Police Officers Now to Declare Assets, Acting IG Declares

Dele Ogbodo in Abuja

The Acting Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mr. Ibrahim Idris, on Thursday declared that senior officers of the Force from the rank of the IGP down to Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) must henceforth make their assets known.

The new Acting IG spoke during a courtesy call to the Minister of Interior, Lt. Gen Abdulrahman Dambazzau (rtd.) while unfolding his agenda aimed at stepping up the Force from where his predecessor, Mr. Solomon Arase, left it.

According to him, “We are going to make sure that our police officers are more accountable to the people and we are going to make sure that we take over the street from criminals and ensure that our presence is felt in our cities, towns and villages.

“We are also going to operate within the concept of rule of law and the code of conduct law of this country and the Section 13 of the Code provides that every officer must declare their asset and I am assuring you that every police officer from my rank (IGP) to the Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) must declare their asset.”

Making further clarification on the assets declaration, he said: “Under Section 13 of the Code of Conduct law, Cap 15 in the Federal Law of Nigeria, every police officer from the IGP to the ASPs are the Commission officers and they must declare their asset.

“I must declare my asset and every police officer must declare his or her asset since I am declaring mine. Under our structure and it is the requirement of the Code of Conduct Law of Federal Republic of Nigeria and I don’t think the state made that law for the fun of it.”

The move, he said is aimed at ensuring that we are morally sound and that people should have limitation in what we are doing in life.

The Police boss said; “I told you when I took over that the NPF will henceforth be governed by the Code of Conduct values and internationally recognised core values of policing. We are trying to standardize Nigeria Police Force and one of the requirement is that we must do things according to law and the law requires that every police officer must declare his asset.”

On the fight against corruption amongst civil servants, he said: “For some time now, what people see is the EFCC and DSS but if you look at the Nigeria Police Force when we joined, the X-Squad were the under-cover police personnel that go after policemen and anybody because if you look at Section 4 of the Police Act, police serve the responsibility to prevent crime and to enforce it.”

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