Executive Director of Peering Advocacy and Advancement Centre in Africa, PAACA, Ezenwa Nwagwu, has said that the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, NSCDC, and other security agencies require requisite familiarisation with the country’s electoral reforms to check electoral crimes.
Nwagwu spoke at the NSCDC office in Abuja on Wednesday.
He noted that electoral crimes such as vote-buying, ballot box snatching and voter intimidation pose serious threats to democracy and must be treated as national security concerns.
Nwagwu insisted that security agencies and personnel must not wait for an electoral offences commission to be created before maintaining law and order and frowned at the compartmentalisation of electoral crimes in the country.
He said, “The whole idea of waiting until we create an electoral offences commission subverts the offences; crimes are crimes, so to compartmentalise electoral crimes to a point that we will wait until there’s an offences commission is something that we are trying to mitigate, to call out, to say that crimes committed during elections need to be taken very seriously, and the only people who can do that are security agents.
“The NSCDC has responsibility for protecting public facilities, but the Interagency Consultative Committee on Election Security Access has brought all security agents under a coordinating platform, which means that all of these people working in these platforms must understand the process in a way that enriches democracy and governance.”