Nigeria enjoys relative peace, stability – IGP

The Federal Government says the nation has continued to enjoy relative peace and stability in the ember months.

The Inspector General of Police, Muhammed Adamu, made this known after the meeting of the National Security Council, presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja, on Tuesday.

According to him, the meeting reviewed the nation’s security situation and noted that the situation across the country is stable.

He said: “The meeting reviewed the security situation all over the country and we realised that it’s stable, banditry has been reduced to the barest minimum, kidnapping had been reduced significantly.

“The epic center of this kidnapping as you know in the north western part of the country – Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, they are all very calm now.

“The insurgency in the northeast on daily basis they are being degraded and many of the insurgents are surrendering to the authority. They are giving up their arms and for that reason we have been encouraged to sustain the tempo.

“All the successes recorded was as a result of the cooperation received from members of the public, including the press because most of you have objectively assessed the actual security situation in the country, which your followers agreed to.

“So, we have been encouraged to continue with the tempo so that insurgency can be greatly eliminated from the country.

“Politicians and the hunters have been working with us and other stakeholders.

“As such we have been encouraged to work more closely with such groups of people so as to have the information that we require.

”We therefore have all the support that we need to defeat any form of criminality within the country.’’

On the pockets of unrest recorded during the Nov. 16 Bayelsa and Kogi governorship elections, Adamu disclosed that some arrests have been made by the police in the two states.

According to him, the ‘policemen’ alleged to have disrupted the elections in some parts of the two States were “fake” and not the personnel officially deployed for election duties.

He said that all security personnel, who worked during the elections were given “special identification tags”, adding that anyone without the tags was on illegal duty.

“Before the elections, there was threats assessment of the two states and we realised that there was going to be violence in two states.

“Because, during the campaigns we saw how the opponents were fighting themselves, so we prepared so much for that. During one of the stakeholders meeting, I went to Kogi with the chairman of INEC and I also went to Bayelsa.

“Even at the point of signing the peace accord to conduct the election without any problems, after signing the peace accord in Kogi, within the hall there was problem by the parties.

“So we knew that it was not going to be easy and so we had to prepare heavily for the elections.

“During the elections, anybody you saw either in police uniform or military uniform that does not carry the tag that has been given for the election, that person is not genuine police officer or military officer or that he was not on official duty.

“We were aware of the fact that some politicians were going to sew police and military uniforms, so we devised some other means of identifying those that were on elections duty. We gave them tags,’’ he said.

On why the Police allowed violence during the elections even with security reports to the police before the exercise, he said: “You see, it depends on the way you choose to interpret.

“We did our assessment, we knew these things will happen but what we needed to do was plan to prevent it, or if it happens, to arrest. That explains why the number of policemen we sent to those states were so massive.

“Now, when you get the information and you did your assessment and you did your plan, the bad guys are also planning, and the people we are dealing with here are politicians. So, for us to be able to distinguish the bad from the good, one of the strategy was to create a situation that will enable us identify the good ones, genuine personnel.

“Then anyone without identification tag, is a bad guy and then we pick him. They came out as they planned but then, we made some arrests on the spot where we saw them, those that escaped through information and intelligence we also picked them.’’