The Collaborative Roles of the Nigerian Army and The Police Force During the Nigeria Civil War

Abstract:

This study examines the joint efforts of the Nigerian Army and the Nigeria Police Force during the Nigerian civil war between July 6 1967 and January 1970. It depicts the evolvement of the Nigerian armed forces that was organized along environmental and functional lines for the defense of territorial integrity and protecting national interest. so also, the Nigerian police force is a security system of the Nigerian nation established to combat crimes at all level as well as to ensure the security of lives and property of the citizenry. It traces the emergence of the Nigerian Army and Police from June 1861under the British Consul, John Beecroft. This paper note that the police sometimes handled simple and sometimes complicated criminal and civil cases between civilian returnees and soldiers and also between civilians versus civilians. This duty was by no means simple as the police was trying to enforce the civil rule of law without a machinery to carry it out. On humanitarian grounds, the police assisted in attending to the sick and treating the wounded. After the Gowon administration’s effort to resolve the conflict amicably had failed, Gowon decided to institute a “police action to break the secession. The first exchange of fire between both sides was actually between a unit of the Nigeria Police Mobile Force and an Armed Biafra Unit somewhere in Idoma Division. the police were drawn into adopting the military psyche, rash and hasty in responding to civil strife Despite their flaws and weaknesses, accounts of the Nigeria police participation in the civil war depicts that the force immensely assisted in intelligence gathering and actual armed combat. The research relied on both primary and secondary sources of data with a thorough usage of analytical and descriptive methods of analyses. The paper conclude that both the Army and Police were rarely neutral, typically imbalanced in an ethnic conflict. The ethnic composition of the police may or may not try to be like that of the military; when they are essentially the same.