‘Police body for Africa to help better tackle criminality’ |05 August 2014

Collaboration and exchange of information in tackling criminality on the African continent will get a big boost with plans to set up a police organisation for the whole of Africa.

Police chiefs from some 40 African countries including Seychelles, meeting in Algiers in February this year, agreed on the setting up of the African Police Cooperation Organisation (Afripol).

Giving more details on the proposed body, Police Commissioner Ernest Quatre said Afripol, which will be similar to other continental bodies like Europe’s Europol for example, will allow better networking and faster flow of information when dealing with criminality in Africa.

“Afripol will help us to come together to share information faster and know each other better. Each country has its own jurisdiction, the laws may not necessarily be the same but when it comes to addressing criminality we have the same goals the same objective,” said Mr Quatre.

Mr Quatre said the move shows the strong determination of African police institutions to work in a concerted and permanent framework taking into account the specificities of the African region within the framework of police values and ethics.

He noted that criminal organisations have gradually broadened their scope of activity at continental and international levels and taken advantage of difficult socio-economic conditions of some populations, the vulnerability of borders, globalisation, and easy access to technologies.

“Therefore we are forced to join forces together to increase coordination and cooperation especially with Interpol,” said Mr Quatre.

It is expected that Afripol will be operational next year, though no precise date has been set yet and Algeria will be the first to head the regional body which will be headquartered in Algiers.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of this continental organisation to become operational, the police forces of the eastern and southern regions of Africa are already engaged in combined efforts to tackle different types of criminality affecting the region.

At the end of a two-day post action workshop held recently in Seychelles the police organisations of the two regions – EAPCCO (Eastern Africa Police Chiefs Cooperation Organisation) and SARPCCO (Southern African Regional Police Chiefs Cooperation Organisation) – agreed to continue with their joint implementation of the operation codenamed USALAMA which targets various types of transnational crimes.

The workshop found the implementation of USALAMA 1 which took place simultaneously in May this year in member states of both the EAPCCO and SARPCCO in collaboration with the Regional Centre for Small Arms and Interpol Africa through its offices in Kenya and Zimbabwe to be an even bigger success than the first operation in 2013.

All the same the workshop identified certain areas for improvements and said that while no major challenges have come out there is a need for certain member countries to be more committed to the operation, while others needed to be speed up their implementation.

As EAPCCO chairman, Mr Quatre said the country’s police force have benefitted from field trainings and other joint operations and have learned a lot from the experiences of their fellow colleagues from eastern African countries.

 “Cybercrimes are on the increase and we were able to receive proper training on how to deal with these crimes,” he said, adding that they also had the chance to talk about their weaknesses and how to improve their personnel in dealing with cross border crimes.

Kenya is expected to take chairmanship of EAPCCO at the next AGM of the organisation to take place later this year while SARPCCO’s chairmanship currently led by Namibia will be handed over to Lesotho.