Nigeria has announced that it will temporarily close its borders during the general elections, beginning next week Saturday, February 16, to guarantee more security.
The minister of Interior, retired Lt. General Abdrahaman Dambazau, who made the announcement on behalf of the federal government said that security operatives will do everything possible to secure borders especially during the elections.
General Dambazau, at the launching of the situation room of the Nigeria Internal Security and Public Safety Alert System (NISPSAS) today, Friday, said: “I want to assure you that we are very conscious of our borders particularly now and everything we can do to protect our borders during elections we will do.
“During the periods of elections all the borders will be temporarily closed till the elections are over.
“When we came in in 2015 one of the challenges we met was this lack of coordination among our security agencies.
“Lack of collaboration and cooperation and we tried to look at various ways to make things possible because without this collaboration, there so many implications.
“One of them is that you cannot really coordinate their activities well another disadvantage is the fact that you cannot have that synergy and they are bound to waste resources.
He added: “This will make them not to achieve the objectives of public safety and internal security which is the major mandate of this ministry.
“This is how we thought of having a situation room within the ministry that will link up to all the services so that we can have to monitor their activities anytime.
“We embarked on this project since 2016. This has digitalised their activities. Immigration can also with this monitor activities at the land borders and also the fire service could be able to create an alert system whereby if there is fire any part of the country they can monitor and respond. We should have the capacity to respond to incidents.
“I thank God that today we are launching this internal security and public safety alert system which linked to all the services. This app is user-friendly. The public can report any incident using this app.”
NISPSAS is an integrated and single mobile application developed to assist the public access prompt response to emergencies and public safety concern the Federal Ministry of Interior situation coordination.
