Nigerian constitution is a total mess. The service commision is responsible for discipline and yet when policemen collect #20 bribe on the street, everyone blame the IG to call his boys to order. Now the bad eggs are been thrown away police service wants to exercise its duty.


The Police Service Commission, through its Permanent Secretary, Alhaji Garba Buwai, recently took the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mr Sunday Ehindero, to task for sacking 10,000 police officers and men in the dying months of year 2006.

The Commission, which described the mass sack of the policemen as illegal, unconstitutional and null and void, hinged its position on the provisions of the 1999 Constitution which vests it with the powers of appointment, promotion and discipline of policemen.

The Permanent Secretary, who expressed his views at the House of Representatives in Abuja during an investigative hearing by its ad-hoc committee on the sacking of 10,000 policemen and officers without following due process, insisted that the Police Service Commission was the employer of policemen and not the IGP.

He accused Ehindero of eroding the powers of the Commission and refusing to recognise its oversight functions over the police, with regards to promotion and discipline of policemen. The IGP’s unilateral decision on the mass sack, he stated, has led to a series of court cases against the Commission by dismissed police officers. About 2000 petitions have also been received. He also accused the IGP of a general lack of co-operation with the Commission and refusal to stop the rationalisation, even after the Commission wrote a letter to that effect on February 7, 2007.

The IGP, in his defence, has insisted that he acted in the best interest of the police regarding the mass sack because the sacked policemen were “the bad eggs in the police.” The Deputy Inspector General of Police, Mr Ogbonna Onovo, who represented Ehindero at the hearing, traced the problem to the questionable recruitment of 40,000 policemen by corrupt recruitment officers in the year 2000. Onovo alleged that the recruitment officers collected between N25,000 and N30,000 from each applicant and recruited some who did not meet the statutory entry requirements such as age, height and educational qualifications, while some had criminal records.

The resort to open bickering by the Police Service Commission and the Inspector General of Police over the sack of policemen is regrettable. It is embarrassing and unhelpful to service discipline for two organs of the government to engage in public altercation over a matter on which the nation’s constitution is unambiguous. Section 214, subsection 2(a) of the 1999 Constitution states that the Nigeria Police Force shall be organised and administered in accordance with such provisions as may be prescribed by an Act of the National Assembly.

The Police Service Commission Act of 2001 Section 6 subsections a, b and c state that the Commission shall be responsible for the appointment, promotion, dismissal and also exercise disciplinary control over officers and men of the Nigeria Police Force (other than the IGP). It follows, therefore, that the office of the Inspector General of Police should have left the issue of the sack of the policemen and officers to the Commission.

Although we sympathise with the IGP whose office has had to bear the brunt of the wrongful political recruitment of many barely literate men of questionable integrity into the force in Year 2000, his unilateral resort to a mass sack of the misfits without a recourse to the Police Service Commission is a case of doing the right thing the wrong way.

Now that the sack has been effected, we advise the IGP and the Commission to resolve their differences amicably as it does not augur well for discipline in the force for two supervisory offices of government to engage in public affront,

What Nigeria needs today is a disciplined force. There is no need for rivalry between the offices of the IGP and the Police Service Commission. There is also no reason why the former should not respect the position accorded the latter in the Police Act,

The Commission, however, must be careful not to see its supervisory role over the police as a licence to constitute itself into a cog in the wheel of the smooth running of the police. We hope the present disagreement will lead to the beginning of greater care in the process of recruitment of policemen to ensure that only qualified persons who can faithfully discharge the functions of the office are recruited in subsequent recruitment exercises.



http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/opinion/editorial/2007/apr/25/editorial-25-04-2007-001.htm