The Nigerian Police has hint at withdrawing Police personnel attached to VIPs for immediate deployment for the forthcoming elections, as ACP Frank Mba made this known this morning.
ACP Frank Mba who was a guest on Arise TV on Tuesday morning show, spoke about the force preparedness for the elections, and plans to withdraw all personnel attached to some influential persons in the country for the general elections.
According to ACP Frank Mba, the Police in the 2019 General Elections, will provide adequate security to INEC staff whether permanent or ad-hoc for them to carry out their statutory duties. He said:
“We will ensure we provide level playing ground for all political actors, observers, accredited journalists and other critical stakeholders to do their job without intimidation or molestation
On alleged brutality of innocent citizens in previous elections, ACP Frank Mba said:
“we will draw and take into consideration both negative and positive narratives, identify our mistakes and build on our strength to ensure we have peaceful, crime free and crisis free 2019 general election -ACP FRANK
“Giving out the numbers of our personnel to be deployed for the elections is a strategic error, we won’t make such mistake. All our personnel will be involved in the election & having done our security threat assessment, we will deploy both human and material resources adequately.
We will be withdrawing our personnel attached to VIPs to achieve 2 things:
1. It will enable us have enough pool of personnel for deployment and
2. Having policemen attached to Politicians and VIPs may want to give them undue advantage over others which we won’t allow our personnel have been trained adequately to approach incidence of Vote buying/selling and Ballot box snatching.”
Our combat operatives will monitor politicians and the full weight of the law will be brought to bare on anyone trying to test our will on this, we have policed electoral process in countries/post conflict regions around the world, we have ensured adequate security in all previous elections in the country.
This 2019 general election is not going to be an exception. We will build on our strength & correct our mistakes. We are aware of our duties, roles & responsibilities in an election as spelt out in the constitution, Police Act & the Electoral Act.
On the recent posting of officers and how Politicians have reacted to it, he had this to say:
Allegations of being partisan are not unexpected since we are in a period of heightened politics but we will remain focused and not allow ourselves to be caught up in any web of political controversy. We will be professional, non-partisan and politically neutral
We are not politicians, the recent posting/redeployment of Senior officers is based on merit, available vacancy and without any form of political colouration. Lots of our senior officers retired recently and during election we redeploy to bring in fresh hands