By Pascal Ibe
President Bola Tinubu on Tuesday forwarded which bill that seeks to amend the tenure of the Inspector General of Police (IGP).
President Bola Tinubu forwarded the Police Act Amendment Bill to the House of Representatives.
The President appointed Egbetokun as the IGP in June 2023 for four years. He was appointed alongside four new service chiefs.
According to Section 18(8) of the Police Act 2020, Egbetokun, who was born on September 4, 1964, is expected to retire in September 2024, when he will be 60 years old.
He would only have been in office for one year and three months in office by September, with two years and nine months remaining of his four-year appointment.
Earlier in July, the police denied claims that IGP Kayode Egbetokun tried to lobby the National Assembly on a bill seeking to raise the retirement age of officers.
The controversy about the tenure of IGP didn’t start with the current police boss. That of Egbetokun’s predecessor, Usman Baba, was not in any way different. Baba clocked 60 years old in March 2023 when he attained the mandatory 35 years of service but he remained in office till he was replaced with Egbetokun.
What To Know About This Bill
The Bill is sponsored by Honourable Tajudeen Abbas, incumbent Speaker of the House of Representatives and co-sponsored by Honourable Abubakar Makki Yalleman, the Chairman House of Representatives Committee on Police Affairs.
From the long title, the Bill seeks the amendment of the Nigeria Police Act, 2020 to achieve the following objectives:
• Review the service years of police personnel in order to improve the experience and expertise of the police workforce
• Retain experienced personnel and reduce the cost of training and recruiting new officers
• Improve the morale performance and job satisfaction in the workforce of the Nigerian Police Force; and
Address the shortage of experienced police personnel.
The previous statutory framework was the Police Act first made in 1943 (with subsequent amendments), until its repeal and replacement with the Nigeria Police Act, 2020. The present Bill seeks to amend section 18 of the Nigeria Police Act, 2020 by substituting subsection (8) of the section with the following clause:
“(8) Every police officer shall, on recruitment or appointment, serve in the Nigeria Police Force for 40 years or until he attains the age of 65 years, whichever is earlier”.
The existing section 18 (8) of the Nigeria Police Act provides as follows:
“(8) Every police officer shall, on recruitment or appointment, serve in the Nigeria Police Force for 35 years or until he attains the age of 60 years, whichever is earlier”.
Unnecessary Justification
Citing review by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (National Assembly), Abuja in June 2024, the document stated that the recruitment age limit into the Nigeria Police Force is between ages 18-25 years. If a police personnel is recruited at 18 years, that personnel would retire at 53 years of age after 35 years of service. If recruited at 25 years, the personnel would retire at 60 years of age after 35 years. Surely, the period of 1-35 years is more than sufficient for the police personnel to have gained sufficient experience and expertise to effectively perform the duties of a police personnel before retirement.
In any event, improvement in expertise is not a function of age of service but that of regularity of training and retraining on the job. Therefore, to improve experience and expertise, police personnel should be given frequent training in and outside the country on best policing practises, rather than increasing their service years.
On the Retention of experienced personnel and reduction in the cost of training and recruiting new officers, the review noted that this cannot be a justifiable ground for increasing the service years of police personnel. Police personnel are usually recruited annually. At the point of entry, they are not of the same age.
They do not retire at the same time. Therefore, there can be no question of depletion of experienced personnel in the NPF as there would always be experienced hands available to discharge police duties even as experienced hand retire. Similarly, the concern about cost of training does not arise. From a cost/benefit perspective, no special cost is required to train new police personnel since the nature of police duties requires regular recruitment of new police personnel. Any gap in recruitment will harm the regenerative capability of the NPF to inject fresh young blood into the force, to cope with the stressful demands of the tasks of policing which cannot be addressed by retaining older police personnel through increase in service years.
Credit: Edoba B. Omoregie, SAN, PhD, BL
Professor of Constitutional Law and Director, Department of Legislative Support Services, National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies, Abuja
