As dust raised last week directive by the Police Service Commission, PSC, to certain categories of police chiefs to proceed with compulsory retirement is yet to settle down, a security expert has described the decision as ethnic persecution while calling on President Tinubu for urgent intervention.
In its directive last week, the PSC ordered police chiefs who have attained 60 years of age and those who have served the force for 35 years plus those it says falsified their age to proceed on compulsory retirement.
However, a security expert, Prince Shadrack Adewole Ogunyemi, urging Tinubu to look into the matter to put what is wrong and right in the retirement exercise, said that a critical review of the retirement revealed that some of the affected officers were persecuted because of the section they hailed from in the country.
According to Ogunyemi, the issue of “Force Entrants” with their appointment dates was settled by the Appeal Court in 2017 when the PSC appealed against some police chiefs who a lower court had ruled in their favour over appointment date.
The Security Expert wondered why the PSC did not approach the courts to enable it to come up with the decision it arrived at last week. This, he said has led to shock, mental torture and embarrassment to several officers and their families.
” If you look at the list of the retired officers, 90 per cent of it are officers from the Southern part of our country. This policy of force entrants, I can say categorically was initiated in the late 1980s by those who had used all means to ensure that northerners dominate the force”.
Ogunyemi while calling on Tinubu to intervene over the matter, urged the president to call on the case file regarding the retirement issue.
“The same PSC that issued a directive in 2017 to the then IGP on Regularisation of the Date of Entry of Officers of Force Entrants in Courses 18,19 and 20 should not, 8 years after, be singing a different song for the same officers without recourse to the courts”
” I don’t think the PSC, in taking this decision, was properly informed. To rectify this anomaly, President Tinubu, all stakeholders must review this unwholesome directive that has affected several lives negatively”.
