NATIONAL: ‘Recruit more officers, decentralise police force’

• Most officers carry handbags of prominent Nigerians’ wives, says El-Rufai

GOVERNOR El-Rufai of Kaduna State said most police officers are used as general factotums of prominent Nigerians and their wives.

 El-Rufal, therefore, stressed the need to recruit more personnel into the police force and ensure they were rightly deployed into designated areas of duty.

“The number of policemen we have in Nigeria is inadequate, it is less than half of what we need and a large percentage of them are engaged in non-police duties like carrying handbags of the wives of important people.

The governor also called for constitutional amendment which will ensure the decentralisation of the police force.

He noted that this would go a long way in addressing the security problems bedeviling the nation.

El-Rufai said this while featuring o Channels TV ‘Politics Today’ on Monday.

 He said, “We need to have a greater footprint of police in Nigeria and the only way to achieve that in a fasttrack manner is to amend the Constitution and put policing on the concurrent list, as recommended by the APC True Federalism Committee so that we have more policemen.”

According to him, Nigeria is the only country in the world that is a federation that has only one police force.

The governor stated that the governors had engaged in arguments that states should be allowed to have their own police, while local governments should be allowed to have community police.

He noted that most state governments were responsible for the running cost of the police such as vehicles, fuel, communication, while the Federal Government was only responsible for the payment of the salaries of policemen.