Security for the Highest Bidder (2/2)

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The contracts, usually drawn up with a local police department, typically include substantial payments by the private firms. “It is unlikely that these informal incomes contribute to the general police budget,” Mr. Goede said. “Rather the money is most likely to disappear into the private pockets of the commanders of the police departments with whom the contracts are signed.”

Police officers sent to work with private firms also get “bonuses” of between $25 and $50 per month from the firm, a figure higher than most officers’ salaries, which range from $20 to $40 a month. Goede observed that some companies “even pay ‘their’ policemen a similar salary to their own employees … $100 to $150,” and consider them “their employees, rather than state elements on loan. Such police officers … can be replaced at the [security] company’s request.”

In Nigeria, Ms. Abrahamsen and Mr. Williams note, the “privatization of public policing” is most extensive in the oil sector, where insurgency and illegal oil siphoning cost the country and oil companies billions of dollars. To address the problem the Nigerian police force trains and deploys additional unarmed officers to guard corporate facilities. Such officers are paid and controlled by the companies. The researchers found that Shell employs 1,200 such officers, ExxonMobil over 700 and Chevron approximately 250. In addition, oil companies routinely rely on the heavily armed state paramilitary police (MOPOL) to secure their operations. Shell also uses over 600 armed police and MOPOL officers.

“Virtually all levels of public force, including the military, have been integrated into the day-to-day security arrangements of the oil industry to a degree where it is often difficult to determine where public policing ends and private security begins,” the researchers note.

The use of public police forces to provide private security for the oil companies could be interpreted as a government effort to secure national income, since oil is the major revenue-earner for the economy. But major questions arise about the way Nigerian police forces go about playing this role.

Corruption

The arrangements, report Ms. Abrahamsen and Mr. Williams, provide opportunities for corruption. In the oil company payments for the police officers, say the researchers, “no receipts are given and prices also appear to vary somewhat between companies and contracts.” Moreover, the funds generally do not go into the public coffers but instead to individual high-ranking officers and to officials assigned to work with the private security companies. They estimate that acquiring the “initial permission from the inspector general to utilize MOPOL officers” costs the equivalent of $800. Then the equivalent of $335 goes to each unit and station commander. Another $13 is allocated for each MOPOL officer per 12-hour shift, paid to the unit commander, plus a $2 supplement for food.

As such examples show, the involvement of public officials in private security dealings in Nigeria, Kenya, the DRC and other countries has become a highly profitable source of additional income for senior police commanders and officers fortunate enough to be deployed with a security firm. Such activities create wide income differences within the police force, generate cutthroat competition for the more profitable jobs and erode overall morale. There are also questions of undue political influence, since some high-ranking government and military officials in countries such as the DRC, Angola and Liberia reportedly own security firms. The irregular nature of such activities is not only “highly corrupt,” Mr. Goede notes. It also “debilitates the public security forces.”

But the most dangerous result, Mr. Goede continues, is that police officers working in such a commercialized atmosphere ultimately lose the incentive to serve the public. Instead, they increasingly see security as a commodity for which the public should pay. Such an attitude, he comments, “depreciates the functioning of the police as public protector.”

The very existence of security forces that individuals and companies can access only for a fee diminishes people’s already low expectations of state institutions. It further reduces the legitimacy of already weak governments in the eyes of their citizens.

Out of the public domain

Many experts agree that the worst problem with such irregular, corrupt and unregulated “partnerships” between private and public security institutions is that they remove public resources (the police, their arms and legitimacy) from the public domain, where citizens theoretically have a right to access them for free. They are deployed instead to the private arena, where they become available only for those who can afford to pay.

According to Sabelo Gumedze, a defence researcher for South Africa’s ISS, official security services are virtually “nonexistent” for many poor people in Africa. This reduces their overall well-being. As the “wealthy barricade themselves behind higher security walls and install increasingly advanced alarm systems, crime moves to the poorer neighborhoods, where the ‘pickings’ may be less enriching, but more accessible,” Mr. Gumedze explains. Inevitably, he says, the inadequately policed poor areas, especially in town centres, become the most “insecure and violent, [and] this further robs the already marginalized urban poor of a good quality of life.”

Vigilantes and gangs

In a 2007 report on private security companies and human security in Africa, Mr. Gumedze and fellow ISS researcher Deane-Peter Baker pointed to another disturbing trend. As African states fail to provide protection for their citizens, the population is impelled to organize in other ways to ensure their own safety. As a result, the two researchers warn, the role of public security enforcer is increasingly being filled by “vigilante groups and other militias that have had the ability to provid[e] the services that the state is not able to provide.”

For poor citizens, such non-state formations are often the cheapest and most reliable form of protection. However, over time some vigilante groups, such as the so-called Taliban and Kamjesh in Kenya or the Bakassi Boys in Nigeria, have themselves evolved into criminal organizations and extortion rings.

Security concerns are also high in countries like Uganda and Angola where private security providers are allowed to carry arms, since such weapons can be used to for criminal purposes. Mr. Kirunda of the ISS blames this on the poor monitoring and enforcement of laws prescribing safe storage of arms and prohibiting off-duty officers from carrying weapons. Moreover, the presence of former military or police officers in such heavily armed private services could potentially foster wider insecurity if the services become politicized or grow so powerful that they escape control.

Angola, Sierra Leone and the DRC have laws intended to ensure that such things do not happen. In Kenya, a proposed bill to bar members of the armed forces and the National Security Intelligence Service from running security companies and to require ex-military and police to get clearance before registering a firm has languished in parliament for years. As the UN’s Mr. Ebo notes, the weakness of state institutions makes creating such laws difficult. Even where there are laws and mechanisms for enforcement, “individuals find ways to beat the law,” he told Africa Renewal.

Without adequate security, fostering broad economic growth or achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) becomes difficult. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pointed out in a 2008 report that “longer-term development demands a sufficient degree of security to facilitate poverty reduction and economic growth.”

However, police and other security sector reforms cannot be imposed on governments. As Susan van der Merwe, the South African deputy foreign minister, told the Security Council in May 2009, reforming security institutions in African countries is a “process that requires continuous attention and political will. It is a process that is politically sensitive and that must be nationally owned.”

Towards that end, civil society and community organizations have a key role to play. The Centre for Law Enforcement Education (CLEEN) in Nigeria and the Mars Group in Kenya are seeking to generate public support for security reforms and pressing their governments to act. They provide the public with information about the role of the police and lobby national leaders to make the changes needed to ensure that police forces serve the population better.

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