[1][2] In 1951, Horsfall's schooling was disrupted by the death of his uncle Albert in the United Kingdom while taking in-service training.
Albert had to return to his parents in Buguma, where he completed his primary education at Saint Michael's School, Emohua.
[3] At age 17 in 1962, he joined the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) for cadet training, but had to wait a year before this could begin.
[7] When Horsfall returned from the United States, the Special Branch was severely short-staffed because of the exodus of easterners to seceding Biafra.
Horsfall claims to have been embedded with the federal troops in Opobo, Calabar, Onne, and Port Harcourt; he obviously would have held some advantage in this role because he was indigenous to the area.
She was one of a couple of young women he had helped move to Lagos to continue their education during the civil war, and he knew her family.
[9][10] Horsfall remained with the Special Branch until 1976, when the department was excised from the NPF due to the creation of the National Security Organization (NSO).
Horsfall, by then an Assistant Commissioner of Police joined the NSO as an officer under the first Director-General, Colonel Abdullahi Mohammed.
His former bosses at the Special Branch and the NSO, M. D. Yusuf and Abdullahi Mohammed, had refused his applications for a study leave on the grounds he was too useful to their organizations to lose.
[13] Horsfall held this position till the dissolution of the NSO in 1986 by the new military government headed by General Ibrahim Babangida.
This followed a prolonged campaign of calumny mounted by Dr. Junaid, the fiery advocate of northern supremacy who Horsfall forcefully removed from the OMPADEC Board in 1995.
In defence of his role and integrity, Horsfall claimed with authentic figures and statistics from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) that during his three years of service in OMPADEC, the commission had received only 11.48 billion naira approximately $133,488,372 from government through monthly disbursements from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and that with this paltry sum he had performed a near miracle by dotting the whole of the nine oil-producing states with several on-going, medium and major projects and actually completed and commissioned 102 such projects and put them in use by the various communities throughout those oil-producing states.