Prior to the civil war, the Nigerian Police was one of the most upstanding institutions in Nigeria.

Your average Police officer on the beat carried only a baton and a whistle. This is not to say that the police back then were never issued guns but rather police men on beat duty were not carrying. Pistols were however reserved for senior police officers and there was a special strike force issued with appropriate weapons to counter armed robbers. The Special Branch E (E stands for Espionage) of the police was also effective, as this unit of the police were the ones who thwarted Awolowo's lame coup plot and also had gathered intelligence on the Jan 15 Coup. Their warnings to the Tafa Belewa govt were ignored.

When the Military struck in both Jan 15 of 1966 and July of same year, the Police were relgated and civil policing was being mismanged by the poorly trained semi-illiterates of the Nigerian army. Road blocks were first mounted as a permanent fixture on our roads by the orchestratators of the counter coup of 1967 and this was exclusively manned by same military personnel.

The civil war will see to the militarization of the Police from a civil organization to a paramilitary force and so the name of the organization was changed to reflect this - Nigerian Police Force!

The Nigerian Police were then assigned the task of internal security by the Nigerian Military govt and as such were issued with automatic rifles.

After the war, the Nigeria was both awash with weapons and civil war veterans. The Nigerian govt under Gowon had refused to demobolize the army, which stood at about 250,000 men and women, to back to pre-war numbers of slightly above 10,000. This came with serious economic and financial implications as Nigeria struggled to maintain a bogus and highly undisciplined armed forces. The army as at 1970, accounted for 40% of the Nation's budget as against less than 5% prior to the war, and most of that money was going towards paying salaries.

The doubled edged sword of an oil windfall coupled with war commitments to creditors in Europe that financed the war, saw inflation rates soar in the 70's. And with no increment in the pay of both the Police and Army, both of these organizations began to see high cases of indiscipline and criminality as a resort to compliment their earnings.

The period 1970 - 1974 witnessed an upsurge in armed robbery as never seen before.

The factors were glaringly obvious - a nation awash with assault weapons and un-rehabilitated war veterans!

So it wasn't any surprise that the Gowon military Junta will refuse to re-invent the police back to their traditional roles but rather the police were equipped with more SMGs and assault rifles.

Good