Nigeria police chief vows 'safe, secure' vote despite insecurity

Nigeria's police chief insisted upcoming national polls will be secure, in an interview with AFP, despite violence that usually flares up during election seasons, a jihadist insurgency and a raging kidnapping crisis.

Africa's most populous country heads to the polls in January when President Bola Tinubu will seek re-election.

Votes have in the past been marred by violence, with politicians recruiting thugs to intimidate opponents and silence dissenting political views, rights groups say.

Ethnic violence also often breaks out.

"We will have safe and secure voting in the country," said Olatunji Disu, inspector general of the Nigeria Police Force, who took office 10 months before the vote.

He said officers were being trained "so that we improve our effort in bringing a perfect election in 2027".

Asked about polling in violence-wracked northern parts of the country, battered by a years-long jihadist insurgency and kidnapping by armed "bandit" gangs, he said: "Definitely people will be able to vote."

Some Nigerians have, however, told AFP they are afraid to travel to their home villages where they are registered.

The force is working with other bodies, including the military, "to ensure that we bring peace to every part of the country", Disu said.

Violence has worsened since 2024 and the country now faces its most violent period in nearly three decades, driven by banditry and jihadist attacks, according to US-based conflict monitor ACLED.

But it faces huge policing challenges due to the size of the population, insecurity, inadequate resources, public trust and uneven distribution of personnel for its roughly 240 million people.

In 2020, major protests broke out against the brutality of the force's SARS anti-robbery squad.

Tinubu's government is pushing reforms that would require a constitutional amendment to create police forces managed independently by Nigeria's 36 states.

Supporters say it would create nimble forces that are easier to hold accountable, staffed by locals who know the terrain, amid years of rising insecurity and accusations that the federal force is slow to react.

"We are in support of state police," said Disu, speaking to AFP earlier this week from his office at the highly secured force headquarters in Abuja, near the national assembly and presidential villa.

"We assisted in creating the framework," he added.

Critics, however, worry that Nigeria's powerful governors will use police forces to crack down on opponents and dissenting voices.

Disu said the federal police, which would not be dissolved, will still have some oversight and that training would be standardised nationally.

"If anything that is not supposed to happen starts happening within the state police, measures have been put in place to correct it immediately," he told AFP.

Disu, who came into the top job in March, said he was working in the meantime to grow the federal police force, which has just under 300,000 officers, in a country where both the military and police are overstretched, especially in rural areas.

Following a presidential directive, the police aim to increase their numbers to about 350,000, in part by resuming regular recruitment, which Disu said lagged under his predecessors.

Disu also said the Nigerian police are pushing to update the force's tech.

There are currently 25 people on a drone team "undergoing specialised training", and police are sifting through data with the aid of artificial intelligence to better understand trends.

"We know where we are expecting banditry. We know insurgency. We know where robberies will go on," he said.

Though Disu has cast himself as a reformer and called on the public to report misbehaving officers, many Nigerians do not trust the police, who researchers say are weakened by decades of corruption and have struggled in the face of increased violence.

Disu, however, pushed back on recent security failures, saying the police were doing their best -- often paying with their lives.

"We are losing officers daily," he told AFP.