By Our correspondent
Christian Izundu and his wife left for work in the morning as usual. Their children went to school.
At about 2pm their house within the jurisdiction of the Central Police Station( CPS), Awka was vandalized by unknown persons.
It was a case of housebreaking because the act was done in the day time. It should have been a case of burglary if done at night, from 6pm onwards.
The next option for Izundu was to report the matter at a police station nearest to him . He moved to the CPS to incident the case with confidence.
At the counter, Izundu saw a lanky officer, who asked him what the matter was . Izundu narrated his story in a jiffy .
The police officer he told his pathetic story responded: “Oga na 10k.”
Izundu looked at the officer’s face in bewilderment apparently to know what he meant by 10k.
The lanky officer reinforced his request: Oga, it’s N10,000 ,and mechanically the officer faced another complainant, they way a trader would do to a customer waiting in a queue.
Seeing that Izundu was not ready to play ball, the officer reduced the cost to N5,000.
Izundu who had thought such services were free at police stations, in frustration walked away from the police station.
“Oga, can you pay 3k?”, the police officer bellowed at the back of Izundu who had made up his mind to go home in peace and nurse his wound .
The next day, Izundu saw our correspondent and narrated his experience at the police station.
Our correspondent placed a call to the state Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), DSP Tochukwu Ikenga and narrated Izundu’s experience to him.
The PPRO who frowned at the police officer’s demand for money from Izundu for trying to incident his case, warned that if such officers are caught they would be punished maximally.
The PPRO said,”Tell the complainant to go back there and report his case; if anybody asks hIm to pay anything let him call me and we will call the DPO in charge of the station and the officer that is doing that we will fish him out and do the needful.
” How can you ask somebody to pay money before he can report a case? It’s not done. Who will approve that kind of thing?”, the PPRO said.
When our correspondent informed Izundu of what the PPRO said, he said he would not go back to the police station.
” I have left everything in God’s hand to decide”, Izundu said.
