*He stepped on powerful toes, sources say
The recent recruitment of 10,000 police constables by the Police Service Commission (PSC) may not have gone down well with some powerful persons in government, leading to the unceremonious removal of the Commission’s chairman, Dr. Solomon Arase, investigations have revealed.
President Bola Tinubu’s spokesman Ajuri Ngelale on Monday night announced Arase’s removal and his replacement with Hashimu Argungu, a retired deputy Inspector General of Police.
According to Ngelale, the president also approved the appointment of a member of the commission, Chief Onyemuche Nnamani, as secretary.
No reason was given for the removal of Arase whom the immediate-past President Muhammadu Buhari appointed in January 2023.
Even though PSC members are by law confirmed by the Senate, the same law expressly grants the President powers to unilaterally remove any member he is, dissatisfied with.
According to section 4 (2) of the PSC Act, “A member of the Commission may be removed by the President if he is satisfied that it is not in the interest of the Commission or the interest of the public that the member should continue in office.”
It was gathered that Arase’s insistence that only the best 10,000 candidates who sat for and passed the comprehensive computer-based test conducted by the Joint Addmissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) be employed as Constables.
It would be recalled that on March 5, 2024, 171,956 candidates drawn from all the 774 local government areas in the country sat for the examinations.
A former Inspector-General of Police, Arase, had while justifying the need to get JAMB conduct the examination said “Nigeria needs the right police personnel with mental mobility and fertile minds to relate effectively with the public.”
Sources say that, mindful that some powerful interest groups were bent on hijacking and politicizing the recruitment, Arase quickly ordered that the result be uploaded online. This, it was gathered, peeved the powerful interest groups who recycled an allegation that had been thrown out by the courts, to press for his removal.
The federal government had for long been trying to close the police to citizen ratio, considered to be among the lowest in the world.
An attempt in 2019 by the then police boss, Mohammed Adamu, to recruit 10,000 constables met a legal brick wall, as the then PSC headed by Musiliu Smith, himself a retired police IGP, went to court to challenge the recruitment powers of the PSC.
The PSC held that Part 1 of the Third Schedule to the 1999 constitution (as amended) states that: “The Commission shall have power to — (a.) appoint persons to offices (other than office of the Inspector-General of Police) in the Nigeria Police Force.”
However, the police hierarchy clung to Section 18 (1) of the Nigeria Police Act 2020, which was assented to by President Muhammadu Buhari.
According to the section, “The responsibility for the recruitment of recruit constables into the Nigeria Police Force and recruit cadets into the Nigeria Police Academy shall be the duty of th Inspector-General of Police.”
The police leadership lost the case. He headed to the Court of Appeal, where they equally lost.
Even though the matter was finally resolved by the Supreme Court last August, the bitterness and undercurrents lingered culminating in Arase’s removal on Monday.
