Our strategies to keep voters and elections safe -Frank Mba, Force PRO

By Olusegun Adeosun

 As voting in many parts of the country ground to a close on Saturday, Frank Mba, the force public relations officer of the Nigeria Police Force, spoke extensively on what the Inspector-General of Police and the organisation did to ensure security of life and property in the nation’s flash points.

Although the police, unfortunately, lost some personnel in keeping voters, INEC personnel and the process generally safe, Mba, an Assistant Commissioner of Police, ACP, revealed that some of the strategies employed in accomplishing that were situation-specific. They were customised to deal with specific challenges.

The FPRO fielded questions on Channels Television and Olusegun Adeosun monitored the interview for The Crest.

Here is the full text of the encounter:

 Could you give us your general view of the security situation (in the governorship and state assembly elections) so far?

The reports I received show things have been moving on smoothly in most parts of the country. However, in a kind of massive security operations of this nature, the kind of logistics we are deploying both by INEC and the Police, as well as other security agencies, we don’t expect that you won’t have some stitches, here and there. But on the whole, it has been a very good one. And we remain cautiously optimistic that it will remain so; that all that have started well, (and) by God’s grace end well.

I will run you through a couple of issues that are already on my table. For instance, in one of the wards in Ibadan, two young men approached the ward, armed, but thank God for the vigilance of the policemen on duty, they were chased down the line. Eventually, two weapons were recovered from them-a locally made pistol and a cut-to-size pump action. Those weapons have been recovered and investigations into that incident have already commenced.

Of particular note is the incident in Imo State, where five young men were arrested for impersonating the Nigeria Police Force. They came into the polling stations, wearing apparels that looked so much like the uniform of police officers. They were spotted out immediately and were taken into custody. In the same Imo, five (fake) military officers were also arrested. They claimed to be Marine or Navy officers wearing what looked like camouflage of the Nigerian military. They were equally arrested. These ten suspects have been moved to the State CID where preliminary investigations have already commenced.

Across the country, it’s been okay; it’s been commendable. But we are still collating and evaluating reports from the field. At this stage (Saturday evening), we are already changing our tactics because, before now, we were focusing on providing security for voting materials (both sensitive and non-sensitive materials) at the polling centres, providing security around the polling centres. But now, counting has commenced. So, we have re-strategized and our focus now is on the collation centres and we are paying very special attention to what is happening in those areas where votes are being counted at the local centres, both at the local government areas level and the central collation centres at the state capitals.

We got a report that some of your personnel were involved in an accident in Gwagwalada in the outskirts of Abuja. What is their situation now?

Thank you for that show of empathy. Forty-four personnel of the Nigeria Police Force were involved in a very serious motor accident on Friday, They were deployed by the FCT Command in pursuance to the discharge of their constitutional responsibilities, as it relates to the election. Unfortunately, on their way to their places of assignment, they had an accident somewhere along Gwagwalada express road. It was a very serious accident, 34 of them sustained injuries of varying degrees. Some of them were immediately rushed to the Air Force Hospital, some to the Police Clinics, Police Hospitals, the National Hospital here in Abuja and the teaching hospital in Gwagwalada.

But to the glory of God, 33 of them have been discharged so far, while 11 are still on admission. Five of them are currently admitted at Gwagwalada Specialist Hospital, three are on admission at the National Hospital, Abuja, and two are on admission at the Police Hospital in Garki, one on admission in one of the private hospitals here in Abuja. The Inspector-General Police, today, personally visited the men, empathized with them, and assured them that the Force will not abandon them at this hour of their needs. The Force will take care of their bills and do everything humanly possible to support the medical doctors and every other persons working behind the scene so that they get back on the feet as quickly as possible.

Do you have any information about the reports we are getting from Benue State, where it has been reported that the electoral materials in some wards were burnt down?

I don’t have that information now, I have lots of situation reports coming to me, but I don’t have that specific information now. But as soon as I have it I will share it.

Earlier in your comment, you talked about massive security exercise for this election. But one of the things we have noticed is that there is this aerial surveillance in very many parts of the country. Of course, there were issues as to whether the military and other forces deployed to many areas ensured security or scared away some people. Before you go to that, when you said “massive security deployment” what did that actually mean?

When you talk about massive deployment, it means that we are ensuring the maximal utilization of manpower and resources. When we talk of massive deployment, we are not just talking numbers, we are talking about details in planning and deployment. We are talking about the comprehensive nature of the coverage. We are talking about making sure we take care of all the little details. We are talking of covering every area, all the polling centres, taking care of the collation centres, taking care of events around the streets, protecting lives and properties beyond the polling centres. We are talking about very strong synergy between the police and all other law enforcement agencies. Strong synergy between the police and the people; and you can see that manifesting itself in so many parts of the country today. I have reports from so many parts of the country where the people who have turned out to vote assisted police officers, supported police officers in ensuring that they were able to actually discharge their responsibilities expectedly. That is what we mean by massive security deployment. It is not just about numbers, it’s also about style, strategy, details.

What are the security plans for Rivers State as it has begun to get dark?

I want to assure you, like I said at the beginning, the moment the voting is over and we go into the collation phase, and we alter our arrangement. We begin to focus our energy, our strategies at securing the collation centres and we know exactly what to do. I might not be able to discuss detains on a national television but I will tell you that we have adequate strategy for protecting the collation centres. Particularly a state like Rivers that has been receiving very special attention from us.  So, Nigerians, citizens of Rivers State should be assured that we have adequate security architecture in place in securing and safeguarding the collation centres.

I don’t know if you heard that the police did confirm the death of one person, an officer of the police, during a kidnapping. I don’t know if you have a report of that, and if you can give us any details.

That story shows you the kind of dangers we face every day in policing a country as complicated, as large and as diverse as Nigeria. Everyday a police officer steps out of his home, he is sure of where he is going, but he is not sure what happens when he gets there. That is the truth. Every time I put this uniform, I know I am out there to take the bullet for you, and for millions of Nigerians out there. That is what we do every day. Every day, we stand in gap between our people and dangers. Every day, we get our skulls broken so that the skulls of our citizens will remain intact. Every day, we take the risks, we get our limbs broken, so that your limbs will remain intact. That’s exactly what happened in this case. He was out there on an operation, trying to rescue someone who was being kidnapped, and that’s exactly what happened. It is unfortunate; it is just a stark reminder of the danger inherent in policing any nation, not just in Nigeria, but globally. As police officers, we know we are constantly coming the way of risk and constantly trying to prevent and securing our people from risks and from dangers; and in doing so, we are exposing ourselves to dangers. I can also confirm that even today, we lost a police officer in Sokoto while he was also on an election duty.

Perhaps, at the end of this exercise, just like the Inspector-General of Police did the last time, we will come out clean in the spirit of transparency and accountability to tell Nigerians, give a summary of everything that have transpired during these gubernatorial and state houses of assembly elections.

At the end of the day, we will look at areas where we have done excellently well, replicate them in other states. And where we didn’t do quite well, we will try to improve on them in subsequent elections. So what we have noticed in these gubernatorial and state houses of assembly elections is that, what we put out is actually an improved version of deployment strategy we used during the presidential and national assembly elections. The strategy today is actually an upscale one and we try to block some of the loopholes we noticed in the last elections.

For instance, we can see how we have improved on our response time. We noticed that in the last election, even though the response time was good in quite a lot of places, in some areas, we were not impressed with the response time. So, what did we do? We tried to make sure that our arm-bearing units, the tactical squad, were placed a bit closer to the polling units. We also tried to locate check-points a bit closer to areas where you have clusters of polling booths. The strategy is to generally improve response time.

Again, we paid attention to states that have waterways. So, states like Rivers, Lagos, Ondo, Bayelsa, Delta, and parts of Kogi, got a very strong deployment of our Marine Police unit. Also, we decided this time around to use our Police air wing. The reason for deploying the air wing is because they provide real time intelligence. While they are in the air, surveying, they transmit data directly to us. So, it is easier to receive those information, analyse them and make use of them immediately. They can also effectively communicate with the ground troops. So, for some areas in the country, we made sure we have intensive aerial patrol, I can tell you, it is the aggregation of all these strategies that helped us to have the kind of peaceful conducts that we are all enjoying today.

While I am not asking you to divulge anything tactical or strategic, going forward, what are you then expecting to happen?

The moment voting is over in the respective polling centres, counting will begin in individual polling booths. Once those processes are concluded, we provide escort for both INEC officials, the result sheets, electoral materials, and escort them to the collation centres. At the collation centres, we provide very strong security, at the time it is more of a static security, static guard and the details, I won’t be discussing. But you know there are different levels of collation, but for each collation centres we provide adequate data and sufficient security. In some of the collation centres, don’t be surprised you will be seeing armoured-personal -carrier in position, based on analysis we’ve carried out, and based on historical facts at our disposals. We designed our deployment strategies to take care of threats that we anticipate, specific and general.

As a matter of fact, some of our strategies will be customized for different areas. The kind of strategy we may be deploying in Benue State might be entirely different from the strategies we will be deploying in Sokoto, Rivers or Lagos. Each collation centre will receive a deployment strategy that will be customized to suit and to tackle the expected security challenges from that area.

There are areas in Lagos where voting did not start until about 3 p.m. today. That would then have meant there is a push-back in terms of time. Did you anticipate this in the deployment strategy, because this is introducing new dynamics into the process, especially when you talk about night fall?

One interesting thing about these strategies is that security agencies, particularly Nigeria Police personnel, are trained to perform for 24 hours. We are not just day-time security agents that operate in day and close at night. In our deployment template, we actually anticipated that in some areas, collation could actually drag late into the night. We have been part and parcel of the Nigerian electoral system. We have been policing Nigeria’s elections for the past two decades and so we will be drawing from all these election experiences. We did anticipate the fact that this election will drag through the night, till tomorrow and in some states, we may still be on ground up till Monday or Tuesday. So, we are sufficiently and adequately prepared for this exigencies.