“You have two options now: To live or to die.” That was the chilling message with which a senior police officer confronted Mubarak Bello, a 38-year-old whistleblower and father of four young children, whose revelation has left the Katsina State police command fiercely rattled since 2019.
Bello, a civilian staff in the finance unit of the state command had exposed three layers of massive fraud perpetrated by the command’s high-ranking but heavily corrupt police officers: a payroll inflated with thousands of phantom officers; illegal “tax” deductions ranging from N5,000 to N80,000 levied on officers’ monthly salaries; and a fraudulent loan scheme through fake companies in which loanees were fraudulently deducted long after repaying the loans.
Since Bello reported the grand-scale swindle to relevant authorities including the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), his universe has gone downhill. As this piece goes out, he is buffeted by a continuous stream of virulent retaliation launched, in a classic case of institutional betrayal, by his employers, the police, a critical organ of the state whose duty it is to preserve law and order and protect people who expose criminal conduct, but has now turned themselves into a tool of deliberate, mean-spirited oppression of a whistleblower.
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