Scandal Trailes the Nigerian police force promotion

By Oluchi Ihediuche

Scandal trailed the Nigeria Police Force and the Police Service Commission promotion list as strange names who did not take the mandatory Promotion Examination nor go through any assessment using the Annual Performance Evaluation Report (APER), where found while 17 qualified senior officers were excluded.

It was gathered that the promotion lists were released on December 18, 2020, with 47 serving ACPs who were supposed to have been promoted to the rank of DCP, having successfully undergone the mandatory APERs.

Reporters learnt that the 47 were penciled down for promotions by the PSC, only for the commission to turn around and announce 29 of them as new DCPs, leaving out 17 others.

According to an insider source, to make up for the space, the commission smuggled in eight officers, who are among other padding done to other promotion lists by the police.

, “The criminal smuggling of the names of the eight officers into the list of recently promoted ACPs to DCPs only buttresses the primordial ineptitude of the Chairman of the PSC.

“Inconsistencies trail the police promotion and the lists are deeply influenced by nepotism, favoritism and other immoral conducts, including execution of ethnic and religious agenda.

“Apart from padding the list of those made Assistant Inspector Generals and Commissioners of Police, the padding was glaringly the case in the promotion list of the 47 serving ACPs who were supposed to have been promoted to the rank of DCP. To their greatest shock and surprise, when the list came out through the IGP, seven ‘foreign’
names had been added to it.

“It must be made clear that the seven names smuggled into the list were not in the list of the original 47 officers slated for promotion.”

The International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, a civil society, confirmed the anomalies in the police promotion, while identifying the names of the sidelined 17 officers.