Chairman of the Police Service Commission (PSC), Musliu Smith, said they went to court over the recruitment of constables into the Nigeria Police because they had to protect the Commission’s mandate, as well as the provisions of the constitution of the country.

Smith, a retired Inspector General of Police, disclosed that funding for the litigation was not from government coffers but that the Commissioners of the PSC taxed themselves for it. He said this while contributing at a public hearing on the proposed Bill for an Act to repeal the Police Service Commission (Establishment) Act 2001 and enact the Police Service Commission Act, 2020, organized by the House Committee on Police Affairs on Thursday.

The PSC had in 2019 taken the Inspector General Police and others to the Federal High Court in Abuja last year over the recruitment of 10,000 police constables into the Force. The court had ruled in the defendants’ favour saying it was the duty of the IGP to carry out the recruitment.

The Commission had headed for the Court of Appeal, which on September 30, 2020, overturned the lower court’s decision, saying it was the Commission’s responsibility, thereby nullifying the ongoing process of the recruitment into the Force. The IGP had headed for the Supreme Court after that. Smith said based on the Court of Appeal judgment delivered on the 30th of September, 2020 in a matter between the Police Service Commission vs the Nigeria Police Force and three others with number CA/A/84/2020, the appellate court had held that the word appointment and recruitment mean the same thing.

Source: The Nation