2019: Foundation maps out strategies to monitor police officials, other agencies



As 2019 general elections are expected to get underway after postponement, CLEEN Foundation has unveiled an election security support centre to monitor the conduct of Police and other law enforcement agencies deployed to monitor the election. 

The Executive Director of the foundation Dr. Benson Olugbuo on Friday in Abuja said the essence of it was to map electoral risk factors, identify actors and actions that could cause violence and make recommendations to the relevant actors to mitigate identified threats.

Olugbuo said the foundation in the build-up to the 2019 General Elections, conducted three security threat assessments regionally and across the 36 states of the federation in April, December 2018 and January 2019 respectively.

He said vote buying and hate speech were among the leading electoral risk factors likely to course electoral violence in the surveys.
He said the rating of the police will to a large extent be determined on how best they handle the 2019 General Elections to ensure an atmosphere devoid of rancor of any sort.

The CLEEN director said that for the 2019 elections, the Foundation also trained law enforcement officers of the Nigeria Police Force and the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) on Electoral Security Management.

He said the training was conducted across the six geo-political zones while trained officers also conducted step-down training for officers in their divisions who were not part in the training.

“To ensure adequate coverage of the elections and real-time security situation analysis around the elections, CLEEN Foundation through its Election Security Support Centre ESSC) will be observing the conduct of security agents deployed on election duty for the February 16 and March 2 Elections respectively.

“Our observers are trained to observe and report the conduct of security personnel with a particular focus on the police. They will observe police conduct from movement of elections materials to voting centres, arrival at polling areas, accreditation and voting processes and announcement of poll results,” he said .

According to him, the information from their observers would be fact-checked before releasing same to the public while doubtful information that cannot be verified would be discarded, as part of their support to counter fake news and misinformation that could trigger election violence they are working to avert.



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