By appointing Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim as the director-general of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), President Muhammadu Buhari becomes the first president to breach the law guiding the appointment.
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Mr Buhari axed Julie Okah-Donli as NAPTIP’s director-general months before the end of her four-year tenure and appointed Mrs Sulaiman-Ibrahim last week.
However, the appointment of Mrs Sulaiman-Ibrahim breached the law establishing the anti-human trafficking agency.
Section 8(1) of the NAPTIP Act 2015 mandates that the head of the agency should be picked from the directorate cadre in the public service or its equivalent in any of the law enforcement agencies.
The Act further mandates the agency to have a board to which the director-general is the secretary. The board must be mafe up of representatives of government, all of whom must be within the directorate cadre in any of the ministries of justice, women affairs, labour and productivity, the police, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), the Nigerian Immigration Service and the National Population Commission (NPC).
Mr Buhari has breached the NAPTIP law twice while appointing the head of the agency.
First in April 2017, he appointed Julie Okah-Donli who prior to her appointment was involved in private legal practice before she got a political appointment as an executive assistant to former Governor Timipre Sylva of Bayelsa State.
Her job profile further showed that at other times, she had only worked as a legal adviser to the Nigerian Capital Market Institute and led the Abuja branch and northern region of UBA Trustees.
Again last week, the president appointed Mrs Sulaiman-Ibrahim, who until the appointment was the special adviser on strategic communication to the minister of state for education.
She was never an employee of the Nigerian civil service or law enforcement agency as she was in private legal practice when she was hired for the top job, in clear violation of the NAPTIP Act.
The Office of the President has refused to speak on the matter. Likewise the attorney-general and the humanitarian affairs ministry.
Meanwhile it has been discovered that the breach of the NAPTIP Act is peculiar to the Buhari-administration.
Created July 2003 under the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, NAPTIP was the outcome of a private member bill, the Trafficking in Persons Prohibition and Administration bill sponsored by the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation (WOTCLEF), a not-for-profit organisation founded by Titi Atiku, the wife of the former vice-president Atiku Abubakar.
NAPTIP was the federal government’s response to rising cases of human trafficking in the country.
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