoring the institutional deficiencies that produced them. That is why Isiokpehi’s pornographic grammar became a bigger talking point than the obvious liquefaction of his emotional stability.

Again, I admit guilt for laughing. I should have been more disturbed than amused because a mentally distressed policeman is not merely an individual problem. He is a societal hazard carrying live ammunition. The force itself also bears enormous responsibility because police culture in Nigeria often rewards aggression while stigmatizing vulnerability. It is the similar to what happens in the highly pressured elite level of European football, where footballers are expected to be macho. An officer admitting psychological distress would probably receive the same sympathy accorded to a crocodile complaining about humidity. So, policemen continue deteriorating silently until the deterioration becomes public, viral and dangerous. By then, it is often too late.

This is why conversations about reform cannot merely revolve around salary increases or new patrol vehicles, necessary as both are. They must include a radical restructuring of police welfare and psychological care. Every command should have trained mental health professionals. Officers exposed to violence and distress should undergo mandatory counselling, with periodic psychiatric assessments becoming standard procedure, especially for armed personnel operating in volatile places. Trauma management must become as essential as weapons training.

Bullets do not only rip flesh. They also rip the mind, leaving it badly damaged. In that video, Isiokpehi sounded very much like a man whose mind had been ripped repeatedly. As a society, we must decide whether we want to continue ignoring that reality until another mentally screwed officer converts personal trauma into public tragedy. One day, and it might not be long, another viral video may not end with awkward grammar and internet jokes, but with fatality.