Guest Columnist Edoba Omoregie
In the last few weeks, the nation has witnessed a flurry of impassioned exchanges over the constitutional proposal to reform the police system in Nigeria. Put simply, the proposal seeks to alter sections 214 and 215 of the Constitution by outright deletion and enactment of new sections 214 and 215.
The extant sections 214 and 215 create a single Nigeria Police Force, under the professional leadership of the Inspector General of Police (IGP) as overall head, and state commands under Commissioners of Police (CP) who are answerable to the IGP. Section 215 also subordinates the IGP directly to the President or his responsible minister, and requires the IGP to comply with the lawful instructions of the President or his minister so empowered to issue such instructions. Similarly, the section empowers the governor of a state or his commissioner so directed to issue command instructions to a CP.
Two troubling aspects of section 215 are worthy of note, although only one of them has received greater public attention. The first is the proviso to subsection 4 which grants a discretion to a CP to decline a lawful command instruction from a Governor or his Commissioner until cleared to do so by his superior at the federal level. The second is subsection 5 which outrightly prohibits judicial review of the command instructions given either to the IGP or CP.
