“We don’t hate Nigerian Police enough. In 2021, my brother-in-law went missing. We went to the police station to report the matter and they demanded 500k from us to ‘open the case’.
“We didn’t have a choice but to pay the money cos we needed to find him. He was less than a year into marriage and had a 3 weeks old baby. After paying this money, they were so complacent that we still did the majority of the investigation which led us to his last known location. We went to the police station in the location and they demanded another money from us.
“As desperate as we were, we had to pay. Less than 30 minutes after making this payment, the policewoman on the case clandestinely told us that a body was found on the road the previous day, we asked why she’d think he was dead and she told us that we should expect the worse to happen and that it’s better to find the dead body of a mising relative than to not find them at all because with a body, we can have closure.
“We went to the scene where the body was found and everyone we asked admitted a body was taken away the previous day but didn’t know where it was taken to, and thus a search began. We had to go from hospital to hospital to find out if any corpse was brought in the previous day, all the while praying that the corpse shouldn’t be my brother in-laws’.
“After 4 mortuary visits without results, we arrived at one that admitted a body was brought in the early hours of that day. We walked into the room where the body was placed, lo and behold, it was him. Now, why am I really angry with the police?
“Even before we made the first payment, they knew about a body but didn’t tell us about it until they had extorted us first. The second police also knew about it because it happened within their jurisdiction.
“Their logic was that if they had told us about the body and we then found that it was his, then they won’t have a payday. In broad daylight, the Nigeria Police use people’s unfortunate situation to make money. So you see, we don’t hate the Nigeria Police enough – in an alternate universe people would be hunting them like game until every one of them is expunged from the surface of the earth.
“How could I even forget. We needed a police extract to take his body and so we had to go back to the police.
“Yes, you guessed it right; the police demanded another money, and we paid, cos you know, we can’t abandon his body. Extortion in its purest form.”

Credit: X/@IruefiNG