Disagreement among senators and House of Representatives members over procedure disrupted the 2025 budget defence of the Nigeria Police Force on Thursday.
A shocked Inspector-General of Police, Mr Kayode Egbetokun, looked helplessly as he watched the unfolding altercations among the lawmakers.
Egbetokun was at the National Assembly to present the police’s estimates to the Joint Senate/House Committees on Police Affairs.
At least one senator, Onyekachi Nwoebonyi (Ebonyi-North), angrily abandoned the session in protest, saying that his privilege had been breached.
Trouble started as the IGP read his budget speech, specifically highlighting the provisions made for various projects, including the plan to put in place five zonal police headquarters in the country.
A lawmaker from the House of Representatives, Hon. Mark Esset, began interjecting, disputing the figures reeled out by the police chief.
According to him, the figures the IGP read were different from those contained in the copies of his speech given to the committee members.
He was joined by Sen. Nwoebonyi, a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who also insisted that Egbetokun must distribute the copies he was reading to members and not the one already before them to be sure that they were working with the same document.
He shouted, “We are here to serve Nigerians and Nigerians should see us as a very serious institution.
“We are not against the presentation of the IGP, but I, as the senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, should have what the IGP is reading.”
After his point of order was overruled by the co-chairman from the House, Hon. Abubakar Makki-Yalleman, while the IGP continued to read from his copy, the senator stormed out.
“I am leaving; I am going. This country belongs to all of us,” he shouted.
A number of House members responded to his verbal complaints and threats, asking him to walk out as they cared less.
Expressing his disappointment over the uproar, a member of the House, Hon. Yusuf Gagdi, said the conduct of the angry lawmakers was “unparliamentary”.
Gagdi, a ranking member, noted that the established parliamentary tradition was that the presiding chairman must first recognise and yield the floor to a member before they could speak.
He deplored the method of interjecting the chair or wanting to stop the IGP from reading his speech because his views must be heard.
Egbetokun, who patiently waited for the verbal engagements to end, later resumed the reading of his speech after order was restored.
He complained of the annual inadequate funding of the police through the envelope system, which he said rarely took into detail the needs of the crime-preventing outfit.
The IGP made an appeal to the National Assembly to remove the police force from the envelope system.
However, he praised President Bola Tinubu for approving an increase in the annual recruitment quota of the force from 10,000 to 30,000.
He noted, “We are hopeful that with this increased recruitment, we will be better equipped to deliver on our mandate.”
