Police Service to discipline officer for comments on Elections Security; apologises to Armed Forces

The Ghana Police Service (GPS) has described as ‘an unfortunate statement’, comments by DCOP Mr Gabriel Prince Waabu, Director-General, Research and Planning, who on Tuesday claimed the Police Service would play lead roles in providing security for Elections 2024.

The Service also apologised to the Ghana Armed Forces for the comments and issued a disclaimer to disassociate the Service from DCOP Waabu’s claims.

DCOP Waabu who joined a panel discussion on Monday, 19th February, 2024 at the launch of Elections Headquarters, a JoyNews’ programming for the exhaustive coverage of the 2024 general elections, had indicated that the Ghana Police Service had learned a lot of lessons from policing past elections, with particular reference to the exclusive policing of the internal primaries of the New Patriotic Party and National Democratic Congress by the GPS and pointed to their peaceful nature, and contrasted that with the pockets of violence that attended Election 2020, which was policed by the combined security agencies.

He said the police would devise strategies from those lessons and ensure an incident-free 2024 elections, suggesting the military may not play any role at all.

“We’re not maybe going to involve the military, as it were, because it was not even the police that came out with this issue. So, it’s going to be only the Police, the Prisons, Fire and then Immigration that are going to conduct this election. They are going to support us; it is our baby,” he had said, and explained that elections are internal matters over which the police have a clear-cut mandate. “It’s a clear-cut issue. Every internal issue is the police duty, and that is for sure in place,” he had said.

The Police Service however, says this position does not represent the position of the Service and issued a statement to disown it.

“The statements made by DCOP Mr Gabriel Prince Waabu concerning election security are unfounded and do not represent the position of the Ghana Police Service. We would therefore like to dissociate the service completely from the statements and apologize to the Ghana Armed Forces. The conduct of the officer is being subjected to internal disciplinary processes of the Ghana Police Service.

“We want to state that under the National Elections Security Taskforce Architecture, the Ghana Police Service works with all other security services including the Ghana Armed Forces to ensure peace, security, law and order, before, during and after elections. The approach to the 2024 General elections will be no different,” said the statement issued by the police.

Source:Fiilafmonline/JoyNews