UPDATED: Buhari Approves Recruitment Of 10,000 Policemen Annually

President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the annual recruitment of 10, 000 police officers.

The Minister of Police Affairs, Maigari Dingyadi, disclosed this on Friday while featuring on Channels Television’s ‘Politics today’.

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He said, “What we have at hand now is that Mr President has given us the go-ahead to recruit 10,000 police personnel yearly and in addition to the once we are recruiting through the police academy, within which is about 1000 annually.

“So, you can see we are having about 11,000 and we are also thinking of about employing police personnel to do short service courses and by the time we get this approval we will recruit more. So, we are on course, we are on the way to reaching that target. What we have now is about 540 per head. So, in the next three, four years we will be there”.

The minister also disclosed that operatives of the new Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT) have been posted to various police state commands in the country.

Recall that the president had ordered disbandment of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad over allegations of human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings, and the squad had been replaced with SWAT.

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Dingyadi, while answering questions on the latest development of the new security unit, said operatives of the unit have concluded their training and were now performing their functions.

“SWAT officials have ended their training and they have been posted to the state police command that brought them for training, they are there with them and they are performing the functions of the SWAT,” he said.

About 1,850 members of SWAT were trained at the Police Mobile Force Training School, Ila Oragun in Osun State and the PMF Training School, Ende Hills, in Nasarawa State respectively.

The Minister noted that the SWAT officers had been deployed in police formations across the country to fight crime, particularly robberies.

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