President Bola Tinubu on Monday appointed a retired Deputy Inspector General of Police, Hashimu Argungu, as the Chairman of the Police Service Commission, thus ending the tenure of a retired Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, about 17 months after his appointment and 15 months after inauguration.
As reported earlier by The Eagle Online, members of the Board of the PSC have a tenure of four non-renewable years.
The Eagle Online recalls that while President Muhammadu Buhari appointed him in January 2023, he was eventually inaugurated on March 29, 2023 after confirmation by the Senate.
The replacement of Arase by President Tinubu did come as a shock to many, while some saw it coming based on events before his sack on June 10, 2024.
The country’s former number one cop had been at loggerheads with the International Centre for Investigative Reporting over a report that linked him and Ibrahim Idris, another retired IGP, to an alleged infraction while they were in office.
The report accused them of receiving N200 million each and a house allocation as incentives for awarding an estate development contract to Corpran International Limited for a land originally meant to be used as police barracks.
ICIR, which a few days back called for the suspension of Arase as the Chairman of the PSC to pave the way for his thorough probe, reported that a former staff member of Corpran International Limited, Kalu O. Kalu, and a lawyer, Francis Mgboh, accused Arase and Idris of unlawfully approving the contract for the development of the land, which belongs to the police, without adequate scrutiny, after allegedly receiving the bribe.
The allegations currently form a part of ongoing litigation at the Federal High Court in Abuja.
Following the report, the writer of the story, Nurudeen Yahaya Akewushola, and a Director of ICIR, Dayo Aiyetan, were invited by the Nigeria Police Force National Cybercrime Centre to answer questions in a very untidy manner.
So also did the spokesman of the PSC, Ikechukwu Ani, issued a statement in which Arase threatened legal action against the publisher of the ICIR.
Ani, in the statement, said the narrative of the story, the kernel of which has become a lawsuit before a Federal High Court in Abuja, was a figment of the imagination of the writer and his sponsors.
He said: “While the initial inclination was to ignore the spurious publication with a view to denying the misguided authors and the elements they might be representing the undue attention they were, perhaps, seeking to attract, the depth of the misinformation, maligning content and hatchet man job they clearly seek to project and the overriding consideration of the need to continually protect Dr. Arase’s hard earned public service reputation and integrity, make it expedient that the records be set straight.
“The publication essentially seeks to project a false narrative indicating that in his then capacity as the Inspector-General of Police between 2015-2016, that he drew pecuniary benefits as reward for ‘selling’ police barracks at Mbora District, Abuja….
“Similarly, at no time in his service record did he sell any police barracks at Mbora District or any other location across the country as being falsely and maliciously alleged.
“At no point in the project perfection process did Dr. Arase seek nor obtain any form of reward as being maliciously and falsely projected by ICIR or their paymasters.
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“IGP Arase (rtd), therefore, finds the unholy alliance between ICIR and Barrister Francis Mgboh in engaging the ICIR platform and the cyberspace to malign his personality and taint his hard-earned public service reputation in the manner conveyed in the publication under reference as irresponsible, intolerable, ill-intentioned and in bad faith.
“In issuing this rebuttal, Dr. Arase has as well briefed his lawyers to initiate requisite civil actions against ICIR and their paymasters, while the relevant law enforcement agency has also been petitioned to investigate and prosecute these characters towards holding them criminally liable for cyberstalking and sundry crimes.”
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