The Rivers State High Court in Port Harcourt has issued an order restraining the Inspector-General of Police and the state Commissioner of Police from arresting, detaining, or forcing the Vice-Chancellor of PAMO University of Medical Sciences, Professor Smith Jaja, to appear before the Rivers State House of Assembly.
Justice F. Onyiri granted the interim injunction on Wednesday in a suit filed by Jaja against the Assembly, its Speaker, the IGP, and the state Commissioner of Police. The order comes days after the Assembly resolved to issue an arrest warrant for Jaja over his repeated failure to appear before an ad hoc committee investigating scholarship funds released to PAMO University by the state government.
In her ruling, Justice Onyiri restrained the police and other security agents from acting on the Assembly’s resolution to arrest or compel Jaja’s appearance before the committee or any other Assembly-constituted panel, pending determination of the substantive case.
She also granted Jaja permission to serve court documents on the Assembly and its Speaker through substituted means, either by dropping them at the Assembly’s main gate on Aba Road or publishing them in a newspaper, and to serve the IGP and Commissioner of Police through the state police command headquarters on Moscow Road.
The case has been adjourned to October 9, 2026, for hearing of the substantive application concerning the enforcement of Jaja’s fundamental rights.
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The legal battle stems from a report by the Assembly’s Ad Hoc Committee investigating scholarship disbursements to PAMO University. According to the committee, chaired by Maol, the university received more than N29 billion from the state government without a corresponding number of enrolled scholarship students.
The House subsequently moved to issue an arrest warrant after Jaja allegedly ignored several invitations to explain how the funds were used, and also recommended that the state government set up a committee to recover any unaccounted funds and return them to the State Consolidated Revenue Account.
According to a statement from the Speaker’s Special Assistant on Media, Martins Wachukwu, the investigation drew on documents from the Ministries of Finance and Education as well as the Office of the Accountant-General.
Speaker Martin Amaewhule said the scholarship programme was well-intentioned but poorly implemented, noting that the documents reviewed contained conflicting figures and showed only about N5 billion of the more than N29 billion disbursed had been properly accounted for. Earlier this month, the House had also rejected a proposed N6 billion allocation for PAMO University scholarships in the state’s 2026 budget.
