The police have lamented that the violence in Kogi State during the governorship elections was worse than that of Bayelsa State.
Elections had been disrupted in Ward two, Lokoja, once gunshots were fired into the air by suspected thugs.
They additionally created away with ballot boxes, while electorates scampered for safety.
Speaking concerning the case during an appearance on Channels TV’s special election programme, the Police public relations Officer, Frank Mba, noted that though a number of the incidences had been known within the threat analysis and preventive measures were taken, heaps of things ar still on the far side the control of the security agencies.
He, however, explained that if the general public knew the {amount} of threat that was detected as well as the amount of labor that went into identifying, isolating and neutralising a lot of the threat they might appreciate the efforts of the security agencies.
According to him, the very fact that there have been incidences of some isolated cases of violence ought to “not distract from the heavy investments and quantity of labor (they) have done”.
“The scenario in Kogi has really been terribly difficult, tougher than the case in Bayelsa,” he said.
“The truth, however, is that we tend to saw an excellent deal of this within the threat analysis we tend to conducted earlier and that we really took heaps of measures and strategic steps to isolate and neutralise some of these problems”.
Speaking more, he blamed a number of the electoral malpractices and violence on politicians who play terribly desperate games.
According to MBA, despite being armed, the security agencies need to exercise most restraint so as to not hurt innocent voters.
“When you’re policing an setting wherever politicians play terribly desperate games, wherever politicians believe winning in any respect price, wherever they are doing not believe the rule of law or political method, you may perpetually be swimming against the tide and after all you perceive that as law enforcement officials, we are able to ne’er behave like thugs.
“As very much like we tend to ar armed, we tend to believe 1st and foremost that our weapons ar given to us by the state to preserve our voters then even once we ar responding to incidents at the polling stations, we tend to ar conscious of the actual fact that we’d like to exercise most restraint.
“We got to exercise heaps of ordinary care and diligence to make sure that in attempting to prevent the thugs, stop the law breakers, we tend to don’t bring the innocent into harm’s way”.
