You Can’t Ban Protests, Rivers AG Tells Police Commissioner

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  Rivers State attorney-general and commissioner for Justice, Mr. Wogu Boms has told the state commissioner of Police, Mr Mbu Joseph Mbu, that he has no legal power to ban protests in the state.
  
  Mr Boms explained that the Public Order Act authorised only the state Governor Chibuike Amaechi to grant permission for any street procession.
  
  Boms, who spoke to newsmen in Port Harcourt, the state capital yesterday, bemoaned Mbu’s utterances and conduct which he said could lead to anarchy, just as he decried his ban on street processions and urged the police chief to discharge his responsibilities within the precepts of law and not allow himself be used by political forces against the state and the governor.
  
  He said, “The commissioner of police is a commissioner of police and not a lawmaker or a law interpreter – functions that statutorily and constitutionally belong to the parliament and the judiciary respectively. He is only a law enforcer and no more. Yet, being neither a lawmaker nor a law interpreter, he (Mbu) has continued to act in both capacities through his speeches and conduct.
  
  “The Commissioner of Police declared, on May 24, or thereabouts, that he has banned all type of procession in the state. For the avoidance of doubt and for the information of the public, he has no such powers.
  
  “Indeed, it is the governor of the state that the Public Order Act authorises and empowers, in its Section 1, to direct the conduct of all assemblies, meetings and processions on the public roads, or places of public resorts in the state. The Act also empowers the governor, not the commissioner of police, to prescribe the route by which and the times at which any procession may pass.”
  
  Meanwhile, concerned about the ongoing alteration between the Rivers State Police Command and the Rivers State government, the House of Representatives has directed its committee on Police Affairs and Justice to liaise with the office of the Inspector General of Police, the Police Service Commission and the Rivers State Government to work out a way of the troubled relationship between the two parties.
  
  The committees, which are expected to report back to the  House within one week, are to mediate between Governor  Amaechi and the police commissioner.