Nigeria needs more than a million active policemen in order to ensure peace reigns.

According to Foremost human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, Nigeria could not afford to scrap an arm of the Nigerian Police Force, saying only two hundred thousand policemen are active among the three hundred and fifty thousand policemen available to policeover one hundred and eighty million Nigerians.

Falana, human rights campaigner,speaking at an Interactive Seminar of the Ogun state Police Community Relations Committee, and Federal-Special Anti-Robbery Squad in Abeokuta, said “SARS was not going to be abolished, saying what was going to happen was that the police was going to reform SARS-like the Nigerian Police Force.

Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria in his lecture titled “FSARS Between Combating Crime and Protection of Human Rights,” ascribed the worrisome security situation in the country to shortage of policemen.

He also lamented poor funding of the police in the country, sayingpolicemen that were not well paid cannot discharge their duties effectively to the society.

His words: “I want to say that we are under-policed in this country and that is the problem. We are short of policemen in this country. We need nothing less that one million policemen and women, well-equipped and well-funded.

“My position is that we are not to end SARS. What we must do is to force the government to reform SARS sufficiently to the extent that men and women in the force will respect the rights of the people.”

In a related vein, the Commissioner for Police, Ahmed Illiyasu, urged the policemen present at the seminar to ensure strict compliance with the rule of law and also be committed to the discharge of their duties.

He also charged them to respect fundamental human rights law and say no to brutality and asking for money to bail a suspect.